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 …
Gulliver’s Wife
by Lauren Chater
I loved Lauren Chater’s debut novel, The Lace Weaver, which was set in Estonia during World War II, and so I was looking forward to seeing what she did next. Gulliver’s Wife is very different, being set in London in the early 18th century. It tells the story of the famous hero of Gulliver’s Travels, an epic satirical novel by Jonathon Swift published in 1726–except that the story is told from the point of his wife, left at home to care for his family.
I love this premise so much. Women are so invisible in early fiction. The man goes off, has adventures, sees the world, learns what he needs to make his life a triumph. The meek little wife stays home and … does what? The implication is, nothing important.
In this novel by Lauren Chater, it is the women’s stories that matter. The narrative moves between the points of view of Mary Gulliver and her teenage daughter, Bess. They both think Gulliver is dead. Mary is quietly relieved, for he was always a feckless dreamer. She sets out to rebuild a new life for herself and her family. She is a trained midwife, and it is this work which will support and sustain them through the financial mess her husband left behind. Bess, however, adored her father. Her grief for him is overwhelming. She blames her mother Mary for driving him away, and wishes he would come back and fulfil his promise of taking her adventuring with him.
Then Gulliver turns up, full of strange tales of wondrous lands. Is he telling the truth, or is he mad?
From this intriguing beginning, Lauren Chater waves a fascinating story of London in the early 1700s. Vivid and immersive, the story is driven by the tension between truth and lies, sanity and madness, love and duty. I particularly loved the sub-plot of the midwives’ struggle to be allowed to continue with their work at a time when male surgeons sought to replace them with forceps. Highly recommended.
Buy it here
Daffodil: Biography of a Flower
by Helen O’Neill
I love books which draw together science, art, myth and poetry to illuminate the history of a single object or item. It’s a way to learn about something in depth, and nearly always the book itself is an artefact of beauty.
This is exactly the case with Daffodil: Biography of a Flower by Australian author Helen O’Neill. She examines the history of the daffodil, from the ancient Greek myth of Narcissus and Echo to its most recent life as the international motif for cancer research. Nearly every page is decorated with the most exquisite art and photographs, and the chapters are short and easily digested.
This is the kind of book you can dip in and out of at will, learning something fascinating on every page and sharing tidbits with your friends. A really lovely little book.
Buy it here
Blackberry & Wild Rose
by Sonia Velton
I was mainly drawn to this book because of the beauty of its cover, and because I knew it was set amongst silk-weavers in London in the 18th century, one of my favourite historical periods.
It tells the story of two young women.
Sara Kemp is tricked into prostitution shortly after her arrival in London. One day she is seen by Esther Thorel, the English wife of a French Huguenot silk weaver, who decides to rescue her. The lives of the two women are then spun together with threads as delicate and yet as strong as silk.
The chapters are short, vivid, and powerful, alternating between the voices of the two women. Esther’s marriage is cold. All she wants is to create beautiful designs to be woven in silk, but her husband will not allow a woman such a significant creative role. She must try and learn in secret, and is helped by a young journeyman weaver. Sara, meanwhile, falls in love.
What follows is betrayal, heartbreak, murder, and tragedy. I found it absolutely riveting.
Buy it here
The Song of Achilles
by Madeline Miller
I love Greek myths, and studied the two great Homeric poems The Iliad and The Odyssey at uni. All I really remember about Achilles, though, was that he was a great hero of the Trojan war, and supposedly invulnerable except for one tiny weak spot–his heel. This is because his mother dipped him in the Styx, the river that separates the land of the dead from the land of the living, when he was only a baby. The only part of his body that remained dry was his heel, which was clasped in her hand. He was later killed by being shot in this heel by a poisoned arrow.
Anyway, I wanted to read this book not because of any great desire to know more about Achilles, but because I had loved Madeline Miller’s novel Circe so much. I found The Song of Achilles just as compelling, powerful and moving (well, almost! Circe is very hard to beat).
Basically, this is a gay love story. It is told from the point-of-view of Achilles’s best friend, Patroclus, beginning when they are only boys and ending with the great, gory, tragic Trojan Wars. Do not be afraid if you do not know much about Troy, or The Iliad, or ancient Greece. You do not need to. Madeline Miller’s greatness lies in her ability to take these ancient stories of love and war and gods and heroes, and make them real and immediate.
I don’t want to reveal too much of the plot, as it’s impossible to do so without spoiling this heart-breaking and beautiful story. All I really need to say is that Madeline Miller has vaulted into the upper regions of my most beloved authors of all time. I will buy anything she writes, the moment it is published.
Buy it here
Agnes Grey
by Anne Brontë
A long-time lover of the works of the Brontë sisters, I am ashamed to admit I had never read Agnes Grey before. I don’t know why. I have a beautiful hardcover Folio set of their collected works, and most of them are well-thumbed and even tattered.
I re-read The Tenant of Wildfell Hall last year, and that reanimated my interest in the youngest and less well-known Brontë sisters. I determined to read her first book this year and have at last managed to do so.
It’s only a slim book, and was inspired by Anne Brontë’s true experiences working as a governess in the early 19th century. The heroine Agnes is young and idealistic, and sets out to help her family by trying to bring in some income. Her first position is caring for a handful of cruel, tyrannical children whose parents never punish them for anything wrong that they do (including killing baby birds with a stone). Her second position is as governess to two rich, spoilt young ladies who almost undermine Agnes’s own chance of happiness out of spite. It’s delicate, haunting, and sad, for–although Agnes finds happiness at the end–we know that poor Anne died tragically young and without knowing her work would end up being so celebrated.
Buy it here
Josephine’s Garden
by Stephanie Parkyn
When I was writing my novel The Wild Girl, which is set during the Napoleonic wars, I read a great deal about Empress Joséphine. She’s a fascinating woman. Born in Martinique and called Rose, her family was wealthy and owned a sugarcane plantation worked by slaves. She was sent to France as a teenager to marry a young aristocrat she had never met. Although they had two children together, Eugène and Hortense de Beauharnais, the marriage was desperately unhappy.
During the French Revolution, Rose and her husband were arrested, and he was guillotined. Rose was freed five days later, only hours before her own execution. She managed to survive as a mistress to rich and powerful men, and married the young general Napoléon Bonaparte, who ultimately crowed himself Emperor. It was he who insisted on her being called Joséphine, a name she never much liked.
Rose bought the Château de Malmaison in April 1799, when Napoléon was away fighting in Egypt, and spent a fortune restoring it. She lavished particular attention on its gardens, which she wanted to be the ‘the most beautiful and curious … in Europe’. Her rose garden was particularly exquisite (hence my interest in it), and I actually grow a sweet-scented, multi-petalled pale pink rose named ‘Souvenir de la Malmaison’ in my garden.
I tell you all this as a kind of background for Stephanie Parkyn’s new book, which is centred on this beautiful, exotic and very expensive garden. It begins with Rose’s release from prison and ends with her finding peace there in her later years, divorced and abandoned by the emperor.
Because I know her story so well, I was not expecting any surprises, but Stephanie Parkyn has woven a luminous, enthralling tale of love, treachery, treason and friendship out of the Empress Joséphine’s life that is full of unexpected twists and turns.
Buy it here
The Blue
by Nancy Bilyeau
In eighteenth century London, porcelain is highly valued because of its delicacy, transparency and strength. Yet the world’s most sought-after porcelain is manufactured in France, and English porcelain makers will do anything they can to compete.
Genevieve Planché, an English-born descendant of French Huguenot refugees, wants to be an artist, but such a dream is impossible for a young woman in England at that time. So when she meets a rich and charming man named Sir Gabriel Courtenay, who offers to send her to Venice to learn oil painting from the masters, she is seriously tempted. There’s just one catch. He wants her to spy for him. An English porcelain factory is said to have cracked the secret of firing the most astonishing cobalt-blue colour, and Sir Gabriel wants to know how.
The book races along at a cracking pace, as Genevieve faces danger after danger in her quest to find out the secret of the colour blue. Not least of all is the danger to her heart …
A hugely enjoyable historical spy-adventure, The Blue also taught me a lot I didn’t know about the porcelain industry and the history of my favourite colour.
Buy it here
Kate Forsyth
Kate Forsyth wrote her first novel aged seven and has now sold more than a million books worldwide. Her new novel, The Blue Rose, is inspired by the true story of the quest for a blood-red rose, moving between Imperial China and France during the ‘Terror’ of the French Revolution. Other novels for adults include Beauty in Thorns, a Pre-Raphaelite reimagining of Sleeping Beauty, Bitter Greens, which won the 2015 American Library Association award for Best Historical Fiction; and The Beast’s Garden, a stunning retelling of the Grimms’ Beauty and The Beast set in Nazi Germany.
Kate’s books for children include the collection of feminist fairy-tale retellings, Vasilisa the Wise & Other Tales of Brave Young Women, illustrated by Lorena Carrington, and the fantasy series The Impossible Quest. 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 France during 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 Belisama-sur-le-Lac in Brittany, for her father, the Marquis de Ravoisier, 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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