IN THE SEPTEMBER ISSUE

• Book of the Month: Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson
• Our Fiction Picks
• Our Non-Fiction Picks
• Our Childrens Picks
• Jonathan Franzen on the cover of TIME
• Q & A with teenage debut novelist Steph Bowe

BOOK OF THE MONTH

Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson

It was a  day like any other day for security chief Tracy Waterhouse, until she makes a purchase she hadn't bargained for.  Suddenly her world is turned upside down, with fear and danger at every turn.  However her Faustian exchange is witnessed by an elderly actress teetering on disaster, as well as Jackson Brodie, who has just returned to his home County...

Kate Atkinson dovetails and counterpoints her plot with Dickensian brilliance, in a book filled with wit, wisdom and a fierce moral intelligence.  Visit her website at http://www.kateatkinson.co.uk.

OUR FICTION PICK NO. 1

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

In his first novel since The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen has given us an epic of contemporary love and marriage. In charting the mistakes and joys of Freedom's intensely realised characters, and the changing fortunes of the Berglund family, Franzen has produced an indelible and deeply moving portrait of our time.

Click here to read an extract.

"His writing has an unshowy, almost egoless perfection.  It does not call attention to itself or the guy who wrote it.  It calles attention to the thing it's calling attention to".  Lev Grossman, TIME (see below).

OUR FICTION PICK NO. 2 

Lights Out In Wonderland by DBC Pierre

Taking in London, Tokyo and Berlin, Lights Out In Wonderland documents Gabriel Brockwell's remarkable pursuit of pleasure.  His global adventure includes a spell in rehab, a near-death experience with fugu ovaries, a sexual encounter with an octopus, and finally an orgiastic feast in the bowels of Berlin's majestic Tempelhof Airport. Along the way we see a character disintegrate and re-shape before our eyes.

DBC Pierre won the 2003 Man Booker Prize for his first novel, Vernon God Litle.  Click here to read an extract of his new novel.
 

OUR NON-FICTION PICK NO. 1

Atlantic: A Vast Ocean of a Million Storiesby Simon Winchester

In a narrative tour de force Simon Winchester dramatises the life of the Atlantic Ocean, from its birth in the farther recesses of geological time to its eventual extinction millions of years in the future. He brings to life key episodes in its history  - the age of exploration and the subsequent colonisation of the Americas; the flourishing of transatlantic commerce and the rise and fall of the slave trade; and the great naval battles that have left an indelible imprint on Atlantic history.

At the core of Simon Winchester's remarkable book is the story of mankind's complex relationship with this immense sea, which stretches for 9,000 miles from the North to the South Pole.

Click here to read an extract.

OUR NON-FICTION PICK NO. 2

Power Shift: Australia's Future Between Washington and Beijing: Quarterly Essay 39 by Hugh White

As the power balance shifts and China's influence grows, what might this mean for Australia?  Will China wield its power differently from the US? How do we define the national interest in the Asian Century? 

In this visionary essay Hugh White considers the shape of the world to come and the implications for Australia, as it seeks to carve out a place in a new world order.

OUR NON-FICTION PICK NO. 3

The Tiger by John Vaillant

"In 1997, deep in the remote Russian backcountry, a gigantic Amur tiger begins acting like the only thing more savage than a wild animal--us. It doesn’t just attack villagers; it hunts them, picking its targets like a hitman with a contract, at one point even dragging a mattress out of a shack so it can lie comfortably in wait until the woodsman returns home. A few days later, the woodsman’s horrified friends discover remains “so small and so few they could have fit in a shirt pocket.”

Vaillant is as masterful with science as he is with suspense. We feel what it’s like to be in a tiny settlement cut off from the rest of the world, at the mercy of a beast so swift that it can’t be seen until its mouth bites down on your face. Tigers, Vaillant explains, are nature’s last word in mammalian weapons design."  Christopher McDougall, author of Born To Run and former war correspondent for Associated Press.

Click here to learn more about the Siberian tiger.

OUR CHILDRENS PICK NO. 1

The Very Bad Book by Andy Griffiths, illustrated by Terry Denton

... in a very bad room there was a very bad cupboard.
And in that very bad cupboard there was a very bad shelf.
And on that very bad shelf there was a very bad box.
And in that very bad box there was a VERY BAD BOOK...
AND THIS IS IT!!!

Andy Griffiths and Terry Denton are a creative partnership that began with Just Tricking! in 1997 and now extends to seven Just books.

Watch the trailer for the book at http://andygriffiths.com.au/books/theverybadbook.

OUR CHILDREN'S PICK NO. 2

Trash by Andy Mulligan

Raphael lives on a dumpsite. He spends his days wading through mountains of steaming trash, ssorting it, breathing it, sleeping next to it.  Then one day his world turns upside down. A small leather bag falls into his hands. It’s a bag of clues, a bag of hope. It’s a bag that will change everything.

Soon Raphael and his friends Gardo and Rat are running for their lives. Wanted by the police, it takes all their quick-thinking, fast-talking to stay ahead. As the net tightens, they uncover a dead man’s mission to put right a terrible wrong.

Read more at http://www.thebookseller.com/news/102063-fickling-signs-trash-from-andy-mulligan.html.

JONATHAN FRANZEN ON THE COVER OF TIME

It is not often that TIME puts an author on the cover.  But this month Jonathan Franzen joins the company of past author covers including Salinger, Nabokov, Morrison, Joyce and Updike.

Here are several quotes from the article:

“The Corrections, published in 2001, was the literary phenomenon of the decade.  Like The Corrections, (Freedom) is the story of an American family, told with extraordinary power and richness”.

“In a lot of ways, Freedom looks more like a 19th century novel than a 21st century one.  The trend in fiction over the past decade has been toward specialization:  the close-up, the miniature, the microcosm.... (These novels) zoomed in deep, exploring subcultures, individual voices, specific ethnic communities.  Franzen skipped that trend.  He remains a devotee of the wide shot, the all-embracing, way-we-live now novel.  In a sense he’s a throwback, practically a Victorian.  His characters aren’t jewel thieves or geniuses…. Freedom isn’t about a subculture; its about the culture.” 

“Freedom is not the kind of Great American Novel that Franzen’s predecessors wrote- not the kind Bellow and Mailer and Updike wrote.  The American scene is just too complex – and too aware of its own complexity to loom that large ever again.  But Freedom feels big in a different way, a way that not much other American fiction does right now.  It doesn’t back down from complexity.  To borrow a term from the visual arts, Franzen’s writing has an enviable depth of field: it keeps a great deal in focus simultaneously.”

Q & A with teenage debut novelist Steph Bowe, author of  Girl Saves Boy

Steph Bowe was born in 1994 and lives in Melbourne. She writes a blog called Hey! Teenager of the Year (http://heyteenager.blogspot.com). Girl saves Boy is her first novel. She does not condone the theft of garden gnomes.

1. You run a blog (Hey! Teenager of the Year) that is enormously popular in YA circles. How did you first get into blogging and where does your material come from?

I loved reading and writing, but I didn't have many friends who shared my Interest—and half the fun of reading is discussing books. Starting a blog seemed like a good way to connect with other readers and writers—I read a few author blogs, but I hadn't yet discovered the massive number of YA blogs out there. I think had I been born ten or twenty years earlier, the things I've achieved with my writing wouldn't have happened without the knowledge I've learnt and contacts I've made online. Everyone's always complaining about how evil the internet is, but there's a lot of potential for positive experiences there.

Read the full Q & A here.