Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What are the featured authors and their latest books?
Hi, welcome to The Bookshelf on RN Summer. I'm Kate Evans.
And I'm Cassie McCullough with summer reading for you, or maybe some Christmas gift recommendations.
which is why we've brought you writers and their own reading recommendations with a bit about their new books too.
And it's also wall-to-wall, me, myself and I, with Heather Rose, who'll also tell us about her novel Bruni, Kate Forsyth, who weaves fairy tales and history into her fiction, and Alex McClintock, who's interested in how we pack a punch, which is actually to say that he's interested in boxing. Yeah.
Yes, he's written a history of boxing in Australia, but we asked him to tell us about novels that take you into the ring.
Tasmanian writer Heather Rose has written many books, including the award-winning Museum of Modern Love. And you might remember us talking about her new book, Bruni, a month or two ago. A political thriller, Kate.
Yes, with some very amusing references to current politicians. She sat down with me in the week that book came out to share her Me, My Shelf and I collection of best reads. But why don't we hear a little bit about her novel first? Let's meet Heather Rose. Heather Rose, welcome to the bookshelf. Thank you, Kate. It's lovely to be here.
Now, I want to quiz you about the bookshelf that's shaped you, a segment we're calling Me, My Shelf and I. But let's begin with your new novel, Bruny. It's full of political intrigue in a very near future. But Bruny Island is a real place.
Can you describe it for us? So Bruny Island is a long stretch of islands really. It's two islands that are joined by a very narrow isthmus called the Neck. And on North Bruny we have a lot of farmlands and forest and rocky beaches and also a beautiful sandy beach right on North Bruny. But on the South Island, we have Adventure Bay and the Lighthouse and Alanna.
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Chapter 2: How does Heather Rose describe her novel Bruni?
I absolutely loved them. I think Lisbeth Salander is an extraordinary character. Yeah, I really like those. I read very widely. You know, I'll read fantasy, I'll read sci-fi, I'll read literary fiction. Yeah.
Well, and you've written very widely in terms of style and approach. But this is also a story about family. Writing about family, there's a lot of it. But fiction that deals with the family that has impressed you, does anything come to mind?
I love Kate Atkinson's Life After Life. I think it's such a beautiful evocation of family. there's a magic in that book at work that kept me going right through to the end. And in fact, I listened to it as an audio book and it's beautifully narrated. It's an unconventional style of novel. Can you explain what she does in that one? So we keep going back to this same day in, I think it's 1910.
And our character is reborn and reborn and reborn and reborn. And she lives these lifetimes. And sometimes they're quite short lifetimes and sometimes they're longer lifetimes. until a certain thing happens. And when that thing happened, it really undid me. I cried. I thought, oh, I understand now the momentum for that character. And I think that's extremely clever, that book.
Middlemarch, again, I must say, George Eliot, that's a superb evocation of family and rural life. Elizabeth Strout, you know, almost all her books. I've loved every single thing she's written. Margaret Atwood, Surfacing.
LAUGHTER
The Robber Bride, that one's a very interesting one about women and friendship. Yeah, I love writing about family. And also it's a challenge, of course, to write about family because there are so many subtleties in families.
And I love the sense that we are getting a whole bookshelf of yours just through this conversation. We're getting a sense of the scope of your reading. Now, Bruni becomes a novel about betrayal too. Is that useful as a writer to have those sort of moments of shock?
I love an unreliable narrator. I think they're so much fun. And of course, the thing for me is that they shock me as well. So I don't know what's going to happen in my novels. I'm a seat of the pants writer. So I got Astrid arriving at the airport. I saw the bridge actually in a cloudscape and light one day at the end of my
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Chapter 3: What themes does Heather Rose explore in her writing?
I've never gone back. The book that I go back to every decade that I fell in love with in my teenage years is Anna Karenina. There's a book about family. And everything else. Yes.
Are there any other books that you've had that same experience with that you read again and again, or is it just Anna Karenina?
The book that instantly comes to mind is Light in August by William Faulkner. I thought when I read it that it was about the most perfect form of the novel I'd ever found. something about the arc of the characters and the way that it seems to go on a slight segue with Byron Hightower, the character, and then it all adds up in this extraordinary way.
And I thought, wow, that is an incredibly clever novel. But the books I probably have revisited most often as a writer have been Virginia Woolf's to The Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway. Those are great favourites of mine and I listen to them often as audio books. I think the characters of those two women have really enriched my life and Orlando, you know.
I just, I love the way she stretches language in a way that is bold and brave and as if she's considered brave the literary canon and made it entirely her own.
Look, your novel, Museum of Modern Love, is so, I mean, it's about, again, it's about many things, but including creativity and art. Are there other books on this sort of book of influential fiction that grapple with art and creativity in a way that has enriched you?
The book that comes to mind there is Elizabeth Gilbert's The Signature of All Things. A wonderful novel. A wonderful novel. And it was the first book of hers that I read. Yes, I am. Yes. And I thought, my, you're an extraordinary novelist. And then I went to Eat, Pray, Love because I thought, oh, maybe it's going to be much better than I imagined. I thought it would be kind of flimsy.
But in fact, I found a depth and a richness in that that surprised me and really delighted me, I have to say. Have you read City of Girls, Elizabeth Gilbert's new one? I have read City of Girls and I really enjoyed it. I loved being back in New York and I had no idea that that whole area of the terminal was that. I had no sense of that being the old theatrical district before.
And there's a real zip and zing to that. But again, it allows women to have...
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