Kate Grenville’s return to the territory of The Secret River is historical fiction turned inside out, a stunning sleight of hand by one of Australia’s most original writers.
A ROOM MADE OF LEAVES
by Kate Grenville
Text Publishing, July 2020 (voir catalogue)
What if Elizabeth Macarthur—wife of the notorious John Macarthur, wool baron in the earliest days of Sydney—had written a shockingly frank secret memoir? And what if novelist Kate Grenville had miraculously found and published it? That’s the starting point for A Room Made of Leaves, a playful dance of possibilities between the real and the invented.
Marriage to a ruthless bully, the impulses of her heart, the search for power in a society that gave women none: this Elizabeth Macarthur manages her complicated life with spirit and passion, cunning and sly wit. Her memoir lets us hear—at last!—what one of those seemingly demure women from history might really have thought. At the centre of A Room Made of Leaves is one of the most toxic issues of our own age: the seductive appeal of false stories. This book may be set in the past, but it’s just as much about the present, where secrets and lies have the dangerous power to shape reality.
Kate Grenville is one of Australia’s most celebrated writers. Her international bestseller The Secret River was awarded local and overseas prizes, has been adapted for the stage and as an acclaimed television miniseries, and is now a much-loved classic. Grenville’s other novels include Sarah Thornhill, The Lieutenant, Dark Places and the Orange Prize winner The Idea of Perfection. In 2017 Grenville was awarded the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature. She lives in Melbourne.
THE RED ARROW follows an unnamed narrator, a failed novelist deeply in debt to his publisher, on a high-speed train from Rome to Modena, where he is desperate to find the famous Italian physicist whose memoir he’s been ghostwriting, and an whose disappearance in the middle of the project has threatened the narrator and his newly formed family with financial ruin. Moving swiftly and seamlessly through his past—including a chemical spill in West Virginia, a failed New York art career, psychedelic therapy in California, and a luxury beach resort in Sicily—THE RED ARROW contains multitudes: it is at once one of the most authentic descriptions of the experience of depression I’ve ever read, and a joyously earnest celebration of freedom from the toxic power of the ego; a spiraling meditation on time, memory, and the nature of the self; and a novel with the ineffable mystery of a poem, one whose originality lies in admitting that it’s not original at all. For we are each just a cloud of quotations with no fixed center—or, as the Physicist might put it, we are nothing more than interactions, like subatomic particles—and when we’re finally able to let go of the fiction of our discrete selves, all that is left is love.
Anna Obata is a biracial teenager living in economically depressed Southern Japan just before the millennium. Left to fend for herself (and to look after her increasingly senile Grandfather) Anna copes with her devastating loneliness by calling upon her strongest inner resource: imagination. This is the story of girl who falls in love with a satellite, yes—but it is also the story of how the human mind attempts to repair itself, no matter the cost, no matter the odds. Told in alternating perspectives by Anna, the satellite, and several others, SATELLITE LOVE is exquisitely strange and refreshingly unconventional.
Eury comes to the Bronx as a girl haunted. Haunted by losing everything in Hurricane Maria–and by an evil spirit, Ato. She fully expects the tragedy that befell her and her family in Puerto Rico to catch up with her in New York. Yet, for a time, she can almost set this fear aside, because there’s this boy . . . Pheus is a golden-voiced, bachata-singing charmer, ready to spend the summer on the beach with his friends, serenading his on-again, off-again flame. That changes when he meets Eury. All he wants is to put a smile on her face and fight off her demons. But some dangers are too powerful for even the strongest love, and as the world threatens to tear them apart, Eury and Pheus must fight for each other and their lives. Featuring contemporary Afro-Latinx characters, this retelling of the Greek myth Orpheus and Eurydice is perfect for fans of Ibi Zoboi’s Pride and Daniel José Older’s Shadowshaper.