Australian Television Premiere: Monday 14 May, 8.30pm
For the Love of Books hosts Cheryl Akle, Michael Campbell and Lachlan Jobbins discussed The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides, Silent Valley by Malla Nunn and Sebastian Barry’s On Canaan’s Side. All books reviewed on this episode of For the Love of Books will be featured at the Sydney Writers Festival this year.
The Marriage Plot – Jeffrey Eugenides
Madeleine Hanna was the dutiful English major who didn′t get the memo. While everyone else in the early 1980s was reading Derrida, she was happily absorbed with Jane Austen and George Eliot. Madeleine was the girl who dressed a little too nicely for the taste of her more Bohemian friends, the perfect girlfriend whose college love life, despite her good looks, hadn′t lived up to expectations. But now, in the spring of her final year, Madeleine has enrolled in a semiotics course ′to see what all the fuss is about′. And, for reasons that have nothing to do with her studies, life and literature will never be the same. Not after she falls in love with Leonard Morten who introduces her to the ecstasies of immediate experience. And certainly not after Mitchell Grammaticus resurfaces in her life, obsessed with the idea that she will be his wife.
Silent Valley – Malla Nunn
The body of a seventeen-year-old girl has been found covered in wildflowers on a hillside in the Drakensberg Mountains, near Durban. She is the daughter of a Zulu chief, destined to fetch a high bride price. Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper is sent to investigate. He must enter the guarded worlds of a traditional Zulu clan and a white farming community to gather up the clues left behind and bring her murderer to justice. But the silence in the valley is deafening, and it seems that everyone – from the uncooperative local police officer, to the white farm boy who seems obsessed with the dead girl – has something to hide.
On Canaan’s Side – Sebastian Barry
As they used to say in Ireland, the devil only comes into good things. Narrated by Lilly Bere, On Canaan’s Side opens as she mourns the loss of her grandson, Bill. The story then goes back to the moment she was forced to flee Dublin, at the end of the First World War, and follows her life through into the new world of America, a world filled with both hope and danger. At once epic and intimate, Lilly’s narrative unfurls as she tries to make sense of the sorrows and troubles of her life and of the people whose lives she has touched. Spanning nearly seven decades, it is a novel of memory, war, family-ties and love, which once again displays Sebastian Barry’s exquisite prose and gift for storytelling.
