So we come to mid-year…

So we come to mid-year, a chance to take a break and take stock, amid all the activity and changes for us in 2023. And I’ll begin with a warm welcome to our new Gleaner editor, Gabriel Wilder, who brings a wealth of journalistic experience with her to the role. We’re all looking forward to working with her.

An update on those comprehensive and exciting renovations at 49 Glebe Point Road (above), half way through the process. The place looks like a bomb site, as architects, builders, engineers, and all kinds of specialists work their way through the myriad of complex issues involved in restoring the battered old building. Never fear, they’re on schedule, but just to remind readers, that means we won’t move back down the road until early next year. So please keep coming to our lovely “outpost office” shop up the hill, for the rest of the year. In the meantime, we’ll try to ramp up our much missed events program, if we can secure some viable space options outside the shop.

We’ve been closely associated, as booksellers, with the Sydney Writers’ festival, for almost 20 years now, and I’m pleased to report that the recent event at Carriageworks and elsewhere was one of the best. There was great energy and vibrancy within and without the many sessions, and I was delighted by the enormous response to the children’s program, both at Carriageworks and at the hugely popular Schools Days programs. I hope that podcasts and repeats of some of the best sessions come your way, meanwhile, start planning for next year! So much has been happening that I’ve been on a (time) restricted reading diet. But I wanted to remind everyone of two “recent-ish” publications, in case you missed them. Old God’s Time, Sebastian Barry’s unforgettable and haunting exploration of memory, loss and justice. A retired police detective, living in pinched circumstances in a lean-to that is attached to an old castle on a bleak Irish coast, has to come to terms with his past actions. Barry’s moral sense is unerring, it’s beautifully done.

As well done, in its own uniquely different way, is Fiona Kelly McGregor’s Iris, published late last year. Its brilliance crept up on me as I read it. It’s a bold and boisterous and thoroughly original recreation of the pre-WWII underbelly of Sydney, arranged around the fictionalised life of one Iris Webber, a notorious figure of the time. I loved it. Finally, and importantly, July sees the publication of what must be the most anticipated book of the year, Anna Funder’s Wifedom. It won’t disappoint – I can only find superlatives to describe my response. Magnificent, profound, utterly original genre-bending work will do to begin with. Wifedom moves seamlessly from the known facts and history of the life of Eileen O’Shaughnessy, wife of George Orwell, to the imagined world behind the letters written by her to her best friend, and takes in, for good measure, contemporary reflections and responses from Funder to her own world as writer, wife, mother. It’s a dazzling and captivating and challenging achievement. A tour de force. Read it and see.