Kate Forsyth is one of Australia’s most treasured storytellers. On today’s edition of What Katie Read, she gives us the rundown on all of the best books she’s been reading lately …
Wintering
by Krissy Kneen
An eerie, atmospheric, and unsettling book set in modern-day Tasmania, written with a deft touch and beautiful, supple prose. Krissy Kneen takes a story of a young woman locked into a relationship with a charming but controlling man, and twists in touches of the gothic to create something really fresh and unusual.
Jessica Weir is a 30-year-old PhD candidate, studying glow-worms in subterranean caves in Tasmania. She lives with her boyfriend Matthew, who grew up in the small country town where they live and knows everyone. Jessica, however, knows nobody but him. And that should be enough, she keeps telling herself. One day Matthew doesn’t come home from work. His car is abandoned on the edge of the wilderness. His phone shows a video of an encounter with someone … something … on the road. But it’s too dark to be sure. Jessica tries to find out what happened to him, but grief and guilt and loneliness can be unhinging. Because, surely, what Jessica begins to believe has happened could not possibly be true …
Buy it here
A Spell in the Wild
by Alice Tarbuck
I bought this book on impulse, because it had such a pretty cover and I loved the title. It was a wonderful surprise. Alice Tarbuck is a poet, an academic, and a witch. The book is divided into twelve parts, one for each month of the year, and delves into the dark history of witchcraft and the bright practise of spellwork. It’s a beguiling mixture of a warm, intimate, expressive personal voice, and a clear-sighted rigorous examination of the many myths and misunderstandings surrounding witchcraft.
I am very familiar with most of the history she examines, including the Scottish witch trials and King James’s Daeomonologie, but some was new to me and opened up ideas for further reading. And I loved the simplicity and openness in which she spoke about her own quest to find the sacred in the ordinary, every-day world: Magic isn’t somewhere else. It isn’t a series of distant rituals, ancient texts and expensive courses. Magic is turning to the world, and seeing it, and knowing we are indistinguishable from it, in all our embodied, strange, soft and edgeless form. We are in the world and it is in us.
Buy it here
Threads of Life: A History of the World Through the Eye of a Needle
by Clare Hunter
This was such a fascinating read! It was full of thing that chimed with me – the story of the Bayeux tapestry (which I have written about several times on my blog) and Mary, Queen of Scots’ and her exquisite embroidery (she appears in my novel The Puzzle Ring), and embroidery written in secret codes (which I am writing about now) – and I learned so much along the way too. I love to sew (though I do it very badly), and I love the idea of sewing being a subversive art that allows people to express themselves and communicate their feelings in such a simple fundamental way. As Clare Hunter writes: You cut a length of tread, knot one end and the pull the other through the eye of a needle. You take a piece of fabric and push your needle into one side of the cloth and then pull it out on the other … You don’t need expensive tools, or years of training, or a university degree. You just need hands.
You don’t need to love sewing to enjoy this book (though it may make you want to try your hand at it). Because Threads of Life simply takes the history of sewing as a lens to look at human history, with a particular emphasis on sewing as a means of self-expression for the hurt, the maimed, the marginalised, and the powerless. Most (but not all) are women. My only quibble – I would have loved an illustrated copy! But I searched up images on the net as I read, and I loved that as well. A really beautiful, thoughtful book.
Buy it here
The Bull from the Sea
by Mary Renault
I read The King Must Die when I was a teenager, and it made a deep impression on me. It felt so vividly real and strange. I read it again last year, and when I posted my review, someone told me that I must go on and read its sequel, The Bull From the Sea. It’s taken me a while, but at last I picked it up off my shelf and settled down to read it. The two books chronicle the life of the ancient Greek hero, Theseus. The first covers his childhood and his journey to Crete to become a bull-leaper at the palace of Knossos, his affair with Ariadne, the killing of the Minotaur and his return to Athens. The second picks up from from this point:
It was dolphin weather when I sailed into Piraeus with my comrades of the Cretan bull ring. Knossos had fallen, which time out of mind had ruled the seas. The smoke of the burning Labyrinth still clung to our clothes and hair.
The book then follows Theseus through to his old age. The sweep is broad – years are covered in a few paragraphs at times – and so The Bull From the Sea does not have the intensity of focus of The King Must Die. Mary Renault has a gift for narrative drive, though, and so the pace of the book does not flag. Theseus is not altogether a sympathetic protagonist. He can be cruel and careless, and his temper is quick. His attitudes to women leave a lot to be desired as well, though it must be said it was a cruel and misogynist age, and Theseus’ attitudes ring true for the time.
Mary Renault is a really interesting writer, with a powerful gift for bringing the past to pulsing life. Her prose in particular is so muscular and vigorous, so full of freshness and vitality, I can only be in awe. I’m planning on reading more of her work.
Buy it here
Eurydice Street: A Place in Athens
by Sofka Zinovieff
I’ve spent the past few years writing a book set in Crete during World War II. As part of my immersive research process, I have been reading as many books about Greece that I could lay my hands on. This book was recommmended to me by a friend, and I enjoyed it hugely. Sofka Zinovieff married a Greek and moved with him to Athens with their two young daughters. She wants to learn as much about Greek culture, history and way of life as she can, even while despairing of some of the country’s eccentricities – the labyrinthine bureaucractic system, the peculiar hold that religion has on the every day, the lack of punctuality, and so on. She has an engaging writing style, a journalist’s eye for what makes a good story, and an anthropologist’s insight into culture and behaviour. And I always enjoy books about people who move to live somewhere different in the world. I can live vicariously through them!
Buy it here
The Rose Code
by Kate Quinn
Kate Quinn has become one of my favourite writers in the last few years. Her historical novels have strong narrative drive, characters who feel real, and fascinating plot premises. The Rose Code may well be her best book yet, and that’s very high praise indeed as I loved her earlier World War II novels.
It might be because her latest is set amongst female code breakers in Bletchley Park, a subject that has fascinated me for a long time (I actually have a scene set there in my latest work-in-progress!) I’ve always loved secret codes and invisible ink and hidden messages, and so The Rose Code really struck a spark with me.
In brief, the book tells the story of three close friends who work together at the top-secret country estate, the nature of their work kept hidden from anyone outside the facility. Each of the three women are very different, but their friendship is deep and real, forged by the intensity of the war and the difficulty of their tasks. However, something happens to smash their friendship – and one of them ends up committed to a mental asylum. We don’t know what that something is – a large part of the suspense of the novel is wondering what it could possibly be. The story moves back and forth in time, between the early 1940s when the three young women first meet and become friends, to 1947 when the three women are now all enemies and a letter written in secret code arrives saying ‘help me’.
It’s a humdinger of a story! One of the best I’ve read this year.
Buy it here
Kate Forsyth
Kate Forsyth wrote her first novel aged seven and has now sold more than a million books worldwide. Her newest book, co-written with Belinda Murrell, is Searching for Charlotte, which tells the fascinating story of Australia’s first children’s author (and Forsyth’s own distant relation) Charlotte Waring Atkinson. Her novels for adults include The Blue Rose, inspired by the true story of the quest for a blood-red rose during the French Revolution, Beauty in Thorns, a Pre-Raphaelite reimagining of Sleeping Beauty, and Bitter Greens, which won the 2015 American Library Association award for Best Historical Fiction. Kate’s books for children include the fantasy series The Witches of Eileanan.
Named one of Australia’s Favourite 15 Novelists, Kate has a BA in literature, a MA in creative writing and a doctorate in fairy tale studies, and is also an accredited master storyteller with the Australian Guild of Storytellers. She is a direct descendant of Charlotte Waring Atkinson, the author of the first book for children ever published in Australia.
Find out more about Kate Forsyth here.
The Blue Rose
Moving between Imperial China and the ‘Terror’ of the French Revolution and inspired by the true story of the quest for a blood-red rose.
Viviane de Faitaud has grown up alone at the Chateau de Belisima-sur-le-Lac in Brittany. Her father, the Marquis, lives at the court of Louis XVI in Versailles. After a hailstorm destroys the chateau’s orchards, gardens and fields an ambitious young Welshman, David Stronach, accepts the commission to plan the chateau’s new gardens in the hope of making his name as a landscape designer...
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