An Accommodating Spouse by Elizabeth Jolley

I am a very quick reader, usually powering through books at high speed. For this book, however, I had to slow down. To read in my head as if it was being read aloud, so lovely were the sentences. The story is told by an aging professor surrounded by women - his wife, her twin, their triplet daughters and two work colleagues. It is a comedy of manners and I enjoyed it very much.

You can find An Accommodating Spouse and other novels by Elizabeth Jolley in the fiction section of Wagga Wagga City Library.

The Mitford Girls: A Biography of an Extraordinary Family by Mary S. Lovell

Having thoroughly enjoyed The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate I was keen to learn about Nancy Mitford and her famous sisters. There were six daughters (and a comparatively unremarkable son) born between 1904 and 1920 into an aristocratic English family. It was a remarkable time to be young and the six girls all led such fascinating and different lives. Nancy became a famous novelist, Diana the most beautiful woman of her time, Unity knew and loved Hitler while Decca was a communist, Debo became the Duchess of Devonshire and lived at Chatsworth and even Pam, the most domestic sister, Pam had the Mitford wit.
Mary S Lovell has done a great job letting us into the lives and loves, trials and tribulations of a most fascinating family living through turbulant times. The book is available from the biography section of Wagga City Library with the call number B940 MIT. There are several other books about the Mitfords in the library as well, just put Mitford into the catalogue.

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

The murders on which In Cold Blood was based were committed in 1959 but the book wasn't published until 1966 as Capote had to wait to find out what ultimately happened to the murderers. A film version of In Cold Blood was made in 1967 and in 1996 a mini-series was made. In more recent years two films were made about Capote's experiences researching and writing the book - Capote and Infamous. His childhood friend Harper Lee (author of To Kill a Mockingbird, pictured) came with him to Kansas. The case certainly consumed Capote for those years and he considered the book the first non-fiction novel.

The Clutters were a wealthy faming family in Kansas. They were murdered by two criminals who met in jail and the book looks at their lives up until the murders and their relationship than enabled them to commit such a crime. It is a fascinating look into a small town in 1950s America, the criminal mind and powerful relationships. This book is an RRL Book Club book and you can also find it in the non-fiction section of Wagga City Library with the call number 364.1523 CAPO. Truman Capote also wrote Breakfast at Tiffany's.

Love in a Cold Climate and other novels by Nancy Mitford

The Pursuit of Love, Love in a Cold Climate and The Blessing are brought together in one brilliant, hilarious volume. Nancy Mitford was born in 1904, a member of the British artistocracy and a family of famous sisters. She was a novelist and biographer who lived in England and France, dying in 1973 in Versailles.
She writes about upper-class life in Britain and France and how the two cultures compliment and clash with each other. She wrote at a time of great change and it is fascinating to see how her characters adapt. The first two books are companions, with the same narrator. Love in a Cold Climate tells the story of Polly, the beautiful, aloof aristocrat who falls in love with her lecherous, married uncle, who also happens to be her mother's lover. All three books show the deliciously absurd side of the life of the British upper classes.

Love in a Cold Climate and Other Novels is available in the fiction section of Wagga City Library. A biography of the Mitford sisters as well as others books by and about the Mitford family are available in the non-fiction section.

Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

Originally published in 1932, Cold Comfort Farm is a very amusing parody of the rather doom-laden novels of rural life in England, such as those by D.H. Lawrence, Thomas Hardy or the Brontë sisters.

Flora Poste is nineteen years old and has just been orphaned. Rather than find a way to make a living she decides to live with relatives in Sussex - the bizarre Starkadders. She is a very sensible young woman and sets about sorting out all their problems in a thoroughly modern way.

You can borrow this book from Wagga City Library.

Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome

I have seen this book on lots of top ten or top one hundred lists so was very keen to read it. It was published in 1930 and is, therefore, a story about the type of childhood that isn't possible now. Obviously we would never call a little girl "Titty" these days but what really struck me was the freedom given these children. Our children seem to be watched every minute and don't spend hours unsupervised, let alone days.

Swallows and Amazons is set in the Lake District in England, in 1929. Four siblings sail a little boat called Swallow and two sisters sail Amazon and together they have wild adventures. It is a delightful, fanciful story, somehow nostalgic even though my own childhood was very different.

You can find this book in the Junior Fiction section of Wagga City Library but it can be enjoyed by people of all ages.

The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd

Lily has grown up believing she accidentally killed her mother when she was four. She not only has her own memory of holding the gun, but her father's account of the event. Now fourteen, she yearns for her mother, and for forgiveness. Living on a peach farm in South Carolina with her father, she has only one friend: Rosaleen, a black servant whose sharp exterior hides a tender heart. South Carolina in the sixties is a place where segregation is still considered a cause worth fighting for. When racial tension explodes one summer afternoon, and Rosaleen is arrested and beaten, Lily is compelled to act. Fugitives from justice and from Lily's harsh and unyielding father, they follow a trail left by the woman who died ten years before. Finding sanctuary in the home of three beekeeping sisters, Lily starts a journey as much about her understanding of the world, as about the mystery surrounding her mother. (Fantastic fiction)

This is a delightful and heart-warming book that would be great to read in a book club. You can find it at Wagga City Library or reserve it here.

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Great Expectations is a classic novel by Charles Dickens and is an RRL Book Club book. You don't have to be a fan of classics to enjoy this story as it follows the delightful Pip as his fortunes rise and fall, Miss Havisham, the jilted bride who nevers sees sunlight nor has changed out of her wedding dress in all the years that have passed, the beautiful but cold Estella, brought up by Miss Havisham to get her revenge on men and the scary and surprising Magwitch.

This book is great to read before or after Mr Pip by Lloyd Jones, which is also an RRL Book Club book.

The Same Man: George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh in love and war by David Lebedoff

At first glance there seems to be very little common ground between Orwell and Waugh. Orwell is most famous for writing 1984 and Animal Farm and Waugh for Brideshead Revisited. They were both born into middle class England but while Orwell shunned the class system Waugh was the ultimate social climber. Lebedoff writes that what they had in common "was a hatred of moral relativism. They both believed that morality is absolute, though they defined and applied it differently. But each believed with all his heart, brain and soul that there were such things as moral right and moral wrong, and that these were not subject to changes in fashion."

This fascinating book gives an insight into life in England in the early to mid-twentieth century and how the influential authors participated in and reacted to society. It can be found in the non-fiction section of Wagga City Library at 823.912 ORW. You can also find the novels of George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh.

The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas

Winner of the Commonwealth Writer's Prize for the Best Book in South East Asia and the Pacific, shortlisted for the ALS Gold Medal 2009, shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Prize 2009. The Slap was also discussed on the ABC's First Tuesday Book Club. It is a gritty, confronting look at suburban life in Melbourne. It centres around a barbecue at which a man slaps a child who isn't his own. This event has great consequences for all present and the author tells the story alternately from the perspective of the different characters. It is thought-provoking on many levels looking, not only at parenting and children, but also at love, marriage and tradition.

This book has tended to provoke strong reactions in those who have read it. I did not like any of the characters in the novel and yet still found the book compelling. It is worth a read just to see what all the fuss is about but be wary if you are sensitive to swearing!

The Slap is available from Wagga City Library - you can reserve it here.

Coronation Talkies by Susan Kurosawa

A charming, funny, engaging novel set in India at the end of British rule. It tells the story of Lydia who enters into a hasty marriage with with an Englishman living in India and Mrs Banerjee who comes to the station to set up a talking picture theatre.

Lydia moves from her quiet, English village to the very wet Indian hill station of Chalaili. This sodden, not quite fashionable town is full of fascinating characters, Indian, English and Anglo-Indian. Mrs Banerjee is hilarious as she sets up Coronation Talkies and enliven the society in Chalaili.

There is gossip and scandal, love and hate, betrayal and blackmail and a lovely look at the end of England's rule in India.

44 Scotland Street by Alexander McCall Smith

This is the first book in the delightful series by the author of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. It is set in a fictitious building in a real street in McCall Smith's home town of Edinburgh. It is full of characters very much a part of Edinburgh and yet recognisable to all of us - a good-looking young man, very used to getting what he wants, the young woman in her second gap year who falls for him though she knows she shouldn't, an eccentric widow, a pushy mother with a 'brilliant' son who just wants to be a little boy, the son of a wealthy man who just can't make a go of anything and many others.
You can borrow 44 Scotland Street at Wagga City Library (reserve it here) as well as the books that follow - Espresso Tales, Love Over Scotland, The World According to Bertie and The Unbearable Lightness of Scones.

Winter Close by Hugh MacKay

Hugh MacKay is a psychologist and social researcher who has written four best-selling books on social psychology and is also well known for his column in the Sydney Morning Herald. This, his fourth novel, is set in the Sydney suburb of Castlecrag and is a study of suburbia and the concept of neighbourhood.
That may sound a little dry but the novel is an engaging look at the residents of Winter Close, told by Tom, a counsellor who has his own inner demons. It is especially interesting if you are familiar with Sydney or have neighbours! Winter Close is one of the RRL Book Club titles.
You can borrow Winter Close, as well as other books by Hugh MacKay, from Wagga City Library - reserve it here.

March by Geraldine Brooks

March is the story of the absent father from Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. Mr March is a man of great conviction who goes as an army chaplain to support those fighting to abolish slavery in the American Civil War. The book tells of the harsh, ugly and life changing realities of the war both for those who experienced them first hand and for those who were left behind.

From the author's website ; October 21, 1861. March, an army chaplain, has just survived a brush with death as his unit crossed the Potomac and experienced the small but terrible battle of Ball’s Bluff. But when he sits down to write his daily missive to his beloved wife, Marmee, he does not talk of the death and destruction around him, but of clouds “emboss[ing] the sky,” his longing for home, and how he misses his four beautiful daughters. “I never promised I would write the truth,” he admits, if only to himself.
When he first enlisted, March was an idealistic man. He knew, above all else, that fighting this war for the Union cause was right and just. But he had not expected he would begin a journey through hell on earth, where the lines between right and wrong, good and evil, were too often blurred.
For now, however, he has no choice but to press on. He is directed to a makeshift hospital, an old estate he finds strangely familiar. It was here, more than twenty years earlier, that he first met Grace, a beautiful, literate slave. She was the woman who provided his first kiss and who changed the course of his life.
Now, he finds himself back at the Clement estate, and what was once the most beautiful place he had ever seen has been transformed by the ugliness of war. However, March’s sojourn there is brief and he finds himself reassigned to set up a school on one of the liberated plantations, Oak Landing—a disastrous posting that leaves him all but dead.
Though rescued and delivered to a Washington hospital where his physical health improves, March is a broken man, haunted by all he has witnessed and “a conscience ablaze with guilt” over the many people he feels he has failed. And when it is time for him to leave he finds he does not want to return home. He turns to Grace, whom he has encountered once again, for guidance. “None of us is without sin,” she tells him. “Go home, Mr. March.” So, March returns to his wife and daughters, and though he is tormented by the past and worried for his country’s future, the present, at least, is certain: he is home, he is a father again, and for now, that will be enough.

Brick Lane by Monica Ali

Brick Lane is an RRL Book Club book and was short listed for the Booker Prize. It tells the story of Nazneen, who, as a young woman, leaves Bangladesh for London with her new and much older husband. Together they struggle to find their place in a new country, dealing with racism and disappointment. A great look into the life of immigrants and their journey towards belonging. She keeps in contact with her sister in Bangladesh whose love marriage resulted in hardship and suffering. Nazneen is a traditional and dutiful Bangladeshi wife who ends up finding a place for herself.

You can borrow Brick Lane from the Wagga Wagga City Library or reserve it here.

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

Water for Elephants is largely set in America in the 1930s and is the story of a travelling circus. The story follows Jacob, a young man recently orphaned who was a veterinary student who finished just shy of his final exams. In desperation he jumps onto a train and discovers that it belongs to the circus. What follows is a tale of love, hate, friendship, betrayal and an elephant.

A fascinating look into the history of travelling circus' of the time with interesting characters and a satisfyingly clever ending.

You can borrow Water for Elephants from Wagga City Library or reserve it here.

How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton

Marcel Proust's novel In Search of Lost Time (earlier translated as Remembrance of Things Past) is considered by many to be the best novel ever written. With seven volumes, many claim to have read it but have not quite managed to. Alain de Botton's book is about Proust and his novel, but it is also about all literature. Through extracts from Proust's letters, essays and novel, de Botton paints a picture of the eccentric author and shows the power of literature to change your life. While the theme is very literary, this book is delightfully readable and full of memorable quotes.

You can borrow the book at Wagga City Library (it is found at 843.912 DEB) or reserve it here.

The Various Flavours of Coffee by Anthony Capella

A lovely piece of historical fiction, set in England. This book, beginning in 1895, also takes us to Africa and Brazil. It is about a young dandy named Robert Wallis who wishes to be a poet but manages spend most of his time, and all of his money, drinking and misbehaving. Suffering a terrible lack of funds he accepts a position with Samuel Pinker, categorising the different flavours of coffee. He falls in love with one of Pinker's three daughters and is sent to Africa where he becomes obsessed with a beautiful slave.

The descriptions of the aromas and tastes of coffee are fascinating and the historical and business details are also very interesting. It is easy to forget the hardships women went through to get the right to vote. A book filled with wonderful characters.

You can borrow The Various Flavours of Coffee from Wagga City Library or reserve it here.

The River Baptists by Belinda Castles

The River Baptists was the winner of the 2006 The Australian/Vogel Literary Award.

Set in a small riverside community, The River Baptists tells the story of Rose, bunkered down in a borrowed house overlooking the river, grieving for her dead father and waiting for her baby to be born. It is also the story of Danny, another refugee from life elsewhere, hiding out from his violent father and dreaming of owning a block of land on the river. Then there are the river old-timers, who miss nothing and forget less, and a newcomer who cares nothing for the locals, or the secrets of the past. Set over the course of a long hot tense summer, when sparks constantly threaten to ignite bushfires, the tight-knit riverside community is set alight by confidences betrayed and a renewed age-old grudge.And through it all flows the mysterious pulse of the river, indifferent, deep and calm, offering the possibility of life and death, renewal and rebirth.

I found this novel completely captivating. You can borrow it from Wagga Wagga City Library and reserve it here.

The Horla by Guy de Maupassant

Guy de Maupassant wrote this novella about a man's decent into madness, three ways, all of which are included in the book. They each tell the story of the man's struggle against what should not be and how his mind manages to explain and deal with it.
The book was published shortly before de Maupassant was, himself, institutionalised for insanity so could well be informed by his own experience.
It is a chilling and fascinating read and I appreciated the insight into what it might be like to lose your mind.

Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga

Set in Rhodesia in the late 60s and early 70s, before it became Zimbabwe, Nervous Conditions is about a clever and ambitious Shona girl called Tamba who leaves her poor parents to stay with an affluent uncle at a mission school. She shares a room with her cousin who spent her early years in England and who struggles to know where or how she fits in. She and Tamba feel the vast differences between European and African culture, particularly for women and try to work out what it is to be an African woman.



This is a lovely coming of age story in a fascinating setting and you can reserve it here. Riverina Regional Library also has the sequel to Nervous Conditions, The Book of Not.

Growing up Asian in Australia

Alice Pung's memoir Unpolished Gem has been short-listed for several awards. In it she shares her experiences of growing up as a child of immigrants, moving between two cultures - experiences shared by many Asian-Australians. Growing up Asian in Australia is a collection of these stories, told by well-known authors and new voices, spanning several generations and from all over Australia.

I found this book funny, sad, poignant and uplifting. I kept reading just one more chapter, unable to put it down.

You can borrow Growing up Asian in Australia from any branch of the Riverina Regional Library or reserve it here.

The Other Hand by Chris Cleave

This is a very powerful book, beautifully written. The subject matter isn't light and yet the book doesn't seem heavy or depressing. It is told from the view points of a young Nigerian refugee called Little Bee and a suburban woman in London. Little Bee's story is shocking and frightening and not only the part that happened to her in Nigeria. This book made me think differently about the life of refugees; before they leave their country and after they arrive in the place that is supposed to bring safety and stability. Despite the horror at the heart of the book, it is funny and life-affirming.

You can borrow this book from Wagga City Library or reserve it here.

Salvation in Death by J.D. Robb

This is the 27th book in the "In Death" series by J.D. Robb aka Nora Roberts. For those of you who like to follow characters, this is a great crime series set in New York in the future. Lieutenant Eve Dallas is the main character, a strong woman who believes in justice. If you haven't already discovered this series, it is a great read. She meets her husband in the first book of the series "Naked in Death", so there is a romantic element. Her sidekick Peabody is another great contrasting character in the series. Whilst not essential to read the books in order, as each book can stand alone, I would recommend that you do read them in sequence and enjoy the gradual character development. This series is light, easy to read and great escapism with the futuristic setting adding an interesting element.

The Waterlily: A Blue Mountains Journal by Kate Llewellyn

This is such a delightful book! Kate Llewellyn is an Australian poet who bought a house in the Blue Mountains and wrote this journal for one year. It is filled with love, heartbreak, hope, gardening, fabulous food and cups of tea. Her writing is evocative and I feel as though I too have spent a year in the mountains coming to terms with life and enjoying it through all the ups and downs.

If you love beautiful writing, gardening or food you must read this book. Reserve it here. Also available by Kate Llewellyn are The Mountain, The Floral Mother and other Essays, The Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets, The Dressmaker's Daughter, Honey: Poems and Playing with Water.

The Trout Opera by Matt Condon

The Trout Opera is an epic, Australian novel, spanning the twentieth century. It begins with a Christmas pageant in Dalgety in 1906 and ends with the opening ceremony of the Sydney Olympics. We follow Wilfred Lampe whose long life is lived in the Monaro and who must come to terms with modern Australia and Aurora Beck whose life is fraught with modern problems and who needs to find a way to reclaim her life.

Australia itself is one of the fascinating characters in this book. From the Snowy to Kings Cross covering history, war, romance and the media. If you like Australian literature you may find this a wonderful experience.

You can reserve The Trout Opera here.