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Hello and welcome to hear this. I'm Frances Kelland and you're listening to the Vision Australia Library radio show, and I hope you enjoy the show. We've got a lovely range of books, so let's jump right into it. First off, a thank you to Dawn. Dawn recommended the book The Lost Flowers of Alice Heart, written by Holly Ringland, and I thank you very much for your email. Dawn, this is a wonderful Australian novel. Nine year old Alice Hart grows up in an isolated, idyllic home between sugar cane fields and the sea, where her mother's enchanting flowers and their hidden messages shelter her from the dark moods of her father. When tragically, irrevocably changes her life, Alice goes to live with the grandmother she never knew existed on an Australian native flower farm that gives refuge to women who, like Alice, are lost or broken. In the Victorian tradition, every flower has a meaning, and as she settles into her new life, Alice uses this language of native flowers to say the things that are too hard to speak as she grows older, family secrecy, a devastating betrayal, and a man whose not only seems combined to make Alice realise there are some stories that flowers alone cannot tell. If she is to have the freedom she craves, she must find the courage to possess the most powerful story she knows her own. Let's hear a sample of The Lost Flowers of Alice Heart by Holly Ringland. It's narrated by Bridget Park.
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Blackfire. Orchid. Meaning desire to possess. Pi raucous, Nick reckons Western Australia. Needs fire to flower sprouts from bulbs that may have lain dormant. Deep crimson streaks on pale flesh turns black after flowering, as if charred. In the weatherboard house at the end of the lane. Nine year old Alice Hart sat at her desk by the window, and dreamed of ways to set her father on fire. In front of her on the eucalyptus desk. Her father built a library book lay open. It was filled with stories collected from around the world about the myths of fire. Although a north easterly blew in from the Pacific full of brine, Alice could smell smoke, earth and burning feathers. She read, whispering aloud. The phoenix bird is immersed into fire, to be consumed by the flames, to burn to ashes and rise. Renewed, remade, reformed the same but altogether different. Alice hovered a fingertip over an illustration of the phoenix rising. Its silver white feathers glowing, its wings outstretched and its head thrown back to crow. She snatched her hand away as though the licks of golden red orange flames might singe her skin. The smell of seaweed came through her window in a fresh gust. The chimes in her mother's garden warned of the strengthening wind that.
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Was the Lost Flowers of Alice Hart by Holly Ringland. Holly is spelled h o l y h o w l y. Ringland is Ringland Ari. England. That book goes for 14.5 hours. This was Holly Ringland debut novel. Her second novel is The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding, which is also available in the library. In 2023, a seven episode TV series adaptation of the same name streamed globally on Prime Video, starring Sigourney Weaver. The series broke records with the biggest opening weekend viewership globally for any Australian launch. Holly's second novel, The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding, was published in 2022 and was book booked Topia Book of the year. And Holly has written another book, the House that Joy built, and that's being just published in October 2023. And it's a collection of essays, part memoir, part research and part storytelling about the pleasure and power of giving ourselves permission to create. And The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart won the Australian Book Industry Award for General Fiction Book of the year in May 2019. Thank you so much, Dawn, for recommending that lovely book and that wonderful author, Holly Ringland. The next book is a true crime novel. It is the Library book, believe it or not. That's the title, and it's by Susan Orlean. After moving to Los Angeles, Susan Orlean became fascinated by a mysterious local crime that has gone unsolved since it was carried out on the morning of the 29th of April 1986, who set fire to the Los Angeles Public Library, ultimately destroying more than 400,000 books. And, perhaps even more perplexing, why? With her characteristic humor, insight, and compassion, Orlean uses this terrible event as a lens through which to tell the story of all libraries, the history, their meaning, and their uncertain future as they adapt and redefine themselves in a digital world filled with heart, passion, and extraordinary characters. The Library Book discusses the larger, crucial role that libraries play in our lives. Let's hear a sample of The Library Book by Susan Orlean. It's narrated by the author Susan Orlean.
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Even in Los Angeles, where there is no shortage of remarkable hairdos, Harry pique attracted attention. He was very blonde, very, very blonde, his lawyer said to me. And then he fluttered his hand across his forehead, performing a pantomime of peaks, heavy swoop of bangs. Another lawyer who questioned Peake in a deposition, remembered his hair very well. He had a lot of it, she said, and he was very definitely blonde. An arson investigator I met described Peake entering a courtroom with all that hair as if his hair existed independently. Having a presence mattered a great deal to Harry Omer Peak. He was born in 1959 and grew up in Santa Fe Springs, a town in the Paddle Flat valley less than an hour southeast of Los Angeles. Hemmed in by the dun colored Santa Rosa Hills and a looming sense of monotony. It was a place that offered the soothing, uneventful ness of conformity. But Harry longed to stand out. As a kid, he dabbled in the minor delinquencies and pranks that delighted an audience. Girls liked him. He was charming, funny, dimpled, daring. He could talk anyone into anything. He had a gift for drama and invention. He was a storyteller, a yarn spinner, and an agile liar. He was good at fancying up facts to make his life seem less plain and minji.
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And that was the library book by Susan Orlean. Susan is Suzanne. Susan Orlean is o r l e a n o r l e a n. And that book goes for 12 hours and 15 minutes. The library book was written by Susan in 2018. Susan was born in 1955 and she's a journalist, television writer and bestselling author of The Orchid Thief, her first very successful true crime novel again. She has contributed to many magazines including Vogue, rolling Stone, Esquire, new York Times reviewer Michael Lewis wrote, Susan Orlean has once again found rich material where no one else has bothered to look for it. Once again, she demonstrated that the feelings of a writer, if that writer is sufficiently talented and to feeling sufficiently strong, can supply her own drama, you really never know how seriously interesting a subject might be until such a person takes a serious interest in it. Sticking with the theme of libraries and books, there is also Public Library and Other stories by Ali Smith. Why are books so powerful? What do the books we've read over our lives, our own personal libraries make of us? And what does the unraveling of our tradition of public libraries so hard won but now in jeopardy, say about us? The stories in Ali Smith's new collection are about what we do with books and what they do with us, how they travel with us, how they shock us, change us, challenge us, banish time while making us older, wiser and ageless all at once. How they remind us to pay attention to the world. We make. Laodicea a sample of Public Library and Other stories by Ali Smith, narrated in a beautifully soft Scottish accent by the author Ali Smith.
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At first I thought it was just that you really liked books, just that you were someone who really loved your work. I thought it was just more evidence of your passionate and sensitive nature. At first I was quite charmed by it. It was charming. She was charming. But here are three instances of what it was like for me. One, I'd be deep asleep in the place where all the healing happens. The place all the serious newspapers talk about in their health pages is crucial, because that's where the things that fray are needed, patched in our daily lives get physically and mentally attended to. And if we don't attend to them, something irreparable will happen. Then something would wake me. It would be you suddenly sitting straight up in the bed so all the covers would be off both of us. Then it would be you, not there. I mean, I'd come to myself and the covers would be off me. I'd open my eyes into a blur of dark, put my hand out and feel the place going cold where you should be. Then a light would come on somewhere in the house. Then a small noise would be happening. I'd get up. I'd blur my way downstairs, one hand on the wall and blur into the frontrillionoom or the kitchen or the study. You'd be sitting at the table. There'd be a too high pile of books on it. Even in the blur, I'd be able to see that the pile was going to topple any moment. You'd be sitting beyond it, looking through a book. Your eyes would be distant, as if closed and open at the same time. I'd stand there for a bit. You'd not look up what's going on, I'd say. It had come out sounding blurry. Nothing you'd say. I just need to know whether wing was actually the original kitten of Charlie Chaplin to know what I'd see.
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That was Public Library and Other stories by Ali Smith. Ali is spelt Ali. Ali Smith is smite. Smite. The book is a little short when it goes for four hours and 15 minutes. There are other books by Ali in the library. The accidental is one that's in the library also Hotel World, which is available in Daisy and in Braille Autumn, which is part of her Seasonal Quartet part one. So Autumn followed by winter and of course, spring. And also the story of Antigone was actually quite a few of her stories just looking through the collection. So if you do like this author, you might want to try some other of her books. That's Ali Smith. The Public Library and Other Stories was published in 2015. Are the novel The Public Library and Other Stories contains 12 stories punctuated by reflections on libraries about the history, their importance and the recent spate of closures. And in The Guardian, Kate Kellaway, a reviewer, praised the book as a brilliant, comprehensive, unpredictable defence of public libraries. And now to another book which is also about books. This is a non-fiction as well. This is called The True Tales of Baker and Taylor. This is by Lisa Rosa and Jan Lush, the memoir of small town librarian Jan Louche, whose pair of Scottish Fold cats became the mascots of the company, Baker and Taylor, and beloved by librarians and readers nationwide. It all started when Jan, assistant librarian at the Douglas County Public Library in Carson Valley, Nevada, and a coworker acquired two Scottish fold cats to keep mice away from the town's new library. Jan called the cats Baker and Taylor because the names fit the felines mild temperaments, and because she dealt with the book distribution company on a daily basis. When Jan agreed to let the company photograph the cats for a poster, she couldn't know that they would go on to become the most famous library cats in the world. It was enough for Jan that everyone who visited the library fell in love with the cats, but then the poster became a hit. Children from across the country wrote letters, which Jan answered for Baker and Taylor, and fans travelled from far and wide to see Baker holding court at the circulation desk and Taylor in his unusual sitting Buddha pose. In this charming memoir, Jan celebrates these wonderful cats and the people readers, cat lovers and many others that came together around them. Let's hear a sample of The True Tales of Baker and Taylor by Lisa and Jan Lush.
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It was a simple idea, really. In the early 1980s, Douglas County, Nevada was desperate for a new library. The population had tripled in the past decade, and we were rapidly running out of room in the old library. New residents and old timers jostled for space at the reading tables, elbows touching. More often than not, the bookshelves were so crowded that we had to store the fiction collection in the library director's garage a few blocks away. Whenever a patron wanted to check out a novel or a short story collection, instead of taking the book from the stacks, he'd hand over a request with a book title scrawled on it, and once a day, a staff member would get in her car, head for the garage, gather up all the books requested, and drive them back to. A library for the patrons to pick up. Even though the library only had two full time employees and one part timer. Our work area was also pretty cramped. We did everything on a big work table in the back room, from typing index cards for the card catalog to covering and repairing books. We had one typewriter, a manual between us. The library director, Yvonne Sadler, sat on one side, me on the other, and we'd rotate the typewriter back and forth depending on who needed it most. On that typewriter, I also pecked out an occasional column for the Record Courier, the local newspaper where I reviewed some of the new books that were on our shelves. The length of the column depended on how much ad space was sold that week. Fewer ads, and the editor would lop off the last two books in the column. So I always pushed my favorites to the beginning.
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And that was the true tales of Baker and Taylor. Lisa Ruzek and Jan Lush all spilled Jan's name. Jan is Jan. Jan. Her surname is l o c h l o c h. That book goes for seven hours and narrated there by Cynthia Darlow. Now let's move on to more exciting territory, but still to do with libraries and books and a little bit of academia thrown in. This book is called Camino Island and it's by, oh my gosh, so prolific, the author John Grisham. All trails become dead ends. Tips that at first seem urgent, now faded away. The waiting game began. Whoever had the manuscripts would want money, and a lot of it. They would surface eventually. But where and when and how much would they want? The most daring and devastating heist in literary history targets a high security vault located deep within Princeton University, valued at 25 million, although some would say priceless. The five manuscripts of F Scott Fitzgerald's only novels are amongst the most valuable in the world. After an initial flurry of arrests, both they and the ruthless gang of thieves who took them have vanished without a trace. Dealing in stolen books is a dark business, and few are initiated to its arts, which puts Bruce Campbell right, on the FBI's Rare Asset Recovery Unit's watch list. A struggling writer burdened by debts, Mercer man spent summers on Florida's idyllic Camino Island as a kid in her grandmother's beach cottage. Now, she is being made an offer she can't refuse to return to the piece of the island to write a novel and get close to a certain infamous bookseller and his interesting collection of manuscripts. Let's hear a sample of Camino Island by John Grisham. It's narrated by January LaVoy.
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The imposter borrowed the name of Neville Mansion, an actual professor of American literature at Portland State and soon to be doctoral student at Stanford in his letter on perfectly forged college stationery, Professor Mansion claimed to be a budding scholar of F Scott Fitzgerald and was keen to see the great writer's manuscripts and papers during a forthcoming trip to the East Coast. The letter was addressed to Dr. Jeffrey Brown, Director of Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Firestone Library, Princeton University. It arrived with a few others, was duly sorted and passed along, and eventually landed on the desk of Ed Folk, a career junior librarian whose task, among several other monotonous ones, was to verify the credentials of the person who wrote the letter. Ed received several of these letters each week. All in many ways the same, all from self proclaimed Fitzgerald buffs and experts, and even from the occasional true scholar. In the previous calendar year, Ed had cleared and logged in 190 of these people through the library. They came from all over the world and arrived wide eyed and humbled like pilgrims before a shrine. In his 34 years at the same desk, Ed had processed all of them. And they were not going away. F Scott Fitzgerald continued to fascinate. The traffic was as heavy now as it had been three decades earlier. These days, though, Ed was wondering what could possibly be left of the great writer's life that had not been pored over, studied at great length, and written about.
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That was Camino Island by John Grisham. John is John Grisham is Grisham. Grisham. And this is part one in the Camino Island series. And it's been a while since I've featured a John Grisham book on the program. We still have all the old favorites The Firm, The Pelican Brief, A Time to Kill, but also a lot of newer ones. Camino Island was released in 2017, but he's about to release his latest book in the series called Camino Ghosts. And if you would like to sort through all the different series he's written because he's written quite a few standalone and and novels, just call the library and and you can start from the beginning novels, if you like, or embark on his later series. Let's keep the excitement going with another author, James Patterson, who I often think of in the same breath as John Grisham. But they do write very differently, just that sort of American blockbuster type novel. This book is called The President Is Missing, and it is a political thriller written in conjunction or co-authored with Bill Clinton. The white House is the home of the president of the United States, the most guarded, monitored, closely watched person in the world. So how could a US president vanish without a trace? And why would he choose to do so? Let's hear a sample of The President Is Missing by James Patterson and Bill Clinton. It's narrated by actor Dennis Quaid.
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The House select committee will come to order. The sharks are circling their nostrils, twitching at the scent of blood. 13 of them, to be exact. Eight from the opposition party and five from mine sharks, against whom I've been preparing defences with lawyers and advisers. I've learned the hard way that no matter how prepared you are, there are few defences that work against predators. At some point, there's nothing you can do but jump in and fight back. Don't do it. My chief of staff, Carolyn Brock, pleaded again last night as she has so many times, you can't go anywhere near that committee hearing, sir. You have everything to lose and nothing to gain. You can't answer their questions, sir. It will be the end of your presidency. I scan the 13 faces opposite me, seated in a long row. A modern day Spanish Inquisition. The silver haired man in the center behind the nameplate. Mr. Rhodes clears his throat. Lester Rhodes, the speaker of the House, doesn't normally participate in committee hearings, but he has made an exception for this select committee, which he has stacked with members of Congress on his side of the aisle, whose principal goal in life seems to be stopping my agenda and destroying me politically and personally.
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That was the President is Missing by James Patterson and Bill Clinton. That bill goes for 13.5 hours. James Patterson is jammies. James Patterson is a double t e r s o n p double t e r s o n. And there's also part two of that. There's the the president's Daughter, written by Bill Clinton and James Patterson as well. So Bill Clinton by double L. By double L. Clinton. Clinton I guess. What else are you going to do when you're a retired American president who loves books, partner up with a successful author and and get your book out. And also for first ladies, as they're called. Hillary Rodham Clinton has also paired up with successful author Louise Penny to write State of Terror. After a tumultuous period in American politics, a new administration has just been sworn in. Secretary of State Ellen Adams is determined to do her duty for her country, but she's about to face a horrifying international threat. A young Foreign Service officer has received a baffling text from an anonymous source. Too late, she realizes it was a hastily coded warning. Then a series of bus bombs devastate Europe, heralding the rise of a new rogue terrorist organization. As Ellen unravels the damaging effects of the former presidency on international politics, she must also contemplate the unthinkable that the last president of the United States was more than just an ineffectual leader. Was he also a traitor to his country? Hmm. Let's hear a sample of State of Terror by Hillary Rodham Clinton and Louise Penny. It's narrated by Joan Allen.
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Madam Secretary, said Charles Boynton, hurrying beside his boss as she rushed down Mahogany Road to her office in the State Department. You have eight minutes to get to the capital. It's ten minutes away, said Ellen Adams, breaking into a run. And I have to shower and change unless she stopped and turned to her chief of staff. I can go like this. She held out her arms to give him a good look at her. There was no mistaking the plea in her eyes. The anxiety in her voice, and the fact she looked like she'd just been dragged behind a piece of rusty farm equipment. His face contorted in a smile that seemed to cause him pain. In her late 50s. Ellen Adams was medium height, trim, elegant, a good dress sense, and Spanx concealed her love of éclairs. Her makeup was subtle, bringing out her intelligent blue eyes while not trying to hide her age. She had no need to pretend to be younger than she was, but neither did she want to appear older. Her hairdresser when applying the specially formulated coloring, called her an Eminence Blonde. With all due respect, Madam Secretary, you look like a hobo. Thank God he respects you, whispered Betsy Jameson, Alan's best friend and counselor. After a 22 hour day that had started with Secretary Adams hosting a diplomatic breakfast at the American Embassy in Seoul, and included high level talks on regional security and efforts to salvage an unexpectedly crumbling and vital trade deal. The endless day had ended with a tour of a fertilizer plant in Guangdong province, though that had been a cover for a quick trip to the DMZ.
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That was state of terror by Hillary Rodham Clinton. Hillary is h I l r y h I w l a r y. Rodham, Rodham, Rodham, Clinton, Clinton, Clinton, and Louise Penny, who is famous for her Inspector series all set in Quebec. She's a Canadian writer. Her name is spelt Lewis Lois Penny p w NY p w NY and what a lot of fun they must have had doing that. Thank you so much for joining us on here. This on Francis Kelland. I've had good fun today, as I always do, but thank you two to Dawn for her suggestion for The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart. If you would like to contribute to the radio show by giving us a recommendation, please do call the library on 1300 654 656 1300 654 656, or you can email a library at Vision Australia. Org that's library at Vision Australia. Org have a lovely week and we'll be back next week with more here this.
