Notes from Eve Abbey • November 2018

Browse: SUMMER READING 2018 CATALOGUE NEW RELEASES

Rick Morton, journalist on The Australian, has written a searing autobiography about his childhood on an enormous pastoral station in far-west Queensland. Not easy reading but leavened by some very amusing insights.

His violent and tyrannical grandfather passed on his genes throughout the family. Morton now says he is a “middle-class man in a poor boy’s body”. If you want to understand what it is like to be poor in this country read this. It is called One Hundred Years of Dirt.

It is 250 years since Captain Cook set sail from England to enter the Pacific. There is a book which is a companion piece to a TV programme on Foxtel I think. It is called The Pacific in the Wake of Captain Cook with Sam Neill and written by Meaghan Wilson Anastasios.

As I was born in New Zealand and went to a country school with many Maori friends I especially enjoyed the first section. I even have a copy of Cook’s famous map of New Zealand. I might put it up in the shop. It is a very readable book with informative remarks from interested people especially displayed throughout the text as well as excellent colour photographs.

There is a new book from Clare Wright who wrote The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka about the women involved in that famous episode. This new, much larger, book is called You Daughters of Freedom: The Australians Who Won The Vote and Inspired the World. Clare points out that World War I overshadowed the fame of Australia as a progressive reformist nation.

This new book is about the well-travelled activists such as Vida Goldstein, Nellie Martel, Dora Montefiore, Muriel Matters and Dora Meeson-Coates (who painted the famed banner carried in the British Suffragettes’ enormous marches in 1908 and 1911). These Australian women were amongst the leaders in the International movement for votes for women.

Both books are very readable. Here is an historian who can tell a good story!

Robyn Williams, of ABC Radio's The Science Show fame, has just written his autobiography and given it the title Turmoil: Letters from the Brink. Like many of us in the later stages of interesting lives he wonders where the world is heading.

Many of his tales fall into line with the recent upheaval at ABC where management by email or cartoon seemed to have gained the upperhand. He enthusiastically sings the praises of young scientists in Australia and thinks he has had a very lucky life.

You will enjoy, as I did, some stories about famous scientists. The Science Show is on Radio National on Saturday at noon and repeated on Wednesday. Don’t miss it. Thank you Robyn and friends.

I hope you pick up a copy of Abbey’s Christmas catalogue for 2018 which is in-store now. Inside the front cover there is a nice photograph of Abbey’s when we were in the Queen Victoria Building in George Street. Do you remember that comfortable shop? I think we have customers today who came along there with their parents. That was fifty years ago!

Keep well,

Since 1968 ~ Abbey's 131 York Street Sydney ~ An Aladdin's cave for readers

Notes from Eve Abbey • October 2018

NEW RELEASES

I’ve been reading some really good novels, not the latest releases, most especially Ruth Park’s The Harp in the South. What a great writer! You can get Harp in the South at a good price as a Popular Penguin, but the typeface is old fashioned or you can choose The Harp In the South Novels which includes Missus, Harp in the South and Poor Man’s Orange. I’m sure if you have been to the Sydney Theatre Company production you will want to fill it all in. Pure enjoyment.

Photo credit: Daniel Boud





I was also given Steven Carroll’s latest version of T.S.Eliot’s private life in A New England Affair. Steven has made two previous imaginings in The Lost Life or in A World of Other People. All wonderful books. This latest one is so very sad it was hard to read.

I admire greatly the writing of Steven Carroll so must remind you again of the Glenroy series about a suburban family in Melbourne beginning in the Fifties. There are five novels now – the first is The Art of the Engine Driver, so check them out at Abbey’s or in your library. Unique style. Great writing.





Finally I have also enjoyed an expanded edition, of Anthony Hill’s Captain Cook’s Apprentice. It is 250 years since Cook’s momentous voyage into the Pacific , so important to us, so it is a good time to publish the expanded edition of this ripping novel. Isaac Manley, one of the servant boys on board was promoted to Midshipman and later became an Admiral so there will be lots to learn for anyone dreaming of a life at sea – both good and bad.

Keep well,

Since 1968 ~ Abbey's 131 York Street Sydney ~ An Aladdin's cave for readers

Notes from Eve Abbey ~ August 2016

There is a splendid book in the New Releases which will interest all our legal eagle customers and others interested in politics and law.

By Ian Hancock, an Editorial Fellow of the Australian Dictionary of Biography, and published by Federation Press, it is Tom Hughes QC: A Cab on the Rank.

There is a great portrait of him on the cover backing up the description “a lion of the Law”. A meticulous account of Tom’s childhood and his time in England as a Sunderland Pilot during the Second World War is followed by an even more meticulous account of the very many important cases Tom Hughes ran during his long period at the bar from 1952 to 2012 plus tales of political in-fighting when Hughes was Federal Attorney General. His 90th birthday was celebrated by the Bar Association in 2013. “He may be the last of the traditional barrister class but on his own he could draw a crowd, persuade a jury and ensure that judges paid attention”. Of course his other claim to fame is that he is Lucy’s father and thus father-in-law to Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.

An unusual Australian biography is Our Man Elsewhere: In Search of Alan Moorehead by Thornton McCamish. I say unusual because it also includes the activities and reactions of the author who has indeed set out to remind us of a famous Australian author who seems to have gone out of fashion. Alan Moorehead was a journalist par excellence. His first big success was the book he wrote about Gallipoli, reissued recently for the centenary of that battle. He was a famous war correspondent and then later took to travel writing.

He led a very cosmopolitan life, friendly with Hemingway and other writers of the period. Although he did write a few novels they were never the success of his travel stories. Who can forget The White Nile and then The Blue Nile, both with wonderful illustrations in large glossy paperbacks? There was a sad end to his life when he suffered a major stroke which left him unable to speak or write. Today his daughter, Caroline Moorehead, carries on his tradition of finding good true stories to tell-such as Village of Secrets: Defying the Nazis in Vichy France and A Train in Winter: A Story of Resistance, Friendship and Survival at Auschwitz, or Priam’s Gold: Schliemann and the Lost Treasures of Troy, as well as a biography of Freya Stark.

If you like true story adventures we have just the book for you. It is The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare: Churchill’s Mavericks Plotting Hitler’s Defeat by Giles Milton. Despite the real seriousness of these activities, which did indeed help defeat Hitler and the Nazis, I think the people involved, mostly men with double-hyphenated names, with very good mathematical minds, had the time of their lives. They blew up the vital dry dock at St. Nazaire which kept the dangerous warship Tirpitz out of the Atlantic; they blew up viaducts and railways; they parachuted behind the lines and linked up with Partisans, they invented and manufactured all sorts of tricky bombs and special detonators; they worked sixteen hour days and celebrated hard afterwards.
They certainly had Churchill’s gleeful support. A good thing that Giles Milton has written this book so their names won’t be forgotten. Milton’s forte is fossicking around in the sidelines of history to find exciting overlooked adventurers. His most famous book is Nathaniel’s Nutmeg about how Britain came to own New York and lots of other things. A few of his other titles are White Gold, Russian Roulette, Fascinating Footnotes from History and Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922. All of them are entertaining.

I’ve just read a terrific crime novel called The Dry: A Desperate Act in a Small Town with Big Secrets. It is by Melbourne journalist Jane Harper. It is a gripping story, as the title suggests. I hope she will write another one soon. This is a perfect description of a country town sweltering in the heat and trying to decide just who was actually the shooter.

I’ve also taken up the crime stories by Lesley Thomson, in a series called The Detective’s Daughter. These are set in the suburbs of London which are carefully described. Lesley is now referred to as “firmly established as one of our leading crime writers”, so I am pleased for her. Years ago she stayed with me in Manly when she first travelled to Australia. She began her first book sitting under my jacaranda tree. The books are very intelligent and credible. There are four in the series now – the last two are The Detective’s Secret and The House with No Rooms.

Keep well,

Eve

Since 1968 ~ Abbey's 131 York Street Sydney ~ An Aladdin's cave for readers

Book Launch: Novel: Educated Youth by Ye Xin

RSVP: events@abbeys.com.au

A novel that touches the heart for the children left behind.

During the Cultural Revolution over fourteen million Chinese high school graduates were sent from the cities to live and work in the countryside. They were known as zhiqing – ‘educated youth’. They fell in love, married, had children. In the late 1970s the policy changed and they were allowed to return, but not their families. Many jumped at the opportunity, leaving spouses and children behind. Ten years later the children, now teenagers, began to turn up in the cities, looking for their parents.

Ye Xin's novel Educated Youth follows five such children, who have travelled across China from a province in the south west to Shanghai in the east, only to discover that their mothers and fathers have remarried, and have new families, in which there is no room for them. Their reappearance brings out the worst in the parents – their duplicity, greed and self-interest – and the best too, as they struggle to come to terms with their sense of love and duty.

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ABBEY'S BOOKSELLER PICK —— Written in the nineties and only now available to the English language reader, this classic Chinese novel provides yet another example of grand social engineering undertaken by governments, only to be dismantled in years to come, by which time their policies have left a trail of broken families and abandoned children.

This is a warm and rewarding novel with insights into Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution and how the edicts were received and observed (or not) by those it sought to control. A novel that touches the heart for the children left behind. Craig Kirchner

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‘With a mix of popular storytelling, psychological insight and startling candour about his generation, Ye Xin turns a slice of recent Shanghai life into an entertaining, touching novel. It’s great to have a fine English version of this Chinese modern classic.’ Nicholas Jose

Ye Xin was born in Shanghai in October 1949. He was sent to Guizhou Province as a zhiqing in 1969 and worked on the construction of the Hunan-Guizhou railway. His novels include High Sierra in Miaoling, The Ages of Idling Away, Family Education, Love Has No Choice and Shanghai Diary. He has won many awards including the October Prize and the National Prize for Best Novel. He is vice-chairman of the Writers’ Association of China and the Writers’ Association of Shanghai, and director of the Institute of Literature of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences.

Dr Jing Han is the translator of Educated Youth by Ye Xin and she received her PhD degree in English literature from University of Sydney in 1995 and her MA in English and American Literatures from Beijing Foreign Studies University in 1986. Dr Han joined SBS TV in 1996 and she is now the head of SBS Subtitling Department. Over the last 19 years, she has subtitled more than 300 Chinese films and TV programs for the Australian audience including the currently showing TV series If You Are The One. Dr Han also lectures at Western Sydney University, teaching translation studies including audiovisual translation, literary translation and accreditation studies.

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