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Take a look. Take a look.
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Hello and welcome to hear this. I'm Francis Kelland and you're listening to the Vision Australia Library radio show, where we talk about books in the Vision Australia library collection. And as usual, I think we've got a pretty interesting array of books with samples today. So sit back and I hope you enjoy the show. And hello to Bob of Canberra. Thank you Bob, lovely to hear from you again. Uh, he wrote, I am on a bit of a historical fiction thing at the moment, currently reading Stone Cold Gold Mountain for our audio book group. I'm also waiting for Northwoods by Daniel Mason to come to the VA library. Meantime, I tried Mason's debut novel, The Piano Tuner, and got a delightful surprise. It's a beauty. Set in colonial Burma. It depicts, of all things, a London piano tuner travelling to the hill regions of Burma to repair the grand piano of an isolated British Army surgeon. And Bob has added Think of Conrad's Heart of Darkness and the mysterious Kurtz. There is an excellent review in The Guardian. Thank you so much, Bob. So we'll have a sample of the piano Tuner. And this book is historical fiction set in 1886. And the piano tuner, his name is Edgar Drake, and he leaves his wife and a quiet business in London, so very much going to the jungles of Burma out of his comfort zone. And the British Army officer, who is travelling to tune the piano of, uses piano and music to help keep the peace amongst warring local Burmese princes. Let's hear a sample of The Piano Tuner by Daniel Mason. It's narrated by John Callen.
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Heavy fog drifted along Pall Mall as Edgar left the War Office. He followed a pair of torch boys through mist so thick that the children, swathed in heavy rags, seemed disembodied from the hands that held the dancing lights. Do you want a cab, sir? One of the boys asked. Yes, to Fitzroy Square, please, he said, but then changed his mind. Take me to the embankment. They walked through the crowds, through the stern and marbled corridors of Whitehall, and then out again through a jumble of carriages filled with black coats and top hats, and sprinkled with patrician accents and the smoke of cigars. Oh, there's a dinner at one out of clubs tonight, sir, confided one of the boys. An eager nodded. In the buildings around them tall windows gave onto walls of oil paintings lit by high ceilinged chandeliers. He knew some of the clubs. He'd tuned a Pleyel at Boodles three years ago, and an era a Brooks's, a beautiful inlaid piece from the Paris workshop. They passed a crowd of well-dressed men and women, their faces ruddy from the cold and brandy, the men laughing beneath dark moustaches, the women squeezed in the embrace of whalebone corsets, lifting the hems of their dresses above a road glistening with rain and horse dung. An empty carriage waited for them on the other side of the street. An elderly, turbaned Indian already at the door. Edgar turned. Perhaps he has seen what I will, he thought, and had to suppress the desire to speak to him.
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And that was the piano tuner by Daniel Mason. Daniel is Danielle. Danielle Mason is Amazon. Amazon. That book goes for 12.5 hours. This book was published in 2002 and Daniel Mason was only 26. And this was his first novel. It was the basis for a 2004 opera of the same name, and is also due to be released as a film. So successful novel for sure. There are now quite a few books and thank you Bob. I'm glad you've ordered or put in a suggestion to get another one of his. But yeah, he has written a few books since 2002, right up until Northwoods 2023 that was published. Mason is a doctor and psychiatrist, and he teaches literature at Stanford University. Thank you, Bob, for that suggestion. For an author I'd never heard of before, but looks like well worth listening to and reading Daniel Mason and the sample of the book The Piano Tuner. Sticking to historical fiction we have in Calamities Wake, and this is by Natalie Caple. Mere has no desire to meet the mother who abandoned her, a woman she knows only as an infamous soldier, drinker and exhibition shooter Martha Connery made notorious as Calamity Jane, but meets beloved adoptive father, makes a deathbed request that the two be reunited. Set in the badlands of the North American West in the late 1800s, in calamities, wake tells the story of me its quest across a landscape occupied by strangers, ghosts and animals. On her journey, she meets an old lover of her father's, a man who claims to be her brother, an imposter she thinks is her mother, a minstrel. Lou Spencer, a kind madame who is her mother's best friend and a wolf who longs to protect her and many others. Let's hear a sample of In Calamities Wake by Natalie Capel. It's narrated by Dale Bartlett.
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I came to the Badlands because I was told that my mother, a woman named Martha Connery, lived there. It was the man of God who acted all my life as my father, who told me this when it was time for him to die, he made me promise that I would go and find her. I squeezed his hands and laid my cheek against his. His breaths and mine were staggered together, very, very weak for different reasons. I said yes because I don't cry. And I loved him. And in that last hour we were together. I would have promised him anything. You have to do it, he said. Promise me you will not change your mind. I know that you've heard sickening things and those things are all true, but I'm sure she wants to know you. I kept repeating my promise out loud, all the while hating the woman for not being the one who was dying. My father's brown eyelids closed. I stared at the window, shades pulled down against the late evening sun, and I felt amazed at how separate I was from him, how separate every person is from every other. And when at last I felt his long, weak body release him. I sat in the dark with everything that was left, still promising and fondled with my memory. Every detail of how he had loved.
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That was in calamities. Wake by Nathalie Capel Nathalie is spelled in a t a l double e in a t a l e capel is Capella Capella. We also have an earlier book by her called mackerel Sky, and that's also about an estranged family, a daughter and a father meeting for the first time under some strange circumstances and in calamities week goes for 7.5 hours. I'm reading here from Publishers weekly.com and they said, by turns cinematic in its rendering of landscape and heartbreaking in its rich description of its young heroine, Capel employs a full range of language and experimental narration to innovate the plot interspersed through me story a minor characters perspectives and larger than life portraits of Calamity Jane, and this book explores the the blurring line between the historic woman, the reality and the myth. She became. So another historical fiction there, with a bit of a journey, involved the badlands of the Midwest. And just in case you're wondering, Calamity Jane was known to have had at least one daughter and possibly two. She got married in 1886 and gave birth to a daughter named Jane, but this daughter was given up for adoption for unknown reasons. There were rumors that the actual father of her daughter was wild Bill Hickok, and indeed, Calamity Jane is one of those really interesting characters from history. I have two impressions of Calamity Jane in my mind one the amazing Doris Day film Calamity Jane with Howard Keel, and also the streaming series Deadwood. There's a wonderful American actor who plays Calamity Jane. And obviously a lot of research was done to try and bring the reality of Calamity Jane to the to the character. She's disheveled, she's an anxious character. She's a heavy drinker, lives on her reputation, has the grudging respect of the men in Deadwood. That's a really interesting characterization. That book is in Calamity Jane's Wake by Natalie Capel. The next book is by Australian Sam Drummond. It's called broke. This is a memoir about downward mobility, disability and the power of hope. Sam always knew he was starting life on the back foot when his parents split. Sam, his mother, and his brother had to learn to survive in a world not built for single parent families. Add to that Sam's diagnosis with a form of dwarfism, and the odds seemed stacked against them as surgeons kept breaking and resetting Sam's legs in attempts to keep him walking. Disability and poverty collided, and it took all the family's strength not to crumble in The Impact. Laodicea, A sample of Broke by Sam Drummond, it's narrated by Tim Potter.
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The fated red station wagon was packed to the brim with keepsakes and baggage, blocking any line of sight to the endless traffic behind. Tucked in the back seat. I peeked around boxes to see her, extinguishes cigarette butt in the ashtray and turn the steering wheel hard. The car pulled out of the hurtling peak hour traffic into a concrete driveway. A frustrated driver accelerated past flat hands stuck on the horn. She flicked a curl, the color of an autumn maple leaf, away from her eyes to see who to apologize to. But that already left us behind. The grey air was in stark contrast to the open rural skies we just left. A frigid breeze entered my nook as the door of the red Rattler opened. There she was. My mother. Large glasses set on a thin nose, the color of the frames matching her curls above. His smile was reassuring. I wanted to know where dad was, but her expression told me now was not the time. She had the look of someone who had just found freedom in the risks she'd taken. The future would take care of itself. She motioned for me to be quiet, pointing over to where my infant brother Jesse slapped. His lips were squeezed open like a pufferfish. His neck craned at a right angle to his shoulders. He was four years younger than me, but that was not the biggest difference between us. He was a large baby, already on the verge of catching up to my size. His skin was tanned without much exposure to the sun. His thick brown hair fell over his defining feature, a birthmark that stretched across his forehead as if a painter had not quite finished their work of art before he arrived in this world.
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So that was a sample of Broke by Sam Drummond that was released fairly recently, June 2023. It was one of readings the bookshops books of the month. Sam Drummond is now a lawyer and disability advocate, and if you wanted to hear an interview with Sam on ABC Dot net, you ABC, you can hear an interview with Sam Drummond on the program Life Matters. But if you did do a search, you can simply search ABC network. You Sam is Sam. Sam Drummond is Drummond. Drew WMO and Collins booksellers have said that Sam Drummond weaves a poignant, stirring and deeply humane tale of life on the fringes. The next novel is also a book that was released in June of this year. It is called Sad Girl Novel. It's written by Pip Fink Meyer. Over the course of a year in Berlin, an aspiring novelist, Kim and her historian best friend Belle confront their twin acts of creation. Kim is becoming a writer and is determined to write a bestseller. She's been convinced of this idea by Matthew, an American literary agent who is as emotionally unavailable as he is handsome in brackets vary. Kim lives in her own carefully constructed reality, which her imagination is constantly pumping full of hot air as she attempts to buoy herself using other people for external motivation. They poke holes in her fantasies, leading her to wonder if she's going to come crashing down or somehow stay afloat. Meanwhile, Belle is becoming a mother and gives birth certain that will fulfill her in ways her career does not seem to. Bill and Kim support and deceive each other as only the best of friends can. Let's hear a sample of Sad Girl novel by Pip Fink Meyer. It's narrated by Alex Dunmore.
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I think it was the third time I got attacked by a stranger on a train, that I thought, maybe it's time to leave Berlin for a while. There was a man throwing candy at people and then asking them for money. His strategy was to throw the candy fast so it went in a straight line instead of a curved one. Most people would lift and squeeze their hands in front of their face as a reflex, when they look down to see what they caught. The man would smile and ask them to pay for it, in the tone of any man behind a counter making a regular transaction. The reason this qualified is an attack in my book, or even as a personal attack, was that I didn't have the reflexes everyone else did. The confectionary hit me in the forehead and made the sound of a knuckle popping. I only left my Keats once a week, and this was one of the reasons why. Awkward interactions with strangers on trains. The other reason I never left my neighborhood was because I had no way to go. All I had was a project that required me to sit alone in my apartment day and night, drinking stovetop espresso from a black bialetti. I would be lying if I said I didn't enjoy the simplicity of only caring about one thing. I let the rest of my life fall away in pieces, like a cliff face collapsing into the sea. I felt like a monk making great sacrifices for divinity. My goal was to write a book in one year and try to not make it about me. But so far, it kind of was.
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That was Sad Girl novel by Pip Fink. Maya Pip is just simply Pip Fink. Meyer is f I n k e m e y e r f I n k e m e y e r. That book goes for 8.5 hours. On an Amazon.com review. They say Pip Fink Maya has drawn such a unique, funny, and painfully astute character in Kim. She is unique and smart, with a wry humour that will make you laugh out loud. And Pip Fink Maya is actually a Melbourne author in The Guardian. They say at this point in the millennial life cycle, sad girl literature is inescapable. It is taken on a sprawling life of its own. From Sally Rooney. The typical novel goes something like this 20 something woman, likely white and middle class, has a crisis, is selfish, does messy, chaotic things. Sometimes she might have a revelation, other times she won't. Keenly self-aware, the third Girl novel both inhabits and deconstructs the genre of sad girl novels through its unreliable narrator. I think Maya, who's 35, feels conflicted about the genre, which she says can sometimes be mean spirited, and her approach blends this disaffected ennui with a kind of nervous sincerity. And she says in this Guardian interview, I think that's the challenge, this really weird mix of being aware of how problematic something is, but also complicit in it. You can't just be critiquing and satirizing, it has to have a firm heart and soul. And that was an interview in the Guardian newspaper Saturday, the 3rd of June 2023 with Giselle O'nien Nguyen over Halloween, which has just gone. And many people will say, thank heavens for that. I was looking at books in the library, but also books on lists of the scariest books of this year and lists like that online. And there is a book here called A House with Good Bones by T kingfisher. Sam Montgomery is worried about her mother. She seems anxious, jumpy, and she's begun making mystifying changes to the family home. Sam figures it has something to do with her unlamented grandmother. She's not wrong. As vultures gather around the house and frightful family secrets are unearthed under the rose bushes, Sam struggles to unravel the truth about the house on her mother's lane before it consumes her and everyone else who stands in its way. Let's have a listen to A House with Good Bones. This is by T kingfisher and it's narrated by Lissa Browne.
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There was a vulture on the mailbox of my grandmother's house. As omens go, it doesn't get much more obvious than that. This was a black vulture, not a turkey vulture. But that's about as much as I could tell you. I have a biology degree, but it's in bugs, not birds. The only reason that I knew that much was because the identification key for vultures in North America is extremely straightforward. Does it have a black head? It's a black vulture. Does it have a red head? It's a turkey vulture. This works unless you're in the southwest where you have to add. Is it the size of a small fighter jet? It's a California condor. We have very few condors in North Carolina. I bet you have some amazing feather mites. I told the vulture, opening the car door. The vulture tilted his head and considered this. Or me or my aging Subaru. I took out my phone and got several glamour shots of the bird. When I tried to upload one to the internet, however, my phone informed me that it had one tenth of a bar and my GPS conked out completely. Ah yes, that at least hadn't changed. My mother lived on Lamour gear lane, which made the vulture even more appropriate. Although we don't have llamas bearded vultures in North Carolina either.
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That was a house with good bones by T kingfisher. T is simply the first initial T one letter and kingfisher is in g f I s h e r king if I s h e r. That book goes for seven hours and 45 minutes, and if you enjoy that book, you'll be happy to know that there's a whole lot of books by T kingfisher in the library. There's nettle and bone, the twisted ones, the hollow places. What moves the dead. T kingfisher is a writer of many horror novels, and I'm here on good reads. T kingfisher is the vaguely absurd pen name of Ursula Vernon. In Another Life, she writes children's books and weird comics, and has won the Hugo, Sequoia and Ursa major awards, as well as half a dozen Junior Library Guild selections. T kingfisher is the name she uses when writing things for grown ups. When she is not writing, she is probably out in the garden trying to make eye contact with butterflies. The author was born in 1977, and she did win a Hugo Award for the fantasy novel Nettle and Bone. And for Halloween, you may have treated your shelf on the 31st of October, there was an online event was called Halloween Redux, and the special guests were Alan Baxter, who's a multi award winning author, and he has a podcast called This Is Horror. And he's been called Australia's Master of Literary Darkness. And there was also Alan Drees on there. And by day Aaron works as a mental health and homelessness case manager. But by night he writes and his novels include House of sighs and its sequel, The Sound of His Bones Breaking. So you may have been lucky enough to have enjoyed that evening from 8:00 to 9:00 on the 31st of October, and for a little while now, because Alan Baxter's been a wonderful support for the library here, and we now have his books in the collection, including Solo bend. Now, I don't have a sample of it, but I'll read out the synopsis. Something old and deadly has awoken when two teenagers go missing from the small rural town of Sello Bend, the residents come together to search for them. Little do they suspect that finding the wayward girls will be the start of their problems. An old evil is rising, and only one man seems to realise that everyone is in danger. And this is not the first time it's happened with the carnival in town. Our carnivals are great in horror and fantasy books. People want to have a good time, but for many this will be the worst time of their lives. So that is Slow Bend by Allan Baxter. If you want to do a search for Alan on the catalog. His name is Alan, Alan Baxter is Baxter. Baxter. Slow bend goes for about ten hours. We also have his Alex Cane series. Starting off with bound. This Alex Cane is a martial artist fighting in an illegal cage. Illegal cage matches his powerful secret weapon is an unnatural vision that allows him to see his opponents moves before they know their intentions themselves. So there's parts one, two and three. So lovely to see some Alan Baxter books in the collection. And just a reminder in Conversation with Judy Nunn is being held on the 17th of November from 2:00 to 3:00. It's an online event. Join Vision Australia Library in conversation with beloved author, actor and entertainer Judy Nunn. Judy's known for her epic novels featuring regional Australia, and during this some sessions she will share how she brings Australian history vividly to life. In her latest novel, Black Sheep. You can register by going to Vision australia.org and looking at library events. If you do a search for library events, you'll find Judy Nunn, so you'll need to register for that. That's 17th of November between 2:00 and 3:00. And she'll be talking about her book, A Black Sheep from the shearing wars of Queensland to the close colonial community of Goulburn, to the trenches of the Western. In front. Judi Nunn once again brings Australian history vividly to life. And for our Braille readers out there, a little bit of a heads up to Braille holiday loans. So hard copy Braille borrowers may borrow an additional five books over the holiday season. These will be posted between November the 13th and December the 13th, so don't forget to ring the library or email them to get out your extra Braille books for the holiday period. Because there is a about a two week shutdown of Vision Australia's library over that time, with nobody there to take your calls or to take your requests. So get in early with that one, and I hope everyone's going to be really, really stocked up for the coming holiday season. Thank you for joining us today on here this I'm Frances and thanks to Bob from the Act, as ever for sending through one of your recommendations and giving us some ideas about different authors we can read, and giving us a bit of an insight into your reading. It's always a joy. If you would like to recommend a book. If you would like to find out more about the library, if you would like to join the library, you can always call 1300 654 656. That's 1300 654 656. Or you can email library at Vision Australia. Org that's library at library at Vision Australia. Org and you know coming up to Christmas and I hate saying it but all the ads have started and everything. If you have a relative or a friend or anybody that you think would benefit from Vision Australia Library if they have a print disability, and that can be due to low vision motor neuron conditions that make it hard to hold a book or turn pages, or even just the general frailty of aging where it is very hard to hold a book. You can always call the library, and they're happy to talk about any of the issues that you might bring up about reading. For anybody that you know, and how to join and how to listen to the audio books as well. I hope you have a lovely week and we'll be back next week with more here. This.
