Cassie McCullough

A pleasure to read.

But I was struck, I was imagining...

a much more serious novel, and it wasn't until I started to read it I realised the tone was funny.

I was taken aback that it was in America, given that she's, you know, Australian and also South African by birth.

And so that language was very interesting and she inhabits it perfectly.

You have no idea that she is nothing but a Native American speaker, I think, in this book.

And then I learned that, in fact, she wrote this book more than a year ago and it was released as an Audible original and this book has actually been around in the world for a year as an audio book and the contract, the deals of the contract were it wouldn't be published in print until a year after that release.

And so it was crafted specifically for...

for the audio environment, which kind of, once I learned that, it made a lot more sense to me of what she was doing.

Well, look, why don't we just get a taste of what the audio sounds like?

It's read by Rachel Butera, who is an American actress who many people might know from the TV series Family Guy.

So hearing that, it's just such a departure from what I imagined it was going to be.

And even the book that I read as, as print, quite an interesting experience.

Very interesting.

This is The Bookshelf on ABC Radio National, your weekly fiction broadcast and podcast.

I'm Cassie McCullough here, as always, with Kate Evans, and we're ready to meet this week's bookish guests, beginning with the Australian's chief literary critic, Geordie Williamson, who's also a former publisher for Picador.

Geordie, hello.

Hi, Cassie.

How are you doing?

Now, I thought I'd be talking to you from your home in Tasmania, but in fact, you're at the other end of the country.