How to use this Page

There is an incredible depth of literary talent in New Zealand ranging from Booker Prize winner Eleanor Catton to Kate di Goldi, Lloyd Jones, Janet Frame and the incomparable Margaret Mahy. NZ is also the base for amazing publisher Gecko Press, which publishes books from around the world for children. We should keep an eye […]

Add a Comment

At Powell's, we feel the holidays are the perfect time to share our love of books with those close to us. For this special blog series, we reached out to authors featured in our Holiday Gift Guide to learn about their own experiences with book giving during this bountiful time of year. Today's featured giver [...]

Add a Comment

Thanks for talking to Boomerang Books, Claire Smith.  You’re the marketing assistant at Walker Books, Australia, and you’re going to share your Christmas picks with us. But first let’s find out about you and some books you’ve been working with. Walker Books  (based in Sydney)  is known for its children’s and YA books. Which do […]

Add a Comment

Set in 19th-century New Zealand amidst the frenzy of a gold rush, Catton's stunningly ambitious novel pays homage to Victorian masterpieces but is far from traditional. The characters and structure are ruled by the Zodiac, and as the chapters wane in size, powers shift and revelations multiply. A flawlessly executed literary achievement and winner of [...]

Add a Comment

I’ve just returned from visiting some major cities in the USA. It was illuminating to see which Australian literature is stocked in their (mostly) indie bookstores. This is anecdotal but shows which Australian books browsers are seeing, raising the profile of our literature.

Marcus Zusak’s The Book Thief was the most prominent Australian book. I didn’t go to one shop where it wasn’t stocked.

The ABIA (Australian Book Industry) 2014 overall award winner, The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion was also popular. And a close third was Shaun Tan’s inimical Rules of Summer, which has recently won a prestigious Boston Globe-Horn Book picture book honour award. Some stores had copies in stacks.

http://www.hbook.com/2014/05/news/boston-globe-horn-book-awards/picture-book-reviews-2014-boston-globe-horn-book-award-winner-honor-books/#_

I noticed a few other Tans shelved in ‘graphic novels’, including his seminal work, The Arrival – which is newly available in paperback.

One large store had an Oceania section, where Eleanor Catton’s Man-Booker winner, The Luminaries rubbed shoulders with an up-to-date selection of Australian novels. These included hot-off-the-press Miles Franklin winner All the Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld and Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites, plus expected big-names – Tim Winton with Eyrie, Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North and works by Thomas Keneally and David Malouf. Less expected but very welcome was Patrick Holland.I chaired a session with Patrick at the Brisbane Writers’ Festival a few years ago and particularly like his short stories Riding the Trains in Japan.

Australian literary fiction I found in other stores included Kirsten Tranter’s A Common Loss, Patrick White’s The Hanging Garden and some Peter Carey.

One NY children’s/YA specialist was particularly enthusiastic about Australian writers. Her store had hosted Gus Gordon to promote his picture book, Herman and Rosie, a CBCA honour book, which is set in New York City. They also stocked Melina Marchetta’s Looking for Alibrandi and Saving Francesca, John Marsden, David McRobbie’s Wayne series (also a TV series), Catherine Jinks’ Genius Squad (How to Catch a Bogle was available elsewhere) and some of Jaclyn Moriarty’s YA. One of my three top YA books for 2013, The Midnight Dress by Karen Foxlee was available in HB with a stunning cover and Foxlee’s children’s novel Ophelia and the Marvellous Boy was promoted as part of the Summer Holidays Reading Guide.

Elsewhere I spied Margo Lanagan’s The Brides of Rollrock Island, published as Sea Hearts here (the Australian edition has the best cover); Lian Tanner’s Keepers trilogy; John Flanagan’s Ranger’s Apprentice and Sonya Hartnett’s The Children of the King. These are excellent books that we are proud to claim as Australian.

Add a Comment

While I didn’t read as much as I had hoped over my vacation, I did manage to finish reading The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton. I can’t say I was blown away by it but I did enjoy it very much.

In spite of reading a number of blog posts by those of you who have read the book already I still managed to be surprised that the book is, at its core, a murder mystery. While the mystery itself is pretty run-of-the-mill, the interesting thing about this book is its structure.

We begin with Walter Moody fresh off the boat in Hokitika, New Zealand, 1866, during the gold rush. He has taken refuge in the club at his hotel after a bit of a harrowing boat ride to shore and finds himself intruding upon a meeting of twelve very different men that include a Maori, a Chinese, a newspaper editor, an apothecary, and a bank clerk. Because the twelve discover Moody arrived on the ship Godspeed owned and captained by a man who is part of the reason they are all meeting, Moody is taken into their confidence. And here we are spun a tale by each of the twelve men of their part in the mystery. None of them have the whole story and only by putting all the pieces together can they begin to make sense of it. But even then we don’t have everything we need to solve the crime. The telling of the twelve tales is full of character and detail and Catton takes her time in the spinning so that nearly half the book is done by the time all twelve have their say.

Then we move forward in time for a bit, still with different perspectives of various characters as they keep the secret of their meeting, or not, and as they find out more information, some that clarifies and some that muddies. Eventually we reach a point where the timeline breaks apart and we alternate between moving forward in the present and learning the details of what happened in the past that led up to the crime and we discover this is also a kind of love story as well.

The structure and the pacing and the lush language keep this huge book from bogging down too much (it does get a little boggy but only a little which isn’t bad considering it is over 800 pages). The style also helps. It has a bit of a Victorian novel flavor right from the start with each chapter heading containing a brief description of what happens in the chapter. This does not give anything away before you read it because it is so general, things like Frost tells a lie and a secret is revealed. At the beginning these little chapter outlines (is there a technical term for them? Does anyone know?) are short and the chapters very long. As the book progresses, the outlines get longer and the chapters shorter until at the end the outlines are no longer outlines but narratives and the chapters are snips of moments and conversations and the outline/narrative becomes longer than the chapter. It totally works to balance out the book with its long, slow beginning and galloping conclusion. Really well done.

Each chapter is named from an astrological star chart but I didn’t bother to look up what they meant. I presume they are related to what happens in the chapter, an additional layer of interest but not a necessary one to either understand or enjoy the book.

Catton must have had quite a time juggling the complexity of the structure and the book’s various layers not to mention the large cast of characters. I’d love to see her notes and outlines or however it was that she managed to keep track of it all. How to plan out and keep something like that organized would be a fascinating conversation all on its own.

Filed under: Books, Reviews Tagged: Eleanor Catton

Add a Comment

Eleanor Catton has won the Man Booker Prize for 2013 with The Luminaries. You can read a free excerpt at this link. Here’s more about the novel:

It is 1866, and Walter Moody has come to make his fortune upon the New Zealand goldfields.  On arrival, he stumbles across a tense gathering of twelve local men, who have met in secret to discuss a series of unsolved crimes.

We also collected free samples of all the longlisted books and wrote about one longlisted book that was rejected 47 times.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Add a Comment

U.K. gamblers at Ladbrokes have set betting odds for the prestigious Booker Prize.

Currently, novelist Jim Crace leads with a 6/4 chance of winning with Harvest. Colm Toíbín‘s The Testament of Mary has a 7/2 chance of winning and Eleanor Catton‘s The Luminaries has a 4/1 shot.

The winner will be announced on October 15th. We also collected free samples of all the longlisted books and wrote about one longlisted book that was rejected 47 times.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Add a Comment

By Robert Eaglestone

So here’s the first thing about the books on the Booker Prize lists, both short and long: until the end of August, it was hard-to-impossible to get hold of most of them. Only one was in paperback in July (well done, Canongate). And while some were in very pricey hardback, several hadn’t even been published. This begs the question: who is the Booker Prize for? If it’s supposed to encourage wider reading, debate and book sales, that’s hard for us and for bookshops if the books just aren’t available. If people outside the world of media reviewers and publishers can’t read the books – I couldn’t and I teach and write about contemporary fiction – then isn’t this all just a little bit strange? It makes the whole thing seem like a game played by an enclosed elite or (hardback prices being what there are) a publishers trick.

Still, eventually I was able to buy some, including four on the outstanding shortlist. I was sorry Donal Ryan’s The Spinning Heart didn’t make the cut. A multi-voiced, pitch-perfect account of post-Crash Irish life, I thought this was a wonderful novel, deep things carved small and accurate.

The press is very keen to see Jim Crace win: he is a much underrated novelist and Harvest has a trick the Booker likes – a sinister and unreliable first person narrator. I teach his excellent novel Being Dead, although when I discovered that all the lovely ecological and scientific details in that book were simply made up, somehow the book lost its sheen. Of course, novelists are supposed to invent stuff, but, well, details are details and they make you trust a book. Harvest has the same flaw. It’s a historical novel set… when? Somewhere between the late sixteenth and early nineteenth century? You can’t tell from the language or plot. There’s a threat of witch burning and people in big hats (sixteenth century) but there are also things that are clearly late eighteenth century. The thing is, people do live in a time and their time colours and shapes them. Historical details wouldn’t escape the book’s sharp-eyed narrator. But this blurriness of focus makes one worry about small things: is that how you make vellum, as the narrator does? (no, it’s not, according to Wikipedia); do horses sleep kneeling down (I don’t know, but it’s a crucial clue)? Was it ever actually illegal just to walk across parish boundaries? And then one worries about larger ones: if you can’t trust the book with minor things, can you believe in the motivations, characters, plot? The book somehow floats free of the world and of history, just the things it wants to be about.

In contrast to Crace’s unreliable storyteller, Mary, the mother of Jesus, the narrator of Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary, is trying to separate what actually happened from what she wished happened and from what other people – rather sinister Evangelists – want to say happened. It’s an odd accompaniment to J. M. Coetzees’s The Childhood of Jesus, also published this year, which focusses on a Joseph-like figure, transposed to an unnamed country. This very short novel – also a historical novel of sorts – is incredibly intense and really rather beautiful, and less controversial than the press presents it, I think.

NoViolet Bulawayo’s debut novel, We Need New Names is also narrated in the first person: a child growing up in Zimbabwe. Children’s voices are hard to do, but this novel gets the tone and level of detail just right. In 2005, Binyavanga Wainaina wrote a savage satirical piece called ‘How to Write about Africa’, attacking stereotypical representations in fiction and the first half of this novel does rather fall foul of this: however, as the book goes on and especially after the narrator emigrates, it turns into something more challenging, reminding me of work by the great Nigerian novelist Buchi Emecheta.

At the core of Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for Time Being is another first person narrator: Nao, a Tokyo teenager, dealing with a range of problems. Her sections are brilliantly written (and when the novel turns to the other narrator, the authorial Ruth, it sags a little). The core of this very contemporary novel is the interconnectedness of things, and in it, stories uncover stories, trauma uncovers trauma, discussions of zen lead to discussions of physics, of philosophy and of the heart. It could have done with more Ruth-less editing – it’s too long, as if the author was desperate to cram in more and more – but apart from that it really grows on one.

I’ve not read the much praised and just published The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton (832 pages long…) but the start – again, a historical novel – looks promising. Similarly, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland, again, just published, seems to be getting good reviews.

Overall, then, three historical novels (even if one is a bit unfixed in time), three and a half (Nao is the half!) first person narrators, and, as everyone has said, a very culturally and geographically diverse field. Interestingly, religion features significantly in the four of them I’ve read (Mary, obviously; Crace’s narrator makes much of the village’s unbuilt church; Bulawayo’s narrator is involved with Christian fundamentalists and a lot of Ozeki’s book concerns Zen Buddhism). Perhaps there’s something in the water.

Robert Macfarlane is an outstanding literary critic (and writer) and his committee has produced one of the most interesting lists for years, one which brilliantly shows off the aesthetic and intellectual vibrancy of contemporary Anglophone writing. Still having two to read, I’m not going to predict anything, but any of the novels I’ve mentioned above would be great winners. They, and most of the long list (especially Ryan’s The Spinning Heart, Richard House’s The Kill, and Charlotte Mendelson’s Almost English), would spark fascinating reading group conversations and are well worth picking up.

It would have been even better (for the general reader, for the bookshops) if we could have read them all first, though.

Robert Eaglestone is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is Deputy Director (and formerly Director) of the Holocaust Research Centre. His research interests are in contemporary literature and literary theory, contemporary philosophy, and on Holocaust and genocide studies. He is the author of Contemporary Fiction: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2013) and Doing English: A Guide for Literature Students (third revised edition) (Routledge, 2009). You can follow him on Twitter: @BobEaglestone.

The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday and like Very Short Introductions on Facebook.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only Very Short Introductions articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only literature articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Image credit: Jim Crace at the 2009 Texas Book Festival, 2009. Larry D. Moore [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

The post On the Man Booker Prize 2013 shortlist appeared first on OUPblog.

Add a Comment

The Man Booker shortlist has been revealed for 2013. We’ve collected free samples of many of the books on the list below–what do you think?

The winner will be announced on October 15th.

We also collected free samples of all the longlisted books and wrote about one longlisted book that was rejected 47 times.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Add a Comment

Stephany Aulenback says Eleanor Catton’s The Rehearsal is written in an experimental style but “peopled with characters that actually have depth and layers.” See also Granta’s interview.

Add a Comment