Pg. 69: Laurie Cass's "Pouncing on Murder"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Pouncing on Murder by Laurie Cass.

About the book, from the publisher:

Springtime in Chilson, Michigan, means it’s librarian Minnie Hamilton’s favorite time of year: maple syrup season! But her excitement fades when her favorite syrup provider, Henry Gill, dies in a sugaring accident. It’s tough news to swallow…even if the old man wasn’t as sweet as his product.

On the bookmobile rounds with her trusty rescue cat Eddie, Minnie meets Adam, the old man’s friend, who was with him when he died. Adam is convinced Henry’s death wasn’t an accident, and fears that his own life is in danger. With the police overworked, it’s up to Minnie and Eddie to tap all their resources for clues—before Adam ends up in a sticky situation…

Visit the official Laurie Cass website.

The Page 69 Test: Pouncing on Murder.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six top YA titles for Jane Austen fans

At the B & N Teen Blog, Jenny Kawecki tagged six top Young Adult reads for Jane Austen fans, including:

The Espressologist, by Kristina Springer

Jane loves to meddle, and she has a habit of determining peoples’ personalities by their coffee orders. So it’s no surprise when she combines her two favorite hobbies and starts matchmaking her friends based on their drink of choice. But when her boss catches wind of the idea and turns it into an in-store promotion, Jane starts to question her decisions. Everything seems to be going fine…so why is she so sad about it? Funny and cute and perfect for reading while you curl up with a nice, hot latté, The Espressologist is an adorable take on Jane Austen’s Emma that’s almost as awesome as the YouTube-ified Emma Approved.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Page 69 Test: The Espressologist.

My Book, The Movie: The Espressologist.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is David A. Bell reading?

Featured at Writers Read: David A. Bell, author of Napoleon: A Concise Biography.

His entry begins:

For work, I’m currently reading sources on the Haitian Revolution, including Marcus Rainsford’s fascinating early history of the events. Rainsford was a British army officer who spent considerable time in Haiti during the Revolution, and came to know and admire Toussaint Louverture.

As I’ve spent the past few years trying to...[read on]

About Napoleon, from the publisher:

This book provides a concise, accurate, and lively portrait of Napoleon Bonaparte's character and career, situating him firmly in historical context.

David Bell emphasizes the astonishing sense of human possibility--for both good and ill--that Napoleon represented. By his late twenties, Napoleon was already one of the greatest generals in European history. At thirty, he had become absolute master of Europe's most powerful country. In his early forties, he ruled a European empire more powerful than any since Rome, fighting wars that changed the shape of the continent and brought death to millions. Then everything collapsed, leading him to spend his last years in miserable exile in the South Atlantic.

Bell emphasizes the importance of the French Revolution in understanding Napoleon's career. The revolution made possible the unprecedented concentration of political authority that Napoleon accrued, and his success in mobilizing human and material resources. Without the political changes brought about by the revolution, Napoleon could not have fought his wars. Without the wars, he could not have seized and held onto power. Though his virtual dictatorship betrayed the ideals of liberty and equality, his life and career were revolutionary.

Learn more about Napoleon: A Concise Biography at the Oxford University Press website.

Writers Read: David A. Bell.

--Marshal Zeringue

The Wall Street Journal's top ten nonfiction books of 2015

One of the Wall Street Journal's top ten nonfiction books of the year:

Mourning Lincoln
by Martha Hodes

Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865 plunged the nation into grief. Mourning for the president became a surrogate for mourning each fallen Union soldier. Yet the deep reaction to his death included not just shock, sorrow and anguish but also glee from his detractors (particularly Northern conservatives and immigrants), who feared his commitment to giving freed slaves civil rights. Martha Hodes draws a direct line between Lincoln’s calls for black suffrage and his assassination, making him an American martyr. “Mourning Lincoln” is a stunning piece of research, based on an extraordinary range of materials often overlooked by traditional historians.

Learn about another book on the list.

Cover story: Mourning Lincoln.

The Page 99 Test: Mourning Lincoln.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kim MacQuarrie's "The Last Days of the Incas," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: The Last Days of the Incas by Kim MacQuarrie.

The entry begins:

I’m perhaps fortunate in that the FX Channel is currently in the process of developing one of my books—The Last Days of the Incas—into a 13-part dramatic series. It’s the (non-fiction) story of how 168 conquistadors, led by a band of four brothers, managed to conquer an Inca Empire of ten million. The truth is, I hadn’t really considered the casting, but now that there is this opportunity, here goes:

Francisco Pizarro: (the eldest brother, shrewd, uneducated, a great leader of men): Jeremy Irons

Hernando Pizarro (arrogant, power hungry): Javier Bardem

Gonzalo Pizarro: (the handsomest of the brothers): Colin...[read on]

Visit Kim MacQuarrie's website.

The Page 99 Test: Life and Death in the Andes.

My Book, The Movie: Life and Death in the Andes.

My Book, The Movie: The Last Days of the Incas.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten top Christmas books

Matt Haig's newest book, A Boy Called Christmas, is out now in the UK. One of the author's top ten Christmas books, as shared at the Guardian:

Holidays on Ice by David Sedaris

One of the funniest things in print. This is a collection of essays about Christmas. The first one, Santaland Diaries, is Sedaris’s take on working as an elf during holiday season at Macy’s department store and is painful in all the right ways. Another essay reviews the local school’s Christmas pageant with delightful mischief.

Read about another book on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Miguel de Baca's "Memory Work: Anne Truitt and Sculpture"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Memory Work: Anne Truitt and Sculpture by Miguel de Baca.

About the book, from the publisher:

Memory Work demonstrates the evolution of the pioneering minimalist sculptor Anne Truitt. An artist determined to make her way through a new aesthetic in the 1960s, Truitt was tireless in her pursuit of a strong cultural voice. At the heart of her practice was the key theme of memory, which enabled her not only to express personal experience but also to address how perception was changing for a contemporary viewership. She gravitated toward the idea that an object in one’s focus could unleash a powerful return to the past through memory, which in turn brings a fresh, even critical, attention to the present moment. In addition to the artist’s own popular published writings, which detail the unique challenges facing female artists, Memory Work draws on unpublished manuscripts, private recordings, and never-before-seen working drawings to validate Truitt’s original ideas about the link between perception and mnemonic reference in contemporary art. De Baca offers an insider’s view of the artist’s unstinting efforts to realize her artistic vision, as well as the cultural, political, and historical resonances her oeuvre has for us today.

Learn more about Memory Work at the University of California Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Memory Work.

--Marshal Zeringue

Simon Sebag Montefiore's 6 favorite books

As a historian, Simon Sebag Montefiore's works include The Romanovs: 1613–1918, Jerusalem: The Biography, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, and Young Stalin, which was awarded the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography, the Costa Biography Prize (UK), and Le Grand Prix de Biographie Politique (France). His novels include the critically acclaimed Sashenka and One Night in Winter.

One of the author's six favorite books, as shared at The Daily Express:

BLOOD MERIDIAN by Cormac McCarthy

This a towering masterpiece of modern American literature.

It’s about a desolate, terrifying world on the borderland between America and Mexico when the remains of Indian tribes were being hunted down by ruffians damaged by the American Civil War. It is a Western but also a study of total evil which is always interesting.

Read about another entry on the list.

Blood Meridian is one authority's pick for the Great Texas novel; it is among Richard Kadrey's five books about awful, awful people, Jason Sizemore's top five books that will entertain and drop you into the depths of despair, Robert Allison's top ten novels of desert war, Alexandra Silverman's top fourteen wrathful stories, James Franco's six favorite books, Philipp Meyer's five best books that explain America, Peter Murphy's top ten literary preachers, David Vann's six favorite books, Robert Olmstead's six favorite books, Michael Crummey's top ten literary feuds, Philip Connors's top ten wilderness books, six books that made a difference to Kazuo Ishiguro, Clive Sinclair's top 10 westerns, Maile Meloy's six best books, and David Foster Wallace's five direly underappreciated post-1960 U.S. novels. It appears on the New York Times list of the best American fiction of the last 25 years and among the top ten works of literature according to Stephen King.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Jonathan H. Ebel reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Jonathan H. Ebel, author of G.I. Messiahs: Soldiering, War, and American Civil Religion.

His entry begins:

Shortly before 9pm last December 11, my dad called to tell me he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He died on April 7 after four months of treatment, suffering, and decline. They told us it would be a rollercoaster. It wasn’t.

Almost from the beginning, friends and family told me that I should read Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal. I agree with them. I really should. It is sitting on my nightstand between the clock radio and the reading lamp. I’ll get to it. For the moment, though, I’m aiming lower, or maybe just differently. I am finishing The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, and I am halfway through A Farewell to Arms, two books that wrestle with being mortal in ways that feel easier to me.

There are few better times to purge closets, drawers, and the recesses of one’s basement than the aftermath of a painful loss. My father is gone. What the hell do I care about CD cases, VHS tapes, an old toaster oven, and sweaters that I haven’t worn in a decade? I’m very sad. The question that Marie Kondo requires me to ask of every possession, “Does this spark joy?” all but answers itself. Old jackets? Hell no. Notes from college? Are you kidding? If we’re talking about...[read on]

About G.I. Messiahs, from the publisher:

Jonathan Ebel has long been interested in how religion helps individuals and communities render meaningful the traumatic experiences of violence and war. In this new work, he examines cases from the Great War to the present day and argues that our notions of what it means to be an American soldier are not just strongly religious, but strongly Christian.

Drawing on a vast array of sources, he further reveals the effects of soldier veneration on the men and women so often cast as heroes. Imagined as the embodiments of American ideals, described as redeemers of the nation, adored as the ones willing to suffer and die that we, the nation, may live—soldiers have often lived in subtle but significant tension with civil religious expectations of them. With chapters on prominent soldiers past and present, Ebel recovers and re-narrates the stories of the common American men and women that live and die at both the center and edges of public consciousness.

Jonathan H. Ebel is associate professor of religious studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is a former naval intelligence officer. He is the author of Faith in the Fight: Religion and the American Soldier in the First World War and the co-editor, with John D. Carlson, of From Jeremiad to Jihad: Religion, Violence, and America.

Learn more about G.I. Messiahs at the Yale University Press website.

Writers Read: Jonathan H. Ebel.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top 5 Texas authors of 2015

At MysteryPeople Scott Montgomery tagged the top five Texas authors of 2015, including:

Between the Living and the Dead by Bill Crider

The latest Dan Rhodes mystery has our sheriff dealing with a murder involving meth, used cars, and a haunted house. A fun, laid back mystery, full of entertaining characters.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Page 69 Test: Between the Living and the Dead.

Read about Crider's choice of actors to portray Dan Rhodes and Seepy Benton on the big screen.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Julia Knight's "Warlords and Wastrels"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Warlords and Wastrels by Julia Knight.

About the book, from the publisher:

The epic conclusion to the fast-paced new adventure fantasy series, the Duelists trilogy, from one of the most exciting new talents in fantasy.

Vocho and Kacha may be known for the first swordplay in the city of Reyes, but they've found themselves backed into a corner too often for their liking.

Finally reinstated into the Duelist's Guild for services rendered to the prelate, who has found himself back in charge, Vocho and Kacha are tasked with bringing a prisoner to justice. But this prisoner is none other than Kacha's old flame Egimont. The prelate wants him alive, and on their side. However the more they discover of Egimont and his dark dealings with the magician, the more Kacha's loyalties are divided. Soon she must choose a side -- the prelate or the king, her brother or her ex-lover.

The fate of Reyes is balanced on a knife-edge...

Visit Julia Knight's website.

The Page 69 Test: Warlords and Wastrels.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven great novels depicting an environmental apocalypse

At io9 Maddie Stone tagged seven great novels that show the real terrifying prospect of climate change, including:

Odds Against Tomorrow by Nathaniel Rich (Macmillan)

In a not-too-distant future Manhattan, mathematician Mitchell Zukor is hired by financial consulting firm FutureWorld to crank out worst-case predictions for the future, which are sold to corporations at a profit. Just as Zukor’s scenarios are reaching apocalypse proportions, a disastrous hurricane floods New York City. A fast-paced literary thriller, Odds Against Tomorrow reveals a world where humanity’s worst fears about the future are being realized in the present. Eerily enough, Rich finished the novel right before Superstorm Sandy struck New York—so maybe there’s a touch of prophecy in here, as well.

Read about another book on the list.

Also see: six top sci-fi books about the changing climate and ten top climate change fiction books for young readers.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Graeme Gill's "Building an Authoritarian Polity"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Building an Authoritarian Polity: Russia in Post-Soviet Times by Graeme Gill.

About the book, from the publisher:

Graeme Gill shows why post-Soviet Russia has failed to achieve the democratic outcome widely expected at the time of the fall of the Soviet Union, instead emerging as an authoritarian polity. He argues that the decisions of dominant elites have been central to the construction of an authoritarian polity, and explains how this occurred in four areas of regime-building: the relationship with the populace, the manipulation of the electoral system, the internal structure of the regime itself, and the way the political elite has been stabilised. Instead of the common 'Yeltsin is a democrat, Putin an autocrat' paradigm, this book shows how Putin built upon the foundations that Yeltsin had laid. It offers a new framework for the study of an authoritarian political system, and is therefore relevant not just to Russia but to many other authoritarian polities.

Graeme Gill is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney.

Learn more about Building an Authoritarian Polity at the Cambridge University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Building an Authoritarian Polity.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Michael A. McDonnell reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Michael A. McDonnell, author of Masters of Empire: Great Lakes Indians and the Making of America.

His entry begins:

Funny enough, I’ve just been reading the work of two great Australian historians - who happen to be married to each other. One of the wonderful things about teaching here in Australia is that it forces you to read widely and think comparatively, if only to keep up with the varied interests of amazing colleagues.

Recently, we took a trip up to Magnetic Island, just off the east coast of Australia and within the Great Barrier Reef. I took along a copy of Iain McCalman’s The Reef: A Passionate History, that relates the human history of the Reef in a series of brilliantly told biographies from Captain Cook to Charlie Veron – an environmental activist trying to document the shocking effects of climate change on the Reef today. I don’t normally read non-fiction while trying to relax, but Iain’s book was a compelling and delightful read. He brings to life in vivid detail Cook’s claustrophobic and near- deadly encounter with this uncharted wonder, different Aboriginal communities’ relationship to its nurturing grasp, and the science (and scandals) surrounding the study of corals and reefs. Now heading up...[read on]

About Masters of Empire, from the publisher:

In Masters of Empire, the historian Michael A. McDonnell reveals the pivotal role played by the native peoples of the Great Lakes in the history of North America. Though less well known than the Iroquois or Sioux, the Anishinaabeg, who lived across Lakes Michigan and Huron, were equally influential. Masters of Empire charts the story of one group, the Odawa, who settled at the straits between those two lakes, a hub for trade and diplomacy throughout the vast country west of Montreal known as the pays d’en haut.

Highlighting the long-standing rivalries and relationships among the great Indian nations of North America, McDonnell shows how Europeans often played only a minor role in this history, and reminds us that it was native peoples who possessed intricate and far-reaching networks of commerce and kinship, of which the French and British knew little. As empire encroached upon their domain, the Anishinaabeg were often the ones doing the exploiting. By dictating terms at trading posts and frontier forts, they played a crucial part in the making of early America.

Through vivid depictions—all from a native perspective—of early skirmishes, the French and Indian War, and the American Revolution, Masters of Empire overturns our assumptions about colonial America. By calling attention to the Great Lakes as a crucible of culture and conflict, McDonnell reimagines the landscape of American history.

Visit Michael A. McDonnell's website, blog, and Twitter perch.

Writers Read: Michael A. McDonnell.

--Marshal Zeringue

Emily Ross's "Half in Love with Death," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Half In Love With Death by Emily Ross.

The entry begins:

I’ve often fantasized about a movie of Half in Love with Death, my YA novel about a teen’s search for her missing sister. The Arizona desert setting provides a cinematic backdrop for my psychological thriller, set in Tucson in 1965. I’d love to see suburban neighborhoods encroaching on the desert and disaffected teens looking for anything to alleviate their boredom coming to life on the big screen.

I’d choose Kiernan Shipka (Sally Draper from Mad Men) as Caroline, my 15-year-old protagonist. Like Sally, Caroline comes of age in the ‘60s. As Shipka literally grew from a child into a teenager on screen, I often thought of my young protagonist. Like Caroline, Shipka has a quiet loveliness and changes from child to sophisticate in an instant. Both Sally and Caroline are able to strike the rocky balance between innocence, intelligence, and...[read on]

Visit the official Emily Ross website.

The Page 69 Test: Half In Love With Death.

Writers Read: Emily Ross.

My Book, The Movie: Half In Love With Death.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Mette Ivie Harrison's "His Right Hand"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: His Right Hand by Mette Ivie Harrison.

About the book, from the publisher:

In the follow-up to the controversial and critically acclaimed mystery, The Bishop’s Wife, Mormon housewife Linda Wallheim finds herself once again ruffling feathers in Draper, Utah, as she assists a murder investigation that is being derailed by transphobia within the LDS community.

In Draper, Utah, a tight-knit Mormon community is thrown into upheaval when their ward’s second counselor—one of the bishop’s right-hand men—is found dead in an elaborately staged murder on church property. Carl Ashby was known as a devout Mormon, a pillar of the community, and a loving husband and father. Who would want him dead?

Linda Wallheim, the wife of the ward’s bishop, can’t rest as long as the ward is suffering. She is particularly worried about Carl’s grieving family. But the entire case is turned upside down by the autopsy report, which reveals Carl Ashby was a biological female. In the Mormon church, where gender is considered part of a person’s soul, some people regard transgenderism as one of the worst possible transgressions of faith. Church officials seem to be more upset by Carl’s gender than by his murder, and more concerned with hushing up the story than solving the crime.

Linda realizes that if the police are to catch the killer, they are going to need an ally on the inside—and she is the only one who can help. Carl was living a life of secrecy for twenty years. What else was he hiding—and can Linda ferret out the key to his death before the rumors tear her community apart?

Visit Mette Ivie Harrison's website.

Writers Read: Mette Ivie Harrison (January 2015).

The Page 69 Test: His Right Hand.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Alastair Bellany & Thomas Cogswell's "The Murder of King James I"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Murder of King James I by Alastair Bellany and Thomas Cogswell.

About the book, from the publisher:

A year after the death of James I in 1625, a sensational pamphlet accused the Duke of Buckingham of murdering the king. It was an allegation that would haunt English politics for nearly forty years. In this exhaustively researched new book, two leading scholars of the era, Alastair Bellany and Thomas Cogswell, uncover the untold story of how a secret history of courtly poisoning shaped and reflected the political conflicts that would eventually plunge the British Isles into civil war and revolution. Illuminating many hitherto obscure aspects of early modern political culture, this eagerly anticipated work is both a fascinating story of political intrigue and a major exploration of the forces that destroyed the Stuart monarchy.

Learn more about The Murder of King James I at the Yale University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Murder of King James I.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten top books about justice and redemption

Jeffrey Lent's novel A Slant of Light is a Washington Post Notable Book of 2015. One of the author's top ten books about justice and redemption, as shared at the Guardian:

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

There’s no escaping it: this is perhaps the greatest novel ever written. As such, it’s brimful of wordly justice and almost utterly lacking in redemption. Tolstoy, being Tolstoy, was not content to write a novel only about a “fallen” woman, but inserts us into the political life, the feudal system and the overarching military thrust of imperial Russia. The result is tactile, satisfying and immensely disturbing.

Read about another book on the list.

Anna Karenina also appears on Bethan Roberts's top ten list of novels about childbirth, Hannah Jane Parkinson's list of the ten worst couples in literature, Hanna McGrath's top fifteen list of epigraphs, Amelia Schonbek's list of three classic novels that pass the Bechdel test, Rachel Thompson's top ten list of the greatest deaths in fiction, Melissa Albert's recommended reading list for eight villains, Alison MacLeod's top ten list of stories about infidelity, David Denby's six favorite books list, Howard Jacobson's list of his five favorite literary heroines, Eleanor Birne's top ten list of books on motherhood, Esther Freud's top ten list of love stories, Chika Unigwe's six favorite books list, Elizabeth Kostova's list of favorite books, James Gray's list of best books, Marie Arana's list of the best books about love, Ha Jin's most important books list, Tom Perrotta's ten favorite books list, Claire Messud's list of her five most important books, Alexander McCall Smith's list of his five most important books, Mohsin Hamid's list of his ten favorite books, Louis Begley's list of favorite novels about cheating lovers, and among the top ten works of literature according to Peter Carey and Norman Mailer. John Mullan put it on his lists of ten of the best erotic dreams in literature, ten of the best coups de foudre in literature, ten of the best births in literature, ten of the best ice-skating episodes in literature, and ten of the best balls in literature.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Paullina Simons reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Paullina Simons, author of Lone Star.

Her entry begins:

“There’s a panther stalks me down. One day I’ll have my death of him.” So writes poetess extraordinaire Sylvia Plath, the day after meeting England’s future poet laureate and her future husband Ted Hughes in February 1956. They fell in love and three months later married. Seven years later, in another frozen February, her premonition came true. She was thirty years old when she kneeled in front of the gaslit oven, while her two small children slept nearby, and put her head inside.

Lately I’ve been consumed by all things Plath/Hughes. Who was this man who drove his passionate heartbroken wife to suicide? And why did tragedy continue to follow him down the road of life? Many years later his only son also committed suicide. I re-read Ariel, the book of poems Plath wrote in the six months before her death. Ted Hughes was the love of her life, but he had fallen for another woman. He left Sylvia Plath, abandoned her and his children to travel joyfully abroad with his new lover, a childless yet married Assia Wevill (rhymes with devil not evil).

While they gamboled, Plath nursed her wounds and her babies and wrote Ariel, arguably one of the best poem collections of the twentieth century. And after she was done writing, she glanced around and Ted wasn’t back. She was still alone, and his new lover was pregnant. Plath may have known this. Or the winter of 1963 may have been too cold and too long for her, the burdens too heavy, the future too bleak. Who knows. Not even Ted Hughes knows. This, according to the books I read.

I read Sylvia Plath: Letters Home, followed by Her Husband by Diane Middlebrook, and...[read on]

About Lone Star, from the publisher:

From the bestselling, acclaimed author of Tully and The Bronze Horseman comes the unforgettable love story between a college-bound young woman and a traveling troubadour on his way to war—a moving, compelling novel of love lost and found set against the stunning backdrop of Eastern Europe.

Chloe is just weeks away from heading off to college and starting a new life far from her home in Maine when she embarks on a great European adventure with her boyfriend and two best friends. Their destination is Barcelona, but first they must detour through the historic cities of Eastern Europe to keep an old family promise.

Here, in this fledgling post-Communist world, Chloe meets a charming American vagabond named Johnny, who carries a guitar, an easy smile—and a lifetime of secrets. From Treblinka to Trieste, from Karnikava to Krakow, from Vilnius to Venice, the unlikely band of friends and lovers traverse the old world on a train trip that becomes a treacherous journey into Europe’s and Johnny’s darkest past—a journey that jeopardizes Chloe’s plans for the future and all she ever thought she wanted.

But the lifelong bonds Chloe and her friends share are about to be put to the ultimate test—and whether or not they reach Barcelona, they can only be certain that their lives will never be the same again.

A sweeping, beautiful tale that mesmerizes and enchants, Lone Star will linger long in the memory once the final page is turned.

Visit Paullina Simons's website.

The Page 69 Test: Lone Star.

Writers Read: Paullina Simons.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five sci-fi books with an Australian sensibility

Jackie Hatton is the author of Flesh and Wires, a post-apocalyptic, post-alien novel that imagines women as the agents of their own destiny. One of five sci-fi books with an Australian perspective she tagged at Tor.com:

John Marsden—Tomorrow, When the War Began

Five kids “go bush, go feral,” for a few days during the holidays. They’re allowed to do this because Australian kids are not mollycoddled. As predicted, the worst thing that happens is that they find a snake in one of their sleeping bags. However…when they get home to their rural farm houses they find their parents missing, their animals dead, something seriously wrong with their world. So begins what is possibly Australia’s most popular speculative fiction novel of all time (with over three million sales to prove it and the #1 ranking on the Better Reads 2013 Top 100 Favourite Homegrown Reads List). As it says in the blurb for my yellowed old copy, “the first of a trilogy, When the War Began is truly an insomniac’s nightmare.” I list it here because kids who don’t read anything will lose sleep to finish this series. Adults with genre boundaries suddenly don’t care that it’s young adult or speculative. An addictive adventure/mystery story set in a future Australia that is pretty scary for kids, invaded by people (we never know exactly who) who plan to either enslave or kill the existing inhabitants, this book echoes the brutal colonial history of Australia and reflects upon the impact of WWII upon the Australian character, as well as offering insight into contemporary life as a young Australian growing up in a rural town.

Although the premise is quite brutal and the realities of life as bush fugitives are never denied, this is also a story that appeals to many Australians’ (young and old) fantasy of living life off the land, or at the very least somehow learning to negotiate its treacherous and beautiful nature.

Marsden’s perspective: This was my country; I felt like I had grown from its soil like the silent trees around me, like the springy, tiny-leaved plants that lined the track.

Read about another entry on the list.

Tomorrow, When the War Began is among Janet Manley's six great Australian YA lit classics.

--Marshal Zeringue