For the Love of Books hosts Cheryl Akle, Michael Campbell and Lachlan Jobbins discuss The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker, Beneath the Darkening Sky  by Majok Tulba and Floating Gold: The Search of the Ambergris by Christopher Kemp.

The Age of Miracles -  Karen Thompson Walker
On a seemingly ordinary Saturday in a California suburb, Julia and her family awake to discover, along with the rest of the world, that the rotation of the earth has suddenly begun to slow. The days and nights grow longer and longer, gravity is affected, the environment is thrown into disarray. Yet as she struggles to navigate an ever-shifting landscape, Julia is also coping with the normal disasters of everyday life—the fissures in her parents’ marriage, the loss of old friends, the hopeful anguish of first love, the bizarre behavior of her grandfather who, convinced of a government conspiracy, spends his days obsessively cataloging his possessions. As Julia adjusts to the new normal, the slowing inexorably continues.

Beneath the Darkening Sky  – Majok Tulba
When the rebels come to Obinna’s village, they do more than wreak terror for one night. Lining the children up in the middle of the village, they measure them against the height of an AK-47. Those who are shorter than the gun are left behind. Those who are taller are taken. Obinna and his older brother Akot find themselves the rebel army’s newest recruits. But while Akot almost willingly surrenders to the training, Obinna resists, determined not to be warped by the revolution’s slogans and violence. In the face of his vicious captain’s determination to break him, Obinna finds help in a soldier called Priest, and in the power of his own dreams.

Floating Gold: The Search of the Ambergris – Christopher Kemp
Journalist and biologist Christopher Kemp discovers, after reading an odd news report, a hidden world of money, intrigue and amazing wealth. Ambergris is a by-product of sperm whales, used for centuries as a perfume, medicine and aphrodisiac. It appears on beaches all over the world and depending on what state it′s in, can be mistaken for all manner of things. For those in the know, it′s an amazing source of wealth — ambergris trades for US$20 a gram, which is nearly as much as gold but it′s harder to find and it cannot be mined. Traveling from the shores of NZ, to the Smithsonian and New Nedford Whaling museum; he meets amateurs, professional hunters, scientists, elusive vendors who traffic ambergris, people who won′t confess to have found any, and strangers denying what they are looking for.

For the Love of Books hosts Cheryl Akle, Michael Campbell and Lachlan Jobbins discussed Rub out the Words: The Letters of William .S. Burroughs, Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn and Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World by Simon Callow.

Rub out the Words: The Letters of William .S. Burroughs
William S. Burroughs was one of the twentieth century’s most iconoclastic literary and artistic figures, an inimitable writer whose groundbreaking work in novels such as Junky and Naked Lunch forever altered the shape of American culture. Now, in this long anticipated collection, editor Bill Morgan takes readers through Burroughs’ correspondence from the early sixties through the mid-seventies, in more than three hundred letters that document Burroughs’ steady drift away from the Beat circle and that witness an era in which he became the center of a new coterie of creative people who would establish his reputation as an influential artistic and cultural leader beyond the literary world, toward multimedia.

Gone Girl - Gillian Flynn
Just how well can you ever know the person you love? This is the question that Nick Dunne must ask himself on the morning of his fifth wedding anniversary, when his wife Amy suddenly disappears. The police immediately suspect Nick. Amy’s friends reveal that she was afraid of him, that she kept secrets from him. He swears it isn’t true. A police examination of his computer shows strange searches. He says they aren’t his. And then there are the persistent calls on his mobile phone.

Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World – Simon Callow
Two hundred years after his death, Dickens′s work is more popular than ever, in a variety of media, most of them undreamed of during his lifetime. Over the last few decades of intensive research, Dickens the man has become much better known to us, and the sheer originality of his personality blazes forth as never before. Simon Callow explores this extraordinary theatrical core to Dickens in this short life of one of our greatest novelists.

For the Love of Books hosts Cheryl Akle, Michael Campbell and Lachlan Jobbins discuss My Hundred Lovers by Susan Johnson, Canada by Richard Ford and Gold by Chris Cleave.

My Hundred Lovers – Susan Johnson
A woman, on the eve of her fiftieth birthday, reflects on one hundred moments from a lifetime’s sensual adventures. After the love, hatred and despair are done with, the great and trivial acts of her bodily life reveal an imperfect, yet whole self. By turns humorous, sharp, haunting and wise, this is an original and exhilarating novel from one of Australia’s premier writers.

Canada – Richard Ford
In 1956, Dell Parsons’ family came to a stop in Great Falls, Montana, the way many military families did following the war. His father, Bev, was a talkative, plank-shouldered man, an airman from Alabama with an optimistic and easy-scheming nature. Dell and his twin sister, Berner, could easily see why their mother might have been attracted to him. But their mother Neeva – from an educated, immigrant, Jewish family – was shy, artistic and alienated from their father’s small-town world of money scrapes and living on-the-fly. It was more bad instincts and bad luck that Dell’s parents decided to rob the bank. They weren’t reckless people.

Gold – Chris Cleave
Usually, this is where we’d tell you what this book is about. But with Chris Cleave, it’s a bit different. Because if you’ve read THE OTHER HAND or INCENDIARY, you’ll know that what his books are about is only part of the story – what really matters is how they make you feel. GOLD is about the limits of human endurance, both physical and emotional.  It will make you cry. GOLD is about what drives us to succeed – and what we choose to sacrifice for success. It will make you feel glad to be alive. GOLD is about the struggles we all face every day; the conflict between winning on others’ terms, and triumphing on your own. It will make you count your blessings. GOLD is a story told as only Chris Cleave could tell it. And once you begin, it will be a heart-pounding race to the finish.

For the Love of Books hosts Cheryl Akle, Michael Campbell and Lachlan Jobbins discuss My Hundred Lovers by Susan Johnson, Canada by Richard Ford and Gold by Chris Cleave.

My Hundred Lovers – Susan Johnson
A woman, on the eve of her fiftieth birthday, reflects on one hundred moments from a lifetime’s sensual adventures. After the love, hatred and despair are done with, the great and trivial acts of her bodily life reveal an imperfect, yet whole self. By turns humorous, sharp, haunting and wise, this is an original and exhilarating novel from one of Australia’s premier writers.

Canada – Richard Ford
In 1956, Dell Parsons’ family came to a stop in Great Falls, Montana, the way many military families did following the war. His father, Bev, was a talkative, plank-shouldered man, an airman from Alabama with an optimistic and easy-scheming nature. Dell and his twin sister, Berner, could easily see why their mother might have been attracted to him. But their mother Neeva – from an educated, immigrant, Jewish family – was shy, artistic and alienated from their father’s small-town world of money scrapes and living on-the-fly. It was more bad instincts and bad luck that Dell’s parents decided to rob the bank. They weren’t reckless people.

Gold – Chris Cleave
Usually, this is where we’d tell you what this book is about. But with Chris Cleave, it’s a bit different. Because if you’ve read THE OTHER HAND or INCENDIARY, you’ll know that what his books are about is only part of the story – what really matters is how they make you feel. GOLD is about the limits of human endurance, both physical and emotional.  It will make you cry. GOLD is about what drives us to succeed – and what we choose to sacrifice for success. It will make you feel glad to be alive. GOLD is about the struggles we all face every day; the conflict between winning on others’ terms, and triumphing on your own. It will make you count your blessings. GOLD is a story told as only Chris Cleave could tell it. And once you begin, it will be a heart-pounding race to the finish.

This week on For the Love of Books  hosts Cheryl Akle, Michael Campbell and Lachlan Jobbins discussed M.L Stedman’s Light Between the Oceans, Patrick Whites The Hanging Garden and Ian Parkes A Youth Not Wasted.

The Light Between the Oceans – M.L Stedman
1926. Tom Sherbourne is a young lighthouse keeper on a remote island off Western Australia. The only inhabitants of Janus Rock, he and his wife Isabel live a quiet life, cocooned from the rest of the world. One April morning a boat washes ashore carrying a dead man and a crying infant – and the path of the couple’s lives hits an unthinkable crossroads. Only years later do they discover the devastating consequences of the decision they made that day – as the baby’s real story unfolds …

A Youth Not Wasted – Ian Parkes
′People who truly live in the outback listen to it. What they hear, I do not know … What the country says is beyond words.′ In the early 1950s, Australia was riding on the sheep′s back and no-one doubted the wisdom of making a life in the wool industry, certainly not sixteen-year-old Ian Parkes.

The Hanging Garden – Patrick White
Two children are brought to a wild garden on the shores of Sydney Harbour to shelter from the Second World War. The boy’s mother has died in the Blitz. The girl is the daughter of a Sydney woman and a Communist executed in a Greek prison. In wartime Australia, these two children form an extraordinary bond as they negotiate the dangers of life as strangers abandoned on the far side of the world.
If you’re a fan of Patrick White, don’t miss the Sydney Writers Festival as Barbara Mobbs and David Marr speak about the importance of preserving Whites literary legacy.

He later moved into literature, managing the events program for one of Australia’s most loved bookshops and then took up the position of Director of Brisbane Writers Festival for three years. Currently he is working freelance as a writer, events manager, dancer, director and choreographer for companies including Sydney Theatre Company, Opera Australia and Bell Shakespeare Company.

He hosts For the Love of Books alongside Cheryl Akle and Lachlan Jobbins. Find out more about the series.

Join three very different (and very opinionated) book lovers for a weekly book club where the new releases and acclaimed classics are discussed and debated.

Cheryl Akle (Project Director of Get Reading!), Michael Campbell (former Director of Brisbane Writer’s Festival) and Lachlan Jobbins (writer/editor) offer fresh, funny and energetic reviews of literature in Australia and abroad. Meet the hosts.

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