Emily Paull

When I was working on the last draft of my novel-length project, Between the Sleepers , I was working four full days a week and writing 1000 words a night Sunday to Thursday as well as most of the day on Friday if I didn't have appointments.  I was also reading A LOT ,  and people kept asking me how I was managing it. It's difficult to answer this because I think the true answer was I wasn't really managing it very well.  A lot of things probably didn't get done, for example laundry and exercise, and I was sleeping a lot less than I would have liked.  Now I'm getting ready to do it all again for hopefully the last time before I start submitting to publishers. The key for me is enthusiasm.  If I can feel excited about writing then a daily word target of 1000 words is literally less than an hours work.  No one ever said the 1000 words had to be any good.  When I am redrafting, I work with the current copy printed out beside me and I type each page u...

The Ark (Print Version) Annabel Smith  9780646923109 I own a copy. In 2041, in the midst of a global resources shortage known as The Chaos, a renegade employee of SynBioTec decides that it is the best course of action to lock himself and 25 others inside a structure known as The Ark, a project that the parent company unwisely put him in charge of.  Hidden in Mt. Kosciuszko, The Ark is a seed bank which rivals the Millenium seed bank at Kew Gardens.  It requires botanists, futurologists, information security officers and many others beside to keep it running, and therefore Aidan Fox invites his employees and select members of their families to report to the Ark for its closure. The Ark  is a collection of their correspondence.  It tells the story of the end of the world, as we know it, through the points of view of several people who will survive it, at a terrible cost.  On one level, it is an opportunity to explore the possibilities of a world af...

Station Eleven Emily St John Mandel Picador (Book courtesy the publisher) Told through multiple perspectives, centring around a famous actor who dies on the first page of the novel, Station Eleven is the story of what happens to the people left after a deadly virus wipes out most of the world's population and leaves us with no internet, electricity, or modes of travel other than walking.  It is an odd mix of Peter Heller's The Dog Stars  and Shakespeare, and as the travelling Shakespearian actors who perform in the settlements say, Shakespeare is the only playwright for the end of the world, because he was so much defined by the plague.  What exactly this means is lost on some of the younger players. On the opening night of King Lear, Arthur Leander dies on stage, apparently of a heat attack.  A member of the audience jumps up on stage and attempts to resuscitate him.  This audience member is a paramedic named Jeevan Choudary but he used to be a paparazzi,...

Penelope Rebecca Harrington Vintage Books How to make friends at college, according to Penelope's mother:  Don't be too enthusiastic, don't talk to people who seem to be getting annoyed, and for heaven's sake stop playing tetris on your phone at parties."  All good advice, but it doesn't seem to help Penelope much, as from the moment she arrives at Harvard, it seems as if she's doomed not to fit in.  From her attraction to pretentious German men in wrinkled suits to her obsession with bringing up the infamous car seat story (she sat in one until she was in grade four, and she thinks this makes her interesting), Penelope is not  'normal'.  She is in fact rather extraordinary.  How she manages to pass college, or indeed if she does at all, is not dealt with, because Penelope's loneliness seems to stem primarily from her lack of urgency when it comes to studying for college exams and assignments.  From the outside perspective, the reader is sho...

Last night, I was herded into an elevator with several other women, guarded by a woman dressed all in black who would not smile at us.  When we arrived at our destination, we were informed by a man in a suit that we had been sealed inside The Ark for the protection of ourselves and also for the protection of the seed bank created by the National Arboreal Protection Agency.  I should have been frightened, but instead I was delighted. This was book launch performance art at it's best, a chance for attendees to physically inhabit the world of Annabel Smith's brand new book, The Ark , which made its way into the world and into cyberspace yesterday.  (Review to come.)   The Ark  is a multi-platform experience which allows readers of the digital format to participate in the story through an accompanying app.  It is an epistolary novel of a new sort, told in emails, memos and text messages, with clear sub-cultures forming as the tale goes on.  But this is n...

The Steady Running of the Hour Justin Go Allen and Unwin I think by now it might be pretty obvious that I like historical fiction novels of a certain type, and about a certain era.  Sometimes I see a cover that has been designed to evoke this genre and I don't even need to see the blurb.  I want to read it.  I blame Kate Morton for this, because she writes the best historical fiction epics I have ever read, and all the covers remind me of hers.  So when I saw The Steady Running of the Hour , I knew it would be right up my alley because it looks like this: I'm also writing about the period between the wars (again) and so it felt good to immerse myself in a book of this time.  There are so many books out there about world war two, but when it comes to fiction, I've not read a lot that grabbed me about world war one, aside from a short story about Colette's cat which I found in the collection Only the Animals  by Ceridwen Dovey. The Steady Running of...

The Minnow Diana Sweeney Text Publishing (Published 2014) The Minnow  won the 2014 Text Prize, an award which seeks the best in unpublished writing for Young Adults.  Previous winners include the ever-talented AJ Betts, whose novel Zac and Mia  sold like gangbusters at this year's Brisbane Writers Festival.  In The Minnow  we join 14 year old Tom (Tomboy/ Holly) who is sleeping rough after the infamous Mothers Day flood killed her family along with half the town.  Her only surviving relative is Nana, but as Nana is in a nursing home, Tom lives in the boatshed with Bill, a man who used to pal around with her father.  Bill is a bushman Lothario of sorts, and he and Tom finance their fishing by shoplifting; an arrangement in which Bill distracts the shopkeeper by having sex with her in 'ingenious' ways so that no other customers will notice, and Tom pockets the things they need.  Bizarrely, the shopkeeper seems to be aware of what is happening bu...

Past the Shallows Favel Parrett Hachette Australia (Published 2012) Past the Shallows  is one of those Australian books which becomes an instant classic, spreading by word of mouth and by media alike, propelled along by its sheer perfection until it sits comfortably on the best-seller list.  For as long as it has been on the market, people have been telling me that I have to read it.  And really, now that I have it seems absurd that I hadn't before.  Like Jasper Jones  or The Shark Net , this coming-of-age story is quintessentially Australian.  It follows three brothers, Harry, Miles and Joe, who live in a fishing town in Tasmania with their father who is an abalone fisherman.  Joe does not live at home any more.  Every day, Miles goes out on the boat with his father, but Harry gets seasick and so he stays home. As the book progresses, a picture starts to form of a broken home.  Years earlier, the boys' mother was killed in a car ac...

Crashing Down Kate McCaffrey Fremantle Press 2014 Kate McCaffrey's previous young adult novels have covered some pretty heavy subjects: her first novel Destroying Avalon  exposed the sickening reality of cyber bullying, and her follow up, In Ecstasy , documented the hard core drug taking tendencies of certain teen sects in suburban Western Australia.  In this new book, her fourth, McCaffrey juggles themes of teen pregnancy, adolescents injured in car accidents due to 'hooning' and the mounting pressure of year 12.  Her protagonist, Lucy, is an excellent student and seems to have it all.  But her relationship with boyfriend Carl is cooling.  After an argument in which Lucy believes they have split up, Carl gets into his car and speeds off despite being under the influence of cannabis, and as a result he is badly injured in a car accident.  When he wakes from his coma, he does not remember the break up with Lucy, and instead asks for her, making it harder...