Each episode, we interview authors and ask them to name the best book they’ve read lately on the assumption that we are bound to get the best of the best when it comes to creating our own reading list.
This set of recommended reads comes from authors at the Perth Festival Writers Week, and we have some real humdingers.
Louise Allan, author of The Sisters’ Song, recommended:
The Museum of Modern Love
by Heather Rose
A mesmerising literary novel about a lost man in search of connection – a meditation on love, art and commitment, set against the backdrop of one of the greatest art events in modern history, Marina Abramovic’s The Artist is Present.
Dervla McTiernan, author of The Ruin, recommended:
The Force
by Don Winslow
The acclaimed, award-winning, bestselling author of The Cartel — voted one of the Best Books of the Year by more than 60 publications, including the New York Times — makes his William Morrow debut with a cinematic epic as explosive, powerful, and unforgettable as Mystic River and The Wire.
Sarah Winman, author of Tin Man, recommended:
Lincoln in the Bardo
by George Saunders
In his long-awaited first novel, American master of the shorter form George Saunders delivers his most original, transcendent, and moving work yet. Unfolding in a graveyard over the course of a single night, narrated by a dazzling chorus of voices, Lincoln in the Bardo is a literary experience unlike any other — for no one but Saunders could conceive it.
Di Morrissey, author of The Red Coast,recommended;
Call of the Reed Warbler: A New Agriculture – A New Earth
by Charles Massy
Is it too late to regenerate the earth? Call of Call of the Reed Warbler shows the way forward for the future of our food supply, our Australian landscape and our planet. This ground-breaking book will change the way we think of, farm and grow food. Author and radical farmer Charles Massy explores transformative and regenerative agriculture and the vital connection between our soil and our health. It is a story of how a grassroots revolution – a true underground insurgency – can save the planet, help turn climate change around, and build healthy people and healthy communities, pivoting significantly on our relationship with growing and consuming food.
Heather Rose, author of The Museum of Modern Love, recommended:
Days Without End
by Sebastian Barry
Moving from the plains of Wyoming to Tennessee, Sebastian Barry’s latest work is a masterpiece of atmosphere and language. An intensely poignant story of two men and the makeshift family they create with a young Sioux girl, Winona, Days Without End is a fresh and haunting portrait of the most fateful years in American history and is a novel never to be forgotten.
Ambelin Kwaymullina, author of Catching Teller Crow, recommended:
The Astrologer’s Daughter
by Rebecca Lim
Avicenna Crowe’s mother, Joanne, is an astrologer with uncanny predictive powers and a history of being stalked. Now she is missing.
The police are called, but they’re not asking the right questions. Like why Joanne lied about her past, and what she saw in her stars that made her so afraid.
But Avicenna has inherited her mother’s gift. Finding an unlikely ally in the brooding Simon Thorn, she begins to piece together the mystery.