Geraldine Brooks on 25 years of wonder and Zoe Foster Blake's girlfriend getaways
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Why should listeners vote for Geraldine Brooks’ *Year of Wonders* in the Top 100 Australian Books?
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This is the book show. Hello, I'm Claire Nichols. And with our Top 100 Australian books vote underway, I've taken it upon myself to help you pick your favourite ever Australian books, providing a bit of inspiration going back to some classic Australian novels. So if you haven't voted yet, you need to head to the Radio National website and pick your favourites. Maybe you'll want to vote for this: Geraldine Brooks and her A classic novel, Year of Wonders.
And would you believe Year of Wonders is 25 years old this year? It was published in 2001. And it takes us not to Australia, this takes us to a small country town in England in the 17th century. This is a town that decides to cut itself off from the world when the plague arrives. Its narrator is Anna Frith. She's a young maid to the local rector. She's already a mother. And a widow at nineteen, and she has a whole lot more love and grief to come. Hi, Geraldine. Hi, good day. This was your first published novel. What does this book mean to you, Geraldine?
It was my swan dive into the unknown. Um I had been a newspaper reporter for a decade and a half and And then suddenly I had a child, a baby, and I couldn't do the kind of reporting I'd been doing for the last ten years. Which was going to extreme places at the worst of times and being a war correspondent. And so I took this one dive into the world of the imagination to see if I could write fiction that anybody would want to read and Uh luckily for me, somebody did, so I got to keep doing it.
It's an incredible story. How did you find This story.
I had literally stumbled into the village of Eme uh in the peak district in England, uh, at the end of a long hike. We'd We had a very rare couple of days off from being Middle East correspondence and I wanted to get somewhere different, moist and green instead of dry and dusty. And so we were rambling, as the English so euphoniously call bushwalking or hiking. And I saw a sign saying plague village. And I thought, that's funny. Not many places try to attract tourists by putting up a sign saying plague village. So we walked the extra five miles and uh found ourselves in this very beautiful gritstone town in a wonderful state of historic preservation. And in the church at that time they had the story of what had happened there in 1665 when the villagers uniquely
during uh bubonic plague took the decision to quarantine themselves.
bravery or self sacrifice, isn't it?
Incredible. And you know, at that point we were living in a very small village ourselves, but it was in rural Virginia. And we couldn't even get an agreement about whether the notice board should be inside the post office or outside the post office. So it intrigued me. on that level. Like how do you get a community to come to a life changing consensus like that? But I was also still working as a war correspondent at the time. So I was seeing what catastrophe did to people and how it tended to either bring people to their best self or their worst self. And I had examples of both. I had like the the morally lost torturer in Bathist, Iraq, or the incredibly um brave and self sacrificing uh Eritrean woman who stepped out of the conventional role accepted for her to, you know, lead her people in the struggle at then against um
the brutal rule of Mengistu. So, you know, I had all this stuff in my head and as I'm covering modern conflicts, I keep thinking back to this town and what what it must have been like to be those people and who found their best self and who found their worst self. And then I would come home to this little town.
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Chapters
3 chapters
1
Why should listeners vote for Geraldine Brooks’ *Year of Wonders* in the Top 100 Australian Books?
0:00–13:42
2
How did Geraldine Brooks stumble onto the 17th‑century plague village that inspired *Year of Wonders*?
13:42–19:28
3
What research did Geraldine do to reconstruct the plague‑quarantined village and its characters?
19:28–43:59
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from The Book Show
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