Emily Paull

Posted with the full knowledge that this list will grow and I won't get to all of them... Gingerbread - Helen Oyeyemi  Invisible Boys - Holden Sheppard (winner of the 2018 TAG Hungerford Award) Priory of the Orange Tree- Samantha Shannon Dreamers - Karen Thompson Walker 99% Mine - Sally Thorne The French Photographer - Natasha Lester The Starless Sea - Erin Morgenstern City of Girls - Elizabeth Gilbert Sweet Sorrow - David Nicholls The Last Days of the Romanov Dancers - Kerri Turner Zebra and Other Stories - Debra Adelaide Room for a Stranger - Melanie Cheng Devil's Ballast - Meg Caddy The Blue Rose- Kate Forsyth The True Story of Maddie Bright - Mary Rose MacColl A Thousand Ships - Natalie Haynes Anna of Kleve: The Princess in the Portrait - Alison Weir [There's also one other rather exciting book that I'm excited to see released in 2019... my own! It was announced in the most recent edition of the Ma...

Love and Ruin Paula McLain Fleet Publishing (Distributed by Hachette Australia) 2018 (I was sent a copy by the publisher in exchange for an honest review) Paula McLain's first big novel was The Paris Wife  and when I first started in bookselling, it was the novel everyone was talking about. Following the years that Hemingway et al spent in Paris from the point of view of his first wife, Hadley Richardson, it shed some light onto the larger than life literary figure and gave some agency to a woman who was otherwise a footnote on his Wikipedia page. I don't remember many details from the book, other than that I loved it. Both of McLain's recent novels, The Paris Wife and Circling the Sun have been criticised for their fawning, simpering heroines, but in Love and Ruin, McLain has Hemingway's third wife, Martha Gellhorn take the spotlight. Gellhorn was a respected writer and war correspondent in her own right, and this novel gently navigates the frustrations that s...

It's been a spectacularly good reading year. Not only did I have a number of friends releasing their debut books, I also found a few new favourite authors in surprising places. I won't be doing a 'Top Ten Books of 2018'-- reading is highly subjective, and my enjoyment is often tied to factors like where and when I'm coming to the book, and what sort of mood I am in-- but instead, in no particular order, I present some of the books that have stayed with me this year; books that I recommend to all of you. The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin Circe by Madeline Miller  The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer The Yellow House by Emily O'Grady How to be Famous by Caitlin Moran The Unexpected Education of Emily Dean by Mira Robertson The Victorian and the Romantic by Nell Stevens The Alice Network by Kate Quinn The Fragments by Toni Jordan I'd also like to give a special shout out to a few friends of mine who releas...