Emily Paull

The Rosie Effect Graeme Simsion Text Publishing Hard to believe it was two years ago that Don Tillman first came into our lives.   The Rosie Project was just what the reading public was looking for: funny, romantic, realistic, it was a book that had something for everyone.  While it followed the standard romantic comedy formula (and therefore, we could predict that Don would get the girl in the end), it deviated just enough from the familiar patterns for the book to be doing something new.  To make odious comparisons, it was Big Bang Theory meets The Forty Year old Virgin meets a Marian Keyes novel.  It was a bookseller's dream come true.  (Unless of course you ran out of stock.) Two years on, that book is still going strong, but it is about to be joined by a new volume; The Rosie Effect  is the story of what comes after our intrepid professor's happily ever after, and begins, like its predecessor, with a culinary mishap. What is so loveable abo...

The King's Curse Philippa Gregory Simon and Schuster So you may remember last week I had a liiiiiittle bit of a fan moment about my favourite historian/ writer, Philippa Gregory. She seems to put out these huge, incredibly thoroughly researched novels at an astounding rate, and this year is no different (although I suppose the research would overlap a little).  2014 sees the final instalment in the Cousins War series, The King's Curse  which neatly forms a narrative bridge between this series, and Gregory's earlier novels about the court of King Henry VIII.  Margaret Pole, the Countess of Salisbury, was the only daughter of George, Duke of Clarence (brother to Edward IV) and Isabel Neville and she lived her life in constant fear of being suspected of treason simply due to the fact that her maiden name was Plantagenet.  As a girl, she saw her brother imprisoned in the Tower of London for being a viable heir to the York lines of succession, and she saw him execu...

There have been a couple of writers I have come across who inspire me to write history.  Their work proves that history can be interesting, multi-faceted, and come alive on a page, and one of these is Philippa Gregory, whose female-led histories of Tudor and Plantagenet England have been best sellers for about twenty years now.  Her novel The Other Boleyn Girl is the foremost novel on Henry the Eighth, and gives a strong credibility in the minds of readers to one possible version of events in the Tudor period; that before Henry Tudor married Anne Boleyn, he bedded her sister Mary and fathered two children with her.  It has been adapted into a BBC miniseries as well as a major movie starring Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman.  Gregory's latest royals series centres around the women of the Cousins War (since come to be known as the Wars of the Roses) has been every bit as successful (if not more) than her novels about Tudor wives, and the first in the series, The ...

When the Night Comes Favel Parrett Hachette Books   There is something very lovely about a book which talks in detail about food.  A book that describes the ritual of cooking and eating in a way that makes you taste things, and crave them. Favel Parrett's new book will make you wish for potatoes and custard and soup. In the late 1980s, Isla and her mother and brother move to Tasmania.  Her mother is somewhat unhinged, that much is apparent, but the reason why is kept very close to the young narrator's chest.  They struggle for a time, living in a dark house and renting out the one good room.  They go to a Quaker school.  Finally, they get a home of their own.  And then some new friends come to town on a big red boat named the Nella Dan. Bo is a Danish sailor on the Nella Dan, who works in the galleys as a cook.  The sea is in his blood; his father was often away from home on the very same boat and Bo remembers missing him for most o...

The Bone Clocks   David Mitchell Sceptre Books 9780340921609 (Due to be released September 2nd 2014) 'One drowsy summer's day in 1984, teenage runaway Holly Sykes encounters a strange woman who offers a small kindness in exchange for 'asylum'.  Decades will pass before Holly understands exactly what sort of asylum the woman was seeking...' So reads the blurb of David Mitchell's new novel, The Bone Clocks , a 500+ page story spanning decades, dimensions and genres. When fifteen year old Holly Sykes first takes up her narrative in the first part of the novel, the reader is immediately drawn to her voice.  Naive and typically teenaged, Holly is at odds with her publican parents, who think that her romance with Vinnie (a car salesman a decade her senior) is a bad idea.  In the spirit of rebellion, and young love, Holly decides to leave home and move in with Vinnie, but is stupidly shocked to find that her so-called friend Stella is in bed with her boyfr...

Or... how I spent this National Bookshop Day.

Anyone who has subscription television in Australia has probably found themselves watching trailers for the new series 'Outlander' at least once a day.  'Outlander' is based on a series of novels written by the American writer Diana Gabaldon which centre around a young woman from 1946 who stumbles through a rock formation and is transported to the Scottish Highlands in 1743, amidst the turmoil surrounding the legitimacy of the English King George's claim to the Scottish throne.  The young woman, Claire, is the wife of Frank Randall, the six times great-grandson of Jonathon 'Black Jack' Randall, an English corporal on patrol in Scotland. In Australia, the first book in the Outlander series is called Cross Stitch , a title which doesn't make much sense at all.  It's an 800+ page tome, beginning with Claire and Frank on their honeymoon in Inverness (I think...), where Frank spends his time researching his ancestor, Black Jack, and Claire alternates ...

The Golden Age Joan London Vintage 9781741666441 In the middle of Joan London's latest novel, Meyer Gold ironically wonders to himself if there is a poet living in the eponymous polio hospital in Leederville, never realising that there is in fact a poet, and it happens to be Meyer's son Frank (or Ferenc in his native Hungarian.)  Poetry becomes a central theme in the novel as it does in young Frank Gold's life; the quest for that illusive final line is a metaphor for a sort of quest for meaning in the life of a young person who has made his way by surviving horrors, first under the Nazis, where as a Jewish person he was forced to hide in the roof above the home of a moribund piano teacher and then in his new home of Perth, where he contracts polio and must learn to walk again.  The novel is not, as one might suspect, the harrowing journey to Frank's recovery from illness, but rather his life despite it and because of it.  His foray into The Golden Age hospital has ...