Emily Paull

Okay okay, so not strictly a Western Australian book, so lying around reading it since Monday night hasn't been a particularly productive use of my time... but I picked this one up at Big W for about 15 bucks and it's been sitting on the shelf staring at me for simply yonks.  Plus, a lot of the characters moved from Perth so it's not a massive stretch of the imagination to link it to my studies...  ahem. The Slap won tonnes of awards.  It's about 550 pages long, and it took me less than three complete days to finish.  I couldn't stop reading it, and when I had to, I thought about it.  (In fact, I think I bored History Boy by discussing it on the way to our date on Tuesday night.)  I first came across it when my Uncle's partner was reading it for Book Club but that would have been years ago.  Probably first year uni.  One of my English teachers absolutely RAVED about it.  Three and a bit years later, I'm reading it. The novel begins with...

The Merry-Go-Round In the Sea by Randolph Stow ISBN 9780143180074 Published by Penguin Classics, 2008 (First published 1965) One of the things that I love about books like this one is the quality of the sweeping family saga.  Drawing on the nature of memory, shared and individual, the narrative follows a line throughout not just a significant event but a string of them.  The reader is invited to watch the character grow and respond to a number of events and share in the special significance of each one. Image from Goodreads At the beginning of this novel, Rob Coram is eight.  Geraldton is his whole world and appears to be made up of a series of rural properties, each one belonging to a member of his family.  He has many aunt and uncles, and a multitude of cousins- they are a link to a family history which, for Rob, has taken on an almost fairy tale like essence. But no one is more at the centre of Rob's attention than his cousin Rick (who is actually some...

A Stranger in my Street by Deborah Burrows (ISBN 978-1-7426-1101-3) Pan Macmilllan, 2012 Imagine my surprise (and joy and a little bit of envy) to discover that finally someone has written a book about Perth in the 1940s.   A Stranger in My Street is the first novel from historian and lawyer, Deborah Burrows.  It follows the story of Meg Eaton, whose beau was killed in the war eighteen months before the story takes place.  Meg seems to be coping well, although she is secluding herself somewhat from the real world, until her dead boyfriend's brother Tom shows up in her street looking for her neighbour Doreen.  Doreen is nowhere to be found, and two days later Meg and Tom stumble across her body in an air raid shelter, and wind up involved in more ways than one. Burrows has used her skills as a historian to paint a realistic and charming portrait of Perth in the 1940s.  No scene seems like it has been adapted from an American film, and the places are easy to...