Zoe Deleuil
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What convinced me to make the move? Getting newsletters from writers I like directly into my inbox. And listening to this Writers off the Page podcast, where authors Emily Gale and Natasha Lester talk about it from a business and career point of view, and realising it makes sense. Substack also has an option for
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This was such a good month for reading, I travelled back to Australia for Christmas and had a fair few 3am wake ups to read through, and after finishing the Wolf Hall trilogy I felt like I could tackle anything (except Middlemarch, which I’m circling. So many people love it. Maybe I should try audio?)
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While reading the Gillian Mear’s biography a few months back I discovered that when The Mint Lawn was reissued she had the opportunity to make a few changes. Yet she more or less left it how it was. Perhaps she simply didn’t have it in her to go back to that book. It was so
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It took me a while to read Tim Winton’s most recent novel and I was surprised, actually, that it was published in 2017 and I still hadn’t got around to it… but that’s moving countries, a pandemic and a supply chain crisis for you. I would have stumbled across it in Perth at some point,
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It’s hard to explain what is meant by a distinctive voice in fiction – after all, every voice is distinctive in its own way. But when you come across a book with a strong voice, you recognise it immediately. My two latest reads are both ones I could ‘hear.’ The first, The Shepherd’s Hut by
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A long time ago I became friends with someone because her partner was my then-boyfriend’s uncle. The three of them lived together in an old terrace house in Fremantle, and we bonded over our love of red wine, books and morbid humour. She was twenty years older than me, but we somehow clicked, and when
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The cure for many ills, noted Jung, is to build something, and this is the epigraph and theme of Amanda Lohrey’s atmospheric novel, The Labyrinth (Text). It’s my second read by a Tassie author this month and further proof that the briney air of that island casts quite a spell on its writers. This one
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Reading is what fuels my writing, and possibly since deleting my Twitter account I’ve gotten back into it big time. Here are a few books I’ve adored recently. How to End a Story by Helen GarnerOof. Helen Garner’s account of her marriage breakdown to ‘V’. Beautiful writing, as always, and so much narrative tension I
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The Claremont Serial Killer, now known to be Perth man Bradley Edwards, was jailed in late 2020 for forty years without parole. News reports referred to ‘a dark line being drawn under history,’ and it is hopefully some relief to the families and his surviving victims to know that at 53, he will almost certainly
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Thanks to Readings Books for adding The Night Village to their list of the best crime books of 2021 – their resident crime reader and bookseller Fiona Hardy (who is also an award-winning author) wrote a wonderful review of The Night Village for Books & Publishing right before it came out, which got it off
Zoe Deleuil 