Book of the week

14 May 2013 - 13:31

 

‘Thought-provoking, harrowing
and lingers long in the mind’
Mail on Sunday

In the twilight years of his life, Janardhanan Pillai wants little more than to pass his days in peace. But on the day a stranger comes knocking, a writer asking questions that Pillai has long avoided answering, he discovers that his peace is merely a mirage, a figment of his imagination sprung from the intense dust and heat of the Indian south. Pillai’s past suddenly looms large and his only hope of laying old ghosts to rest is to tell the story that the writer came in search of – what became of the last hangman of Travancore?

As Pillai commits his life to paper, the men he put to their death come creeping into his consciousness, haunting his dreams and living in the shadows of each day. In the way that so much good literature does, The Last Hangman, transports the reader to another time and place. The India of the mid-twentieth century is deftly captured: the politics, the poverty,...

Featured Author
By webmistress
15 May 2013 - 00:00

A Q& A with Courtney Collins

The Burial is the debut novel of Courtney Collins. It has been optioned for a feature film by Pure Pictures. Courtney grew up in the Hunter Valley in NSW. She now lives on the Goulburn River in regional Victoria.  She is also a pen-kleptomaniac.  See more about the book below, or listen to Courtney speak here

Courtney Collins - Credit Lionfish MediaHow long did it take you to write the novel?
I was writing it on and off for about seven years. There was a lot of life around it – day jobs, share houses, relationships, travel, interstate moves. I wasn’t exactly chained to the desk so it just took that long.
 

Where did you write The Burial?
Given those peripatetic years, I wrote The Burial in many places. But the place I kept returning to was an old postmaster’s cottage in the bush which I live in now. It’s not so hard to conjure life in the 1920s in Australia when there are possums in your roof and you have to chop your own wood.

How did you first hear about Jessie's story?
I grew up near to the Widden Ranges in NSW where the story is set. As a kid, I was intrigued by rumours of this wild woman who had lived in a cave in the mountains for years and had gotten by stealing horses and cattle. But there was nothing much written about her at that time.
 
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Off the page
By webmistress
15 May 2013 - 14:50

 

London and Paris: Dead and Buried -
A Tale of Two Cities by Jonathan Conlin

In 1863, Charles Dickens paid a visit to Kensal Green Cemetery, located
a mile north-west of Paddington, between the Harrow Road and the
Grand Union Canal. As he noted in his account in All the Year Round,
the French believed that the Englishwere driven by melancholy and spleen
to make cemeteries their ‘principal promenades’. For his part, Dickens agreed, confessing that he enjoyed wandering in churchyards. There the oppressor and the oppressed, the servant and the master, the great and the small lay together, united by death. ‘Of the English Cemetery, however, I knew nothing, until, on a blazing July afternoon, I set out for Kensal Green.’ Unlike graveyards, which surrounded a parish church in the heart of the city, cemeteries were located outside its confines, and were not necessarily associated with a single parish community. Though...

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