Margaret Connolly & Associates

Good first review for The Minivers

From The Australian Bookseller & Publisher:

The Minivers: On the Run (Natalie Jane Prior, Puffin, $14.95 pb, ISBN 9780143303664, September)

Rosamund, in her sequinned dress, acknowledges her fans as she arrives at a hotel for her 14th birthday party. What girl reader would not be entranced by this opening scene?

Rosamund and Emily are Minivers, human beings two-feet-tall; they belong to the ruling family of Artemisia, and have everything they could desire. But enemies are plotting against them and even their security guards cannot be trusted.

What is the sinister Madame up to? And why is Rosamund given the mysterious half-key? The adventures proceed at a cracking pace, with kidnapping, escape in a delivery crate and a scary scene at the funfair.

All good nail-biting fun, but a few serious lessons are learned.

‘Minivers may be small, but we’re tough,’ says Emily as she learns to fend for herself. Their loyal retainer Millamant wisely observes ‘the love of people who do not really know you is a fragile thing.’

Readers can heave a sigh of relief at the end, but there is a to-be-continued promise. (I hope Livia the colourful archivist who sleeps in a hammock will reappear).

Prior delivered the goods with the ‘Lily Quench’ fantasy series; The Minivers is sure to find popularity, especially with 9-13-year-old girls.

Topics: Childrens books, Natalie Jane Prior, Reviews, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Vintage Classics: The Year Of Living Dangerously

The cover for the new Vintage Classics edition of Christopher Koch’s The Year Of Living Dangerously, which was first published in 1978 and has been in print ever since.

Jakarta: 1965. Waiting for explosions, the city smells of frangipani, kretek cigarettes, and fear.

It is the Year of Living Dangerously.

The charismatic god-king Sukarno has brought Indonesia to the edge of chaos — to an abortive revolution that will leave half a million dead.

Working at the eye of the storm are television correspondent Guy Hamilton and his eccentric dwarf cameraman Billy Kwan.

As the Indonesian shadow play erupts into terrible reality, a complex personal tragedy of love, obsession and betrayal comes to its climax.

‘A profound and beautiful book.’
Les Murray, Sydney Morning Herald

Age Book Of The Year

Topics: Christopher Koch, Novels | No Comments »

Rave reviews roll in for The After Life

Kathleen Stewart’s wonderful memoir — The After Life — is continuing to attract rave reviews, and here are some excerpts:

‘…disturbing and compulsively readable. …This is an extraordinarily powerful book. …It will tear at your heart.’
Michael Duffy, Sydney Morning Herald

‘The After Life is dark and troubled but so well done it is hard not to be gripped by it. And it is a “risk” that has born fruit, a work that is mature and serene and yet somehow still ferocious in its startling depiction of ordeal and suffering and damage in the leafy suburbs of childhood.
… What’s important, ultimately, is not how dark the book gets, but how exhilarating, how hairs-on-the-back-of-the-neck, how gently triumphal is that which lifts out of the darkness.
In this close but largely dispassionate analysis of an extended trauma, there is wisdom in the analysing, and we are carried, oddly enough by the end, to a place of optimism.’
Luke Davies, The Australian Literary Review

‘The writing is wonderfully atmospheric: the dreamy half-drugged delirium of the love affair with Martin, the weird psychotic world of the Cross; the descriptions of the nocturnal world in which the child, the existential outsider, wanders while the whole world sleeps. This is writing of the highest order.’
Shirley Walker, Australian Book Review

‘In language rich and urgent, spilling over with similes and images, she…has written an exposure of suburban family life that, though it reads as darkly as one of her beloved fairy tales, is uncompromising in its dissection of a tragic adolescence and the people who formed it.’
Kate Holden, Readings Monthly

‘Her writing is spare and beautiful, both lush and tightly controlled.
… This is a bewitching exploration of identity and upbringing, and the effects of two damaged and damaging parents.
… Drink it in.’
Joe Case, Readings Monthly

‘… a finely woven net of past traumas and future repercussions which make even the most simply recounted events emotionally stunning.’
Emily Maguire, Canberra Times

For a taste, here’s the first chapter of The After Life [PDF 47Kb].

Topics: Kathleen Stewart, Memoirs, Reviews, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Black Inc win auction for Nicolas Rothwell’s The Red Highway

Nicolas Rothwell’s new non-fiction manuscript, The Red Highway, has just been acquired by Black Inc in a strongly contested auction.

The Red Highway is set in different parts of the north of Australia: Darwin, the Kimberley, the Centre, and the Pilbara, and is centred on ideas of friendship, loss and return.

Black Inc’s Chris Feik describes it as “a remarkable achievement, a work of surpassing originality and beauty”, and plans to publish in 2009.

Topics: Nicolas Rothwell, Non-fiction | 1 Comment »

Phillip Gwynne: 4.5 stars for The Build Up

From Bookseller + Publisher. July 2008

This debut adult crime novel from the author of Deadly Unna? is set in Darwin.

This is, I believe, a first. The main character is Detective Dusty Buchanon, a female cop in the very male world of the Northern Territory police force.

Dusty gets taken off a case she had been working on by the new female commander and nearly considers leaving the force.

However, the discovery of the dead body of a young Thai prostitute, found in a billabong near a camp of disaffected Vietnam Veterans, looks to get her back on top.

Then the body disappears and her colleagues run against her — but she’s tough and determined to get to the bottom of the case.

Dusty is a likeable hero and the somewhat exotic setting of Darwin (to me anyway) with its melting pot of people and cultures makes for a very good and ‘unputdownable’ thriller, with a bit of sex and dark humour to carry it along.

I thoroughly enjoyed it and eagerly i look forward to the further adventures of Dusty Buchanon.

Peter Milne is a crime aficionado and director of Abbey’s Bookshop, Sydney

Topics: Novels, Phillip Gwynne | No Comments »

Edrei Cullen & Gregory Rogers: Four stars for Flitterwig

From Good Reading, July 2008.

Are your feet too big, your ears slightly pointy on the top and do you have a weakness for sugar?

Perhaps you’re a Flitterwig: someone who is part human, part magical.

The day Ella meets an emotionally unstable yet passionately loyal pixie, and discovers that she is part-Elf, her life changes dramatically.

She becomes, for a time, the most important person in two worlds.; the earth that is inhabited by humans, and the magical kingdom of Magus.
Cullen takes the reader on a magical romp, packed with slapstick, hilarity and drama.

There are pixies, goblins and elves, troggles (magical beings that have had too much sugar), a self-delivering and rather bossy purple package, inept bad guys, talking animals and much more.

This is a delightful, entertaining read for anyone who likes some magic mixed into the plit. I couldn’t put it down.

**** Scholastic $16.95
Flitterwig
Reviewed by Wendy Noble
Age guide 8+

UPDATE: cbj/Random House have bought German language rights in Flitterwig and a sequel which Edrei is presently writing.

They described the novel as “an enchanting story, and outstandingly well written”.

Topics: Childrens books, Edrei Cullen, Gregory Rogers, Reviews | No Comments »

Rachael Treasure: River Run Deep

Rachael Treasure’s first novel, Jillaroo, is to be published in the UK later this year by the Preface Imprint of Random House, with the new title of River Run Deep.

Here is the cover.

Topics: Novels, Rachael Treasure | No Comments »

Cheryl Orsini: The ABC Book of Lullabies

Cheryl Orsini’s illustration for The ABC Book of Lullabies, which will be published in October, 2008.

Topics: Cheryl Orsini, Childrens books | No Comments »

Catherine Jinks live

More good news for Catherine Jinks with her new Young Adult novel, The Reformed Vampire Support Group, which is to be published in April/May, 2009 by Allen & Unwin in Australia, and Harcourt Children’s Books in the USA.

Further rights have now been sold to the novel, and its sequel, The Abused Werewolf Rescue Group.

UK rights to Quercus Books, and German rights to dtv/Reihe Hanser.

Catherine was recently a guest at BookExpoAmerica in Los Angeles, and below is a link to a podcast she did with BookExpo.

Genius Squad by Catherine Jinks

Genius Squad is the sequel to Evil Genius. Now that the Axis Institute has been blown up, Cadel Piggot’s stuck in foster care and is approached by the head of Genius Squad, a group formed to investigate GenoME, one of Darkkon’s pet projects.
Harcourt Children’s Books, $17.00, May 2008, ISBN: 978-0-15-205985-9