Emily Paull

My favourite picture from the book- Dr McKenzie is reunited with his family as the HMAS Fremantle returns AIF and RAAF servicemen from Indonesia in December 1945 (Page 125) (Also, can I just mention that this is my 500th blog post... yippee!  Thanks for all the page views, I wish I had a cake.) On Sunday I was lucky enough to go along to the book launch for  When War Came to Fremantle , a collaborative history in pictures and text by Deborah Gare and Madison Lloyd-Jones.  This book is a gorgeous photographic and social history of the town of Fremantle and its interaction with different world conflicts, and I just know I am going to love toting this with me in my research bag when I go to KSP later in the year. When War Came to Fremantle is $45 dollars, and is published by Fremantle Press.

I'm joined today by Favel Parrett, author of Past the Shallows , a Miles Franklin shortlisted HEARTBREAKER of a novel, and (more recently), When the Night Comes .   When the Night Comes  is a beautiful story of friendship, and of the comforts that can be found in the most unexpected of places.  It begins with Isla and her mother and brother, leaving the mainland and coming to live in Tasmania.  Isla, as a narrator, is lonely and wide-eyed, and perceptive.  She sees that her mother is sad, is dealing with something, but she's not privy to the details.  Her new school is strange, and when tragedy strikes there, the ripples of shock travel through the community.  But then Bo comes.  Bo is big, and Danish, and loves the simple things in life; hot pastry, music, rolling in grass.  His relationship with the family, and most importantly with Isla, will shape that summer in her memory forever. Inspired by the story of the Nella Dan, a real ship tha...

Us David Nicholls 9780340897003 Hodder and Stoughton (I bought a copy) After his breakaway hit, One Day , broke our hearts in 2009, David Nicholls has earned the right to be seen as a certain kind of commercial fiction writer.  He almost has his own genre.  In a recent review, the Sydney Morning Herald debated the difficulty of classifying Nicholls's novels-- as outwardly they seem like what gets called "Women's Fiction" (and why, oh why is this even a thing), and yet Nicholls is, surprise, surprise, not  a woman.  His characters are not all women.  His readers are not all women.  Yet his novels are somehow too light-hearted to be straightforward literary fiction, and too... cynically realistic.... to be purely commercial fiction.  And then, of course, his latest novel Us  was long listed for the 2014 Man Booker Prize. Us , a novel about a fifty something year old scientist who embarks on one last tour of Europe with his disintegrating fami...

Early last week I officially announced that I had been selected as one of three young writers for a residency at the Katharine Susannah Prichard centre in the Perth Hills.   While it's not for a couple of months, this residency means a great deal to me because it is giving me a clear goal to work towards with my novel, currently titled Between the Sleepers .  The overall idea of the Young Writers Residency is to work towards having something ready for publication, and I hope that after a good ten days in the historical home of Katharine Susannah Prichard, my novel will be well on the way of being finished.  Who knows, 2015 could just be The Year of Sending It Out. Katharine's Place is the home of the Katharine Susannah Prichard Foundation, an organisation which helps to advance the profile of Writers in Western Australia through running workshops, writing groups, competitions, and of course, it's residency.  Each year, the Centre hosts an Established Writer In...

Bad Feminist Roxane Gay Corsair Publishing 2014 (I own a copy) I wasn't aware of Roxane Gay prior to the release of this book, but many others would have been.  She is the author of two other books (a novel and a collection of short stories) as well as being published in numerous other places in print and online.   She is a Professor of English and a championship Scrabble player.   Bad Feminist  is a collection of essays which draw on her own personal experience, navigating the modern world as a woman, and as Haitian American, through the broader lens of how she sees herself (or not) reflected in popular culture. Image from Goodreads Bad Feminist earns its title from the idea that 'Feminism' as it has come to be understood in the broader scheme of things, has gained common use as a kind of insulting stereotype-- angry, unattractive, militant women who don't shave their legs, wear make up etc.  In her opening essay 'Feminism, plural', Gay states that...

The Signature of All Things Elizabeth Gilbert Bloomsbury (I own a copy) Most of us are familiar with Elizabeth Gilbert for her memoir Eat Pray Love  which was alternatively raved about and complained about by people all over the English speaking world for being so "innovative."  It was basically the story of Elizabeth's quest to find herself in the wake of a messy divorce, and this spiritual journey involved eating a lot of pasta, praying and meditating, and then falling in love again.  I read it, and there were parts that I really enjoyed, but I didn't find it as life changing as the chatter around me seemed to indicate I would, and I now fall into the camp of Eat Pray Love bashers who equate the reading of that book with reading Twilight  unironically.  Still, I have to remember that book-snobbery serves no one but my own ego, and any book that gets people to read is a good book at least in that small way. The Signature of All Things  is not a t...

Dear reader(s), You may know that over the last few years, I have struggled to find a place for my writing.  I enter numerous competitions, and because I always go into them feeling incredibly confident, I get my heart broken a lot by rejection.  There have been times when I have questioned not only my ability as a writer, but my worth as a human because of it.  Yes, I am that dramatic. Slowly, I am coming to learn that not getting things published is not always the result of necessarily bad writing.  The market is very competitive, and every single writer goes into the competition with the same good feeling as everyone else.  (Or maybe they don't, but they could.)  Some days, you put your work in, and it gets in front of the wrong person at the wrong time.  Or you put in a piece that is objectively rather good, but there are only 3 places, and there are 3 stories that are exceptional.  It's not your day, and maybe tomorrow won't be either. ...

Thicker than Water Richard Rossiter UWA Press, 2014 9781742586052 ** I was sent a copy for review by UWA Press** With a title like Thicker than Water , could Richard Rossiter's novella been about anything other than family?  The story follows Marie D'Anger, an almost thirty-year-old woman from the South West of Australia who has been living in London while she studies, in a kind of exile from a family which has become less than loving.  At the opening of the novella, Marie is returning home to her family to help her mother look after her father, who has had a stroke.  Her feelings about her father are lukewarm at best.  Kenneth has a history of controlling and judgemental behaviour, and his response to Marie's decision to go to London in the first place was to tell her that if she chose to leave she was not welcome to come back.  Yet she comes back anyway, driven by a second motive of escaping the ruins of a passionate relationship which has ended suddenly...