Chris Womersley

I'm looking forward to reading Carrie Tiffany's Exploded View, actually, which I've got on my bedside table, which I have read the first few pages of.

And it's a sort of book set in suburban Australia, and her method is really interesting to me, that sort of collage-y sort of thing as opposed to a straight...

narrative, or so it seems to me so far from having read it, read the first few pages.

So I'm really looking forward to reading that actually.

And another one is a friend of mine, Lenny Bartoulin, is an author who's got a book coming out called Fortune in a couple of months.

And I've read an early release of that or portions of that about a group of people who sort of were at the scene of Napoleon marching into Prussia in 1806 and their sort of disparate adventures.

So

They're the kind of two things I'm kind of looking forward to most, I guess, in the next month or so.

Oh, that's called Fortune.

Yeah, there is a few cars.

There's also, I mean, one of the weird things in assembling the collection was that...

You know, I'm a swimmer, I like water, I've always been attracted to water, but only at the very near the end of the editing process when we were sort of thinking about a cover and so forth that my publisher wrote to me and said, you know that really almost every story in here features water.

Yeah, if not explicitly in pools or oceans or whatever, then there's a lot of water similes and metaphors and stuff, which is sort of why the cover has ended up being a sort of a boy in a sort of sunlit water, partly.

And actually, which reminds me of another book I really enjoyed reading, which is, again, completely sort of perhaps lateral, was a book called Waterlog by a guy called Roger Deacon.

And it's kind of nature writing in a sense, but he, in the mid-'90s,

he decided to swim across England in all the kind of lakes and streams that he could possibly find.

So he sort of, and he in fact lives in some, he's passed away now, but at the time he was living in some farmhouse that had a moat in it and he used to swim in his moat.

So he's a sort of old school English eccentric and he decides to swim across England.

So he sort of goes to various lakes and rivers and on the way he gives you a history of the town and

you know, Lord Byron swam here in, you know, 1842 or whatever it was, and, you know, Prince blah, blah, blah, and things like that.