Emily Paull

If you're a big Thomas Hardy fan like I am, or if you're a fan of the British writer David Nicholls ( One Day , Us ) you might be a little bit excited about the new adaptation of Far From the Madding Crowd that's just been released in Australian cinemas.  Nicholls has worked with Thomas Hardy's novels before, adapting the more well-known Tess of the D'urbervilles  for the BBC, and I think his deep connection with Hardy's themes of class, gender, and the improbability of circumstances and luck is clear in his own writing, where happy endings are not mandatory, and rabbits are not pulled out of hats just to make true love conquer all. For those of you not familiar with the story (and I'll admit that while I own the novel, I haven't yet read it but I will, I swear), I'll do my best to bring you up to speed, but remember that the novel and the film will be two completely different texts.  The film follows Bathsheba Everdene, a young orphaned woman ...

The Gracekeepers Kirsty Logan Harvill Secker 2015 (I own a copy courtesy the publisher) This weekend, our unseasonably warm Perth winter finally turned cold and rainy, which meant perfect circumstances for reading a book about a world that is almost totally under water.  This book was Kirsty Logan's The Gracekeepers, a fantastical and yet oddly real novel about two girls, a floating circus and a bear.  How marvelous it was to listen to the rain beating down on my window and the wind howling outside, all the while imagining myself floating away on a stormy sea with a brown bear for company. The Gracekeepers is the story of North, the bear girl, who performs each night with her trained brown bear on board the Circus Excalibur, a circus on a boat which travels between island archipelagos to entertain the Landlockers, or people who live on land.  North and her people are Damplings, an outcast minority of people who choose to live on the sea, even though the sea is n...

Lost Boy and Other Stories ed. Estelle Tang Margaret River Press 2015 I own a copy (bought at the Margaret River Readers and Writers Festival 2015) The Margaret River Short Story competition, now in its fourth year, has quickly gained a reputation for excellence, with the resulting short story collection being one which always seeks out the best in short fiction from emerging Australian writers.  Writers published in the collection have gone on to do great things, such as Christine Piper, who was published in the first collection. Piper won the 2014 Vogel Award and is now short listed for the Miles Franklin literary award for her novel After Darkness.   This year's collection is no different; lead author Melanie Napthine has been short listed for the Dundee International Book Prize. Napthine's story is about a police officer and the bond he forms with a mysterious wild boy who is abandoned outside an inner city cafe, and the betrayal felt by this police officer when...

The Margaret River Readers and Writers Festival was on over this long weekend in the picturesque South West Region of WA.  The festival is in its seventh year of life, and this was my second time attending.  More than anything else, MRRWF is a festival of ideas and a festival which celebrates creativity in all its forms, which left me with a great sense of the enormous privilege I have been given in being allowed to be part of such a vibrant community as the writers community in Western Australia.  This year, the Festival boasted such illustrious guests as the divine Mr John Marsden, whose wise words of wisdom I almost wept over at this year's Perth Festival in February, the courageous Isobelle Carmody, and the many-times-award-winning Michelle de Kretser.  There were also three comedians on the bill this year and that was a treat indeed. I was lucky enough to be heading along to the festival with Louise Allan , an up and coming writer herself, who was shortlisted ...

I did it!  I finally made it to ten books in one month!  This is a momentous occasion, and to top it all off, I did it whilst finishing the first semester of my postgraduate studies, with assignments to submit and everything.  I don't know if I watched less television or slept less or learned how to pause time, but I managed it and it feels glorious. (That being said, I have acquired a lot of books lately, so reading ten of them hasn't totally solved my nuclear proliferation of books.  Sigh.) In order of when I read them, here are the books I read in May! The Bird's Child  by Sandra Leigh Price I adored this book.  It was set in an era which I feel particularly drawn to (1929) and it featured vaudeville style magic, romance, and one spectacularly creepy narrator.  I reviewed this book here . The Colour of Magic  by Terry Pratchett We very sadly lost Mr Pratchett this year but Discworld will live on.  I'm a shamefully recent Di...