Be ready to swoon! October will have you in raptures over these new titles.

October marks the beginning of the festive season in publishing land, which means a crazy number of big-hitting titles. Here's three that punch above their weight.

Oct 05, 2024

Well hello lovely,

I sit down to write this introduction as the very last part of the newsletter, as in, after I’ve written the rest. It’s a very long newsletter this month so I want to quickly tell you that you if you see the message "View entire message" in this email, click on it to read the entire post in your email app. There, housekeeping done!

It’s long because I have been reading a lot. Partly because the craziness that has been 2024 continues to play tricks on me. I find reading a balm in troubled times and a welcome distraction from reality. But also, as a writer, and I’m sure I’ve said this a million times before, I like reading other people’s finished works. Especially if they also happen to be writers I count as friends. So this month, you are in for a treat. In my humble, unbiased (?) opinion, all three books featured in Books to Love are not only wonderful but they are written by extraordinarily talented people.

The editing on my next book continues on… and on…and on. I’ve started a tapestry project, or rather I’m actually finishing a tapestry project as this is the final one in a set of artichoke hearts based on a William Morris design. Embarrassingly, I started this project in something like 1999?? The plan is to turn them into soft squidgy throw cushions for a new couch. The upside, is that I have been listening to audiobooks!! You may not find this extraordinary but it’s new to me. And, naturally, I have some thoughts about it.

Last month, I had a wonderful time as a guest at Goulburn Library’s BookFest! I shared a stage with Inga Simpson as we talked about her new novel, The Thinning, and our writing processes. Then, in the afternoon, I presented a workshop on structuring your novel. If you would like me to present this workshop at your local library in 2025, make sure you ask the librarian who is in charge of events. It’s lots of fun. I also got to catch up with two Kates, Grenville and Forsyth, plus had a proper chat with Nikki Gemmell and I met…drumroll please…the legendary Mem Fox. Now that was a real fan moment right there!

I’m looking forward to leading a panel discussion of debut authors at Berry Writers Festival at the end of October. Plus spending the entire weekend at the festival itself. If you’re going too, please come and say hello.

Now, time to talk books.

Behind the Scenes

Ah certainty, my dearest and most unreliable companion. Again, I was confident I would be finished the edits by this newsletter. Surely! Again, I was wrong. In my defense, 2024 has been the year of curve balls. It’s not like I haven’t wanted to finish editing, have not railed against the never-ending series of life events that have demanded immediate and urgent attention. But, by their very nature, they were and are immediate and urgent, and thus my time has been prioritised accordingly.

Enough of the excuses. The dog may not have eaten my homework but the cat has sat on the pages on too many occasions to recount. Not to mention sitting on the keyboard, batting my array of coloured markers to the floor or demanding to be strung around my neck like an old-fashioned fox stole. Or perhaps not, as that infers he was elegantly draped around my shoulders rather than hung from my neck. More albatross than fox. As you can see from this photo of him “reading”, he is no lightweight! (And has a limited attention span. Diving, Falling is a very good book!)

As of today, I am a shade over two-thirds of the way through the edits. I have 115 pages to go. And they’re important pages because, by now, having gripped you with my clever plotting and delightful characters (I hope!) you will be desperate to know how the story ends. Stay with me, my friend. Let’s see if I can present you with a fait accompli in the final newsletter in December.

And just to buoy your sense of excitement, a quick addendum to say that there has been movement on the TV production of The Dressmakers of Yarrandarrah Prison. I can’t tell you anymore at this point except it’s a few steps closer to being a reality. Perhaps I’ll be able to be less coy by the December newsletter. Needless to say, I’m excited.

Books to Love

As I said, I have read a lot these past two months. As we hurtle towards Christmas, publishers are bringing out their big guns. Many of the top authors have titles released so that you and I have plenty to read over the summer. I’ve picked three to add to your TBR.

Rapture by Emily Maguire

Mainz, 821. Motherless Agnes is the wildly intelligent daughter of the English Priest, ‘personal friend and confidant to the Archbishop … a man of both influence and wealth.’ At the age of five, she likes nothing better than to hide beneath the dining table as her father plays host to men of power and influence as they discuss politics, God and matters of the day in the shadows of the abbey that graces the hill above the city.

She is named not for her pagan mother who died birthing her but for Saint Agnes who was burnt at the stake and stabbed in the throat for refusing to lay with the men who wanted their way with her. Our Agnes can read and this gift allows her a world of freedom within her father’s walls. Books, religious texts, maps and history are all hers to devour. The forest becomes the place where she forms her views of what it is to live and die. By the time she is twelve, her father has decided it is time to think of marriage. Agnes has other ideas, only reinforced by witnessing the excruciating labour and death of a mother and her newborn infant. Marriage, the bloody business of childbirth are not for her. God, it seems, hears her fervent prayers to save her from such a fate. And, in doing so, changes the course of Agnes’ life.

Emily Maguire has taken the story of the first and only female pope, Pope Joan, and spun a wondrous tale of how that might have happened. What kind of woman must Joan have been and how did she ascend to arguably the very pinnacle of power without ever being unmasked. More than that, in Rapture, it’s as if everything Maguire has written before has come to bear — from her essays and non-fiction on gender and sexual politics to female empowerment and the exploration of the same through fiction, such as An Isolated Incident and her previous bestseller, Love Objects. In Rapture, Maguire explores the tension between what we are given, what is expected of us and how, if at all, we can forge our own paths. And, of course, at what cost. As with all her writing, Rapture brims with passion, fierceness, sensitivity and grace—much like the writer herself.

In a recent edition of the Guardian, fellow Australian author, Charlotte Wood, currently shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize for her novel Stone Yard Devotional, cited Rapture as a novel ‘soon to scorch the UK and Australian publishing scenes.’ With echoes of Lauren Groff’s Matrix and reminders of the work of Isabel Allende, Rapture is a breathtakingly good novel destined for great things.

If you happen to be free in the evening of Thursday, 5 December, lucky me will be in conversation with the delightful Emily Maguire at Goulburn Mulwaree Library. See Upcoming Events below for booking details.

Cherrywood by Jock Serong

Edinburgh, 1926. Thomas Wrenfether has become a rich Scottish industrialist largely by default having inherited his good name and wealth after his parents died in an unfortunate and entirely avoidable motor car accident. He has a lovely, intelligent wife, and a daughter, but also a sense that he personally has not made his mark on the world. When a somewhat dubious business colleague suggests a scheme to build a paddlesteamer to cross Port Philip Bay in the booming town of Melbourne, Thomas seizes upon it. This is exactly the kind of project to fire his imagination. The one oddity is that the colleague insists that the ship shall be built out of the cherrywood he has stockpiled for quite some time rather than the usual timber used for boat-building. With no experience in such matters whatsoever, Thomas is deaf to the warnings and superstitions that the timber brings forth — unexplained accidents and strange goings on. Thus, naively, he embarks on a project that will irrevocably change his fortunes.

Melbourne, 1993: Martha works for an establishment law firm. She is very clever and a valuable employee. She asks time and again for a move into human rights law but when an ambitious young male colleague sets up a new department, Martha is forced to work in corporate litigation defending tobacco companies and asbestos miners and the like. Lonely, dissatisfied and isolated, one night she stops at a strange pub in Fitzroy to buy a bottle of wine. Behind the counter is a compelling young man. A strange old lady scuttles from room to room. There are hardly any patrons. And the building is the oddest design she’s ever seen. Not like a pub at all. And stranger still, when Martha goes back to the pub the following night, it’s disappeared.

In Cherrywood, Jock Serong has woven a story of many different magical elements. It’s historical and contemporary. It has the beating heart of romance and adventure. It is playful yet also has serious themes about legacy, reinvention, and being one’s authentic self. It is populated with characters you want to know. And it’s gently funny. It’s also almost impossible to talk about without destroying the magic awaiting the first time reader!

What is interesting is that it is quite unlike his hilariously razor-sharp The Rules of Backyard Cricket. It is not a dark or biting social commentary as is On the Java Ridge. Cherrywood feels like it might have begun as an idea when Serong was researching his historical trilogy, starting with Preservation. What is true, however, is that Cherrywood has the same magical storytelling quality of the classic Australian novel Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey. Other reviewers have cited Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. It’s also worth considering Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land. All this adds up to say that Serong is a writer who continues to surprise, charm and delight. Suffice to say, Serong is one of the gifted writers published today. Cherrywood will draw you in and won’t let you go, just like the pub itself.

The Thinning by Inga Simpson

Teenager Fin has grown up as the child of an astronomer and an astro-photographer, spending many hours embedded in the ancient lands that surround the observatory in the far north-west of New South Wales. But her wild childhood was completely changed under the twin threats of human politics and human greed. Now she lives with her mother, Dinella, and outlaws like them, hidden in those same forests that seem to stretch to eternity, as infinite as the night sky above. Except, the environment and the diversity of species that live within it, faces an accelerating destruction thanks to the human need to conquer and rule — having already ruined our planet, we seek to colonise the skies.

Fin, accompanied by a reluctant Terry, a child of the new breed of evolved humans called Incompletes, must undertake a perilous journey to play a pivotal role to realise the grand ambition her mother has been working towards for years. For Dinella and her fellow rogue scientists have a plan. The last possible ditch effort to restore the natural order, to redress the worst of human excess, before the future of all life on this planet, ours included, is extinguished.

Inga Simpson is renowned as possibly the most outstanding contemporary nature writer. Set the challenge of writing a dystopian work of fiction that addresses the degradation of our natural environment, she came up with The Thinning, a pacy psychological thriller. Reading Simpson’s prose is to be immersed in the natural world, to smell it, see it, and feel its powerful history. It’s an extraordinary talent in and of itself but when paired with her storytelling skills, she takes you, the reader, on a journey that makes you feel a part of this world, and to feel the sense of urgency within the characters. The title, The Thinning, references ‘The Great Thinning’ which Simpson describes as ‘the rapid loss of abundance and diversity of plant and animal species, and the impacts of that for humans—including on our language and imagination.’ Her care and attention, her love, of the Australian natural landscape, is central to all her writing. Read it because you love stories set in a richly realised Australian landscape. Read it because you love a psychological thriller or read it because you just love great writing. The Thinning is a stand-out read on any score.

Audiobooks to Adore

I am VERY late to this party but I have just discovered audiobooks. I know, I know. What rock have I been under? Even more shameful because two of my books are available on audiobook and I have never even listened to them! However, thanks to picking up my tapestry project over the past few months, I have become a convert. Even better, all of the titles featured were free, thanks to the ABC Listen app and my local library, Shoalhaven Libraries. If you are looking for well-narrated (because doesn’t that make the world of difference to the experience?) excellent works, here are three I enjoyed. Consider it part of a new, occasional, segment.

Wifedom by Anna Funder

If you been subscribing to this newsletter for a while, you already know that Wifedom was my number one read of 2023. However, I was curious to listen to it as well. So I did. Again my ire was raised by the unfairness heaped upon Eileen Blair, the wife of Eric Blair aka George Orwell, and the tragedy of her life cut way too short. At the way men rely on women’s work to free them to do whatever they want in their lives. To claim credit for work that is not theirs. And worst still, how little that has changed between Eileen Blair’s life and today.

Here’s the blurb from the publisher’s website:

Looking for wonder and some reprieve from the everyday, Anna Funder slips into the pages of her hero George Orwell. As she watches him create his writing self, she tries to remember her own…When she uncovers his forgotten wife, it’s a revelation. Eileen O’Shaughnessy’s literary brilliance shaped Orwell’s work and her practical nous saved his life. But why – and how – was she written out of the story?

Using newly discovered letters from Eileen to her best friend, Funder recreates the Orwells’ marriage, through the Spanish Civil War and WW II in London. As she rolls up the screen concealing Orwell’s private life she is led to question what it takes to be a writer – and what it is to be a wife.

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka

When this book won the 2022 Booker Prize, I was keen to read it. But, you know, so many books, so little time. Brilliantly narrated by actor and musician, Shivantha Wijesinha, himself of an Oxford/ Sri Lankan background, I felt that I probably got more out of having this deliciously dark, hilarious and complex story than if I’d read it myself.

Here’s the blurb from the publisher’s website:

Colombo, 1990. Maali Almeida, war photographer, gambler and closet queen, has woken up dead in what seems like a celestial visa office. His dismembered body is sinking in the serene Beira lake and he has no idea who killed him. At a time where scores are settled by death squads, suicide bombers and hired goons, the list of suspects is depressingly long, as the ghouls and ghosts with grudges who cluster round can attest. But even in the afterlife, time is running out for Maali. He has seven moons to try and contact the man and woman he loves most and lead them to a hidden cache of photos that will rock Sri Lanka.

The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece by Tom Hanks

To be frank, I listened to this simply because a) I love Tom Hanks voice and he narrates it (mostly) and b) I actually thought it was going to be a memoir. Imagination my confusion, some way into the audiobook, when it dawned on me that this was a novel. Such an idiot! I loved this story. Although I don’t think it’s very fair that Tom Hanks wrote a really entertaining, complex, and neatly structured novel. Does that man need any more feathers to his bow? I also love that there are many actors apart from Mr Hanks who are telling it.

Here's the blurb from the publisher’s website:

A wildly ambitious story of the making of a colossal, star-studded, multimillion-dollar superhero action film, and the humble comic book that inspired it all. Spanning eighty years and culminating in the opening of a film, we meet a cast of characters including a troubled soldier, a young boy with an artistic gift, an inspired and eccentric director, a pompous film star on the rise, a tireless production assistant and countless film crew members who together create Hollywood magic.

Funny, touching, and wonderfully thought-provoking, The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece offers an insider's take on the momentous efforts it takes to make a film. At once a reflection on America's past and present, on the world of show business and the real world we all live in.

Upcoming Events

Berry Writers Festival

New Voices of the South Coast: A Showcase for Traditionally Published Debut Writers

Sunday 27 October 2024, 11am to 12.15pm

Berry Courthouse

Free event: Find all the details here

How do authors approach traditional publishers and get their manuscript accepted? What happens next? Five debut authors introduce their books and discuss what the publishing process is like with a traditional publishing house. Join me as I host a panel discussion with Siobhan O’Brien, Maxine Faxcett, Kell Woods, Jodi Lamanna and Mitch Jennings.

Emily Maguire in Conversation

Goulburn Mulwaree Library

Thursday 5 December 2024, 6pm to 7.30pm

BOOKINGS ESSENTIAL: Tickets will be open for bookings on November 5. Cost is $5 and includes drinks, nibbles, book sales and author signing. Booking details here

Join us for an in-conversation with Emily Maguire, multi award-winning author of Love Objects and The Isolated Incident. Inspired by the fabled Pope Joan, Rapture is a powerful exploration of gender, identity, and faith. For centuries people have argued over the story of a female pope. Catholic cover-up or anti-clerical invention? Feminist icon or symbol of women’s inherent wickedness?

New Voices Down Under

There was no September edition of New Voices Down Under. Why? You can read all my excuses under Behind the Scenes above. I’m so sorry, I do feel guilty, but also exhausted. All I can say is that I plan to do better this month.

The end of the cup

And now, my friend, my cup is empty. Thank you so much for hanging out with me today. I’ll be back in your inbox in December for the last edition of 2024. That means, I will be sharing my favourite reads (and maybe listens) of 2024. Plus my annual success audit, reviews of new releases to tide you over the summer and anything else I can think of. Which may or may not include the news that I have FINALLY finished my edits. Honestly? I can’t bear the thought that we may still be having this conversation in 2025!!

Don’t forget, you can check out updates on events at www.meredithjaffe.com or, why don’t you leave a comment below or drop me a line. I love hearing from you!

Keep well,

Share A Cuppa With Meredith