Your Summer Reading List

https://res-3.cloudinary.com/amn/image/upload/c_fit,h_320,w_700/v1447648488/1_xw4tst.jpgBiographies tend to focus on exceptional rather than “ordinary” individuals, but Australian novelist Kate Grenville has written One Life (Text), the biography of her mother Nance Russell. partly because "not many voices like hers are heard." And once we hear her voice we realise that no-one is "ordinary" or "unexceptional."

This book is a tribute especially to women who make their mark in quet ways. In one sense, Nance's story is the epitome of the 

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https://res-4.cloudinary.com/amn/image/upload/c_fit,h_320,w_700/v1447648689/3_noyxlh.jpgVan Gogh’s Ghost Paintings by Cliff Edwards (Cascade) is an intriguing little book that asks a rather odd question:

https://res-2.cloudinary.com/amn/image/upload/c_fit,h_320,w_700/v1447648726/4_exvpra.jpgIn The Territories of Science and Religion (University of Chicago), 

https://res-4.cloudinary.com/amn/image/upload/c_fit,h_320,w_700/v1447648803/5_mlh7ng.jpgIn The Hands (Wakefield), the latest novel from South Australian, Stephen Orr, Trevor Wilkie, his wife and sons, his grumbling, swearing father, and extended family live on a cattle station beyond Port Augusta, and beyond viability. The book is far from a rural romance, harking back to an older, fiercer Australian tradition of depicting the unforgiving nature of life on the land. The Wilkies’ often grim, plodding life is broken only by tragedy. Characters bottle feelings and get on with it, always hoping the next season will be better. Orr has sympathy for their roughness and toughness, and sees through their eyes, such as when a deflated balloon is likened to a dead newborn calf. Within the narrative of no-nonsense prose is a carefully constructed tension between tradition and the need to move on, between the hopes of varying generations, and between differing ideas of where home and happiness can be found.