00:05 UU (PROGRAM THEME)
Let's. Take a look. To take a look inside the book. Take a look...
00:24 S1
Hello and welcome to Hear This. I'm Frances Keyland, and you're listening to the Vision Australia Library radio show, talking about books in the Vision Australia library collection. And very happy today to have some really great samples of quite diverse books... starting off with a couple of mysteries. Let's start off today's show with a couple of mysteries.
The first one is Blood Sisters, and this is by Cate Quinn. When a man is found gruesomely murdered in the local pub, all fingers point to the backpackers working behind the bar. That night, two American girls who skipped town before the body was discovered. Despite all the evidence against them, rookie cop Tara Harrison knows there must be more to this case than a pair of sorority sisters who couldn't take a joke. She's determined to uncover the truth, and is soon on the trail of a devastating secret that could tear her hometown apart. But sorority sisters Lauren and Beth have their own dark secrets, and they've made an oath to take them to the grave, which they will all too soon unless Tara can stop it.
Let's hear a sample of Blood Sisters by Cate Quinn. It's got numerous narrators, including Olivia Bardsley.
01:40 S2
When Lauren found me, I was sitting on the sticky floor, flicking the plug socket switch that powered the lights on and off. Staring straight into space. Click off. Click on. The bar was empty at that point. There was the smell you get in bars after closing time when everyone has gone home. Yeast and sour fruit cut at the edges with a little stale tobacco. So I remember looking at my hand and noticing I was holding a half drunk bottle of beer. At some stage, the sun came up. Harsh dawn rays began shining through the cracks in the heavy curtains, the blinding yellow hue of outback Australia. That's when it suddenly felt real.
Click on, click off. The yellowed socket was overloaded with multiple plugs from a cowboy lighting rig that should have been ripped out in the 60s. Back then, the building was a prospector's big house during a short lived gold rush when this little nowhere town had money. When that changed, there were more mining men needing beer than ladies wanting fancy houses. I wonder how long after it was when someone decided that backpackers, girls like me and Lauren made the perfect barmaids? My understanding was expendable. Females were a long tradition.
Click on, Click off. There was a blood spatter on my ankle. It was shaped a little like a bird with one wing. I was still wearing the short shorts they made us wear to our bar shifts. Not a good look with bony legs and prominent knees. The outfit worked on Lauryn, though, obviously. Click on. Click off. The teacher who used to visit disadvantaged kids in the trailer parks told us there was something like five liters of blood inside a human being. You don't really appreciate how much that is until a man's heart has stopped pumping.
03:41 S1
That was Blood Sisters by Cate Quinn, and that book goes for 12 hours. Cate is spelled [spells author's name]. And if you enjoy this book, if you have a listen to it, you'll also enjoy maybe her other books. There's Black Widows, The Alice Analysts Network, The Rose Code and The Huntress and The Diamond Eye. Some of them set in historical, World War 2 times or post-World War 2. Going back and forth through history about Blood Sisters. The Sunday Times review says This is not the usual story of vulnerable women in jeopardy, but one in which the victims fight back. Hachette Australia, the publishers say A gripping and brilliantly evocative thriller set in the Australian outback, where two young American women sorority sorority sisters come under investigation. Combines the atmosphere of the dry with the irresistible, character driven narrative of Big Little Lies.
Cate Quinn is a travel and lifestyle journalist for The Times, The Guardian and The Mirror alongside many magazines prior to this. Quinn's background was in historic research, and she won the prestigious postgraduate funding from the British Art Council. Quinn pooled these resources, combining historical research with first hand experiences in far flung places to create critically acclaimed and best selling historical fiction.
The next mystery is Where the Bodies Are Buried by Christopher Brookmyre. Detective Catherine McLeod was always taught that in Glasgow they don't do whodunit. They do score-settling, they do vendettas, they do petty revenge. They do can't-miss whodunnit. It's a lesson that has served her well. But Glasgow is also a dangerous place to make assumptions. Either way she looks at it, she recognises it. The discovery of a dead drug dealer in a back alley is merely a portent of further deaths to come. Elsewhere in the city, aspiring actress Jasmine Sharp is reluctantly and incompetently earning a crust working for her Uncle Jim's private investigation business.
When Jim goes missing, Jasmine has to take on the investigator mantle for real, and her only lead points to Glen Fallon, a gangland enforcer and professional assassin, whose reputation is rendered only slightly less terrifying by having been dead for 20 years. Cautiously tracing an accomplished killer's footsteps, Jasmine stumbles into a web of corruption and decades hidden secrets that could tear apart an entire police force if she can stay alive long enough to tell the tale.
Let's hear a sample of Where the Bodies Are Buried by Christopher Brookmyre. It's narrated by Elspeth Turner.
06:32 S3
Subject vehicle is taking a right, right, right onto Byres Road. Foxtrot five make ground. I'm letting him run straight on at the lights before subject becomes able to draw my face from memory. Yes, yes, she replied, feeling her heart speed up far faster than the little Renault was accelerating. She had eyeball now. This time Jasmine Sharp vowed to herself, I won't screw it up. She watched Uncle Jim's car. No Delta Sevens car veer left ahead of the junction, heading west along Dumbarton Road and found herself suddenly closer than she intended.
Behind the blue Citroen minivan, she had to step on the brakes quite stiffly. Her anxious literal response to the make ground command causing her to forget that the subject would be slowing to a stop as he waited to turn right. She hoped he wasn't looking in the rear view, as nothing grabbed the attention quite like the appearance that you weren't going to stop in time, especially with this guy. Jasmine watched him indicate, almost hypnotised by the blinking light, focusing on it so that she wasn't tempted to look at his rear view mirror. It took 7 or 8 oscillations before she realized that she'd neglected to indicate herself.
She corrected her omission, feeling as she always did on this job, that she had too many balls in the air, and that her efforts to get the procedure right were in danger of causing her to forget to take care of the basics. It was bad enough when she was the secondary in a two car surveillance, but when it was she who had eyes on. She kept expecting at any second to stall the engine, if not smash into a lamppost, pedestrian or double decker bus she had failed to notice due to her attention being so singularly directed at the subject vehicle. I won't screw up, she vowed. I won't screw up. Not again.
08:21 S1
And that was where the Bodies Are buried by Christopher Brookmyre. That book goes for 11 hours. Christopher is spelt [spells author's name]. And Christopher Brookmyre was recently named as the winner of a major crime writing prize, the William McIlvanney Award. And that was for his latest book, which is The Cracked Mirror, which has been described as a cross-genre hybrid of Agatha Christie and Michael Connelly, with judges declaring it a brilliant piece of storytelling. And we don't have that one yet, but we have a lot of Christopher Brookmyre in the library.
Where the Bodies are Buried is part one in the Jasmine Sharp series. There's also the Jack Parlabane series... starting off with the novel Quite Ugly One Morning, and there's about five in that series in the library. There's also the Angélique de Xavier series, starting off with A Big Boy Did It and Ran Away. Great title. And there's also standalone novels that you can listen to. There's Fallen Angel - one family, two holidays, one devastating secret to new nanny Amanda. The Temple family seemed to have it all. The former actress, the famous professor there, three successful grown up children. But like any family, beneath the smiles and hugs, there lurks far darker emotions. So that's a standalone novel called fallen Angel.
And looking through this series, there's actually about eight of the Jack Parlabane series in the collection, and the first one, Quite Ugly One Morning, was published back in 1996 and introduces us to hard partying, wisecracking investigative journalist Jack Parlabane, who stumbles across the corpse of of the scion of a wealthy Edinburgh medical family, and he's determined to get to the bottom of things on his own. But he quickly becomes enmeshed in an adventure that will take him through all the strata of contemporary Scottish society and into some dangerous and hysterical situations. So that's part one of the Jack Parlabane series. Quite Ugly One morning, Christopher Brookmyre.
Now let's have a complete change of pace with... some nominations for the Barbara Jefferis Awards. This award is offered biennially for the best novel written by an Australian author that depicts women and girls in a positive way or otherwise, and empowers the status of women and girls in Society. Barbara Jefferis was a feminist, a founding member of the Australian Society of Authors, its first woman president, and, in the words of Thomas Keneally, a rare being amongst authors - being both a fine writer but also organisationally gifted. She was a professional and internationally published writer long before most of us dreamed of such things. This award was first established in 2006.
I've got a sample of two of the books from this list, which includes books we've already had on the show: Edinglassie by Melissa Lukashenko and Stoneyard Devotional by Charlotte Wood. So I'm going to play a sample here of Sunbirds by Miranda Riwoe. And this is the synopsis. 1941 West Java. Love and revolution are in the air, and the war is on its way. Shortly before the Japanese invade, the Van Horn family throws their famous Sinterklaas party at their tea plantation in West Java. One of their guests, Matisse, a Dutch pilot, hopes to forge a future in the Dutch East Indies, possibly with the family's daughter Anna, but she is torn between her dreams of Holland and her desire to belong. Let's hear a sample of Sunbirds by Miranda Riwoe. It's narrated by Helen Cresswell.
12:24 S4
Java, December 1941. Stars of light explode against the night sky. A shower of purple plumes of pink smoke lifts into the air. Another burst of white. The fireworks. Cinders drift to earth. Singeing. The tips of the nutgrass scorching the leaves of the camphor tree. Until a branch catches a light and men run, shouting, beating out the flames that lap at the leaves. Mats tilts his head back to watch a silver spray spin high above, reminding him of the diamond ring nestled in his coat pocket. He wonders if the stifling humidity is a prelude to more rain. He's glad to be standing outside on the veranda, even if it seems the rest of the revelers have now joined him to watch the fireworks display. He steps down to the grass to avoid being hemmed in and to escape the heavy scent of stale perfume. Cigar smoke, hair oil.
He bows and smiles at two sisters who were seated on the lawn. Anchor Lin. He says, bowing again to their brother, who brings them glasses of orangeade. He recently met the Jansens at the club. Indeed, he recognizes most of the party guests from the club, and although he has the privilege of staying with the Van Horns at their tea plantation, Sariwangi, he's aware that most of the other guests have travelled for hours by car, carriage or horseback to attend their famous Sinterklaas party. mates only arrived earlier that afternoon from Chiyangwa, and by the time the trim sandalwood's clopped their way along the tea plantations long gravel driveway, he had felt in sore need of a bath.
14:16 S1
And that was Sunbirds by Miranda Riwoe. That book goes for eight hours and 50 minutes. Miranda is spelt [spells author's name]. And I'm here on the University of Queensland Press web page, which is at uqp.com.au ... Miranda Riwoe is the author of Stone Sky, Gold Mountain, which won the 2020 Queensland Literary Award, and she was shortlisted for the 2021 Stella Prize and longlisted for the 2021 Miles Franklin Literary award, and the library does have a Stone Sky, Gold Mountain in the collection as well in audio.
The next book is by Gail Jones and It's Salonika Burning, also nominated for the Barbara Jefferis Award this year. Macedonia 1917. The great city of Salonika is engulfed by fire as all of Europe is ravaged by war. Amid the destruction are those who have come to the front lines to heal. Surgeons, ambulance drivers, nurses, orderlies and other volunteers. Four of them, Stella, Olive, Grace and Stanley, are at the center of Gail Jones' new novel, which takes its inspiration from the wartime experiences of Australians Miles Franklin and Olive King, and British painters Grace Pailthorpe and Stanley Spencer. In Jones' imagination, these four lives intertwine and change, each compelled by their desire to create something meaningful in the ruins of a broken world.
Let's hear a sample of Salonika Burning by Gail Jones. It's narrated by Marisa Barter Waters.
16:08 S5
By midnight, all was blaze and disintegration. A group of soldiers standing on the hill watched with indecent pleasure. The wind locals called the Vedas blasted from the north, puffed minarets into candles and monuments to blocks of gold. A whoosh of flame shaped paisley in its exotic unfurling caused some spontaneously, shamelessly to exclaim and clap. No one would have said it aloud. How strangely beautiful a city burning. But alarm, infant, fear the sufferings of others. These were no match for excitement at a safe distance. And the view of roaring engulfment the way flame Aim hurtled at the sky. Reached for new fuel burst light on the polished marble of churches, synagogues and mosques.
The markets were gone and the luxury stores on Eleftheria Square, the French Quarter, was destroyed. The Cafe Cristal, the Hotel Olympia, the town Hall, the Athens Bank, the English post office on Franklin Street was a pile of hot rubble. Among the first to burn were the Ottoman houses in the Old town. Wooden balconies fell into laneways in splintering crashes. Rooms held shape until the last second in nests of amber, light smoke and ash detachment. They all made up the show. There was a villainous cracking sound, like the smash of a headstone with an axe. Then sparks and black are rising in thick, gusty blurts. Humph! Another gone.
18:08 S1
And that was Salonika Burning by Gail Jones. That book goes for seven hours. Gail is [spells author's name]. And there are many other books by Gail Jones in the library, including the House of Breathing, Dreams of Speaking, Sorry, Five Bells, A Guide to Berlin, Black Mirror, 60 Lights... and Black Mirror and 60 lights are also available in Braille. And the Death of Noah Glass. The Guardian, in a review from November 2022, called Salonika Burning... A wartime novel that feels miraculously fresh, and they finish off the review with... We might ask if we need another book about the war right now, particularly about the First World War, which has, you might argue, been done to death in the literary canon. But Jones has somehow managed to capture something new. The question we're left with as we close Salonika burning is not Why do we fight? But What matters beyond the fight or what remains of us after it? And that was a review by Bek Kavanagh. Friday the 18th of November 2022.
Now to a novel that captured a lot of... publicity when it was first released. This is Daisy Jones and the Six. This was made into a really popular mini series as well, and it's by Taylor Jenkins Reid. Everyone knows Daisy Jones and the Six, but nobody knows the reason behind their split at the absolute height of their popularity until now. Daisy is a girl coming of age in LA in the late 60s, sneaking into clubs on the Sunset Strip, sleeping with rock stars and dreaming of singing at the Whisky a Go Go. The sex and drugs are thrilling, but it's the rock n roll she loves most. By the time she's 20, her voice is getting noticed, and she has the kind of heedless beauty that makes people do crazy things.
Also getting noticed is The Six, a band led by brooding Billy Dunn on the eve of their first tour. His girlfriend Camilla finds out she's pregnant, and with the pressure of impending fatherhood and fame, Billy goes a little wild on the road. Daisy and Billy cross paths when a producer realises that, realizes that the key to supercharged success is to put the two together. What happens next will become the stuff of legend. Let's hear a sample of Daisy Jones and the Six. This has multiple narrators, each giving their own points of view of the characters and the times, and Jennifer Beals is one of those.
20:53 S6
Daisy Jones was born in 1951 and grew up in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles, California, the daughter of Frank Jones, the well-known British painter, and Liane Lefebvre, a French model, Daisy started to make a name for herself in the late 60s as a young teenager on the Sunset Strip.
21:14 S7
Elaine Chang, biographer, author of Daisy Jones Wildflower. Here is what is so captivating about Daisy Jones even before she was Daisy Jones. You've got a rich white girl growing up in LA. She's gorgeous. Even as a child. She has these stunning big blue eyes, dark cobalt blue. One of my favorite anecdotes about her is that in the 80s, a colored contact company actually created a shade called Daisy blue. She's got copper red hair that is thick and wavy and takes up so much space. And then her cheekbones almost seem swollen. That's how defined they are. And she's got an incredible voice that she doesn't cultivate. Never takes a lesson.
She's born with all the money in the world, access to whatever she wants, artists, drugs, clubs, anything and everything at her disposal. But she has no one, no siblings, no extended family in Los Angeles, two parents who are so into their own world that they are all but indifferent to her existence, although they never shy away from making her pose for their artist friends. That's why there are so many paintings and photos of Daisy as a child. The artists that came into that home saw Daisy Jones, saw how gorgeous she was and wanted to capture her. It's telling that there is no Frank Jones piece of Daisy. Her father is too busy with his male nudes to pay much attention to his daughter.
22:51 S1
And that was the sample of Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid. Taylor is [spells author's name]. That book goes for nine hours. And when it was released, it was assumed that the book was based on the real life story of Fleetwood Mac. The author, Taylor Jenkins Reid, was first inspired by the band when she saw them perform in the 1990s, and she was confounded by Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham's performance and their ability to act like they were in love after a brutal breakup. So she stated that she wanted to write a story about that, about how the lines between real life and performance can get blurred, about how singing about old wounds might keep them fresh.
The Guardian on the 3rd of March of 2023... and this is a review by Lucy Mangan, she writes that Taylor Reid Jenkins' bestseller Daisy Jones and the Six is a beautifully controlled depiction of the exuberant rise and chaotic fall of a 1970s band, fictional but very much reminiscent of Fleetwood Mac. It captured the glamour, the hedonism, the freedom, the joy of unleashing talent and the agony of addiction, all the while building an acute psychological portrait of each character and, even more impressively, the crosscurrents between them all.
The mini-series that was created based on the book received less accolades, but it does feature a little bit of trivia here. Riley Keough playing the character supposedly based on Stevie Nicks and she is the granddaughter of Elvis Presley, and I did watch part of the miniseries. I did get a little bit bored with it, so I watched, I think, the first two episodes and Riley Keough, she performs really, really well.
And just a reminder that the time is coming up quite quickly. If you want to attend the In Conversation with Candice Fox online via zoom from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m., so that's on the 2nd of October, Candice Fox will be in conversation with our very own Maureen O'Reilly, and Vision Australia Library is thrilled to announce the upcoming In Conversation. Critics describe Candice as a bright new star of crime fiction, with her books featuring complex human characters, a dark, meaty story, and a great sense of place. The library's interview will delve into the dark depths of High Wire, Candice's latest novel about a road trip from hell across a notorious unmarked trek through outback Australia.
If you love gripping crime fiction novels, join the library In Conversation with one of Australia's most talented crime writers. The Vision Australia library has 12 audiobooks available from Candice, including five collaborations with American author James Patterson. To register, you go to Vision Australia dot zoom dot US and you will find the event there. Register to join the library for that very special event.
Thank you for joining us on here. This today I'm Frances Keel and I hope you enjoyed the show. Remember you can always send feedback about the program or about the books you're enjoying. It's always very, very welcome. If you would like to join the library or find out more about what wonderful books they have, you can always call 1300 654 656. That's 1300 654 656. Or you can email the library@visionaustralia.org - that's library at Vision Australia dot org. Have a lovely week and we'll be back next week with more Hear This.
