Re(a)d or white : uncork a book

Manly Library hosted an informal evening of wine tasting on Thursday 18th September with presenters matching wines to their favourite books. It was a great success and we've had requests for information about the presenters and the wines they selected.

Ann Skea read from and talked about The Letters of Ted Hughes (Ed. Christopher Reid). With special insight as a friend of Hughes and his family and the editor Christopher Reid. She recommended a Canary Island sherry - part of the traditional butt of sack awarded as payment to Poets Laureate. Ted went to Spain to see his wine being bottled and he designed his own label for it. http://ann.skea.com/

Sue Murray talked about Breath by Tim Winton (as an ex-West Australian who knows the south coast of WA well and the wineries there too!) Sue has worked in both theatre and education: as a member of a children's theatre company, a clown, a teacher, a university tutor, a project officer at Australia's national drama school and the series editor of the Macmillan Drama Studio. http://www.suemurray.com.au/

Michael Hedger talked about Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy and selected a Hardy's red to go with it. Michael is the Council’s Cultural and information Services Manager. He was previously Manager of Visitor Services at the National Maritime Museum and before that the Director of the Campbelltown Regional Art Gallery and the Deputy Director of the British Council in Australia. Before these positions he was a teacher, lecturer and education officer. He was the art reviewer of the Newcastle Herald and the writer of Public Sculpture in Australia which was published in 1995. He has MAs in English Literature and Arts Administration.

Wendy Burridge chose The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer. She recommended a smooth, easy drinking Merlot to accompany it. Wendy has been part of the Humphreys Newsagency Team for a number of years now and runs their Book Department. She has access to all the latest publications, selecting the best for their Manly clientele. Wendy has developed a high standard of customer care, provides personalized service, loves her work and has a brilliant product knowledge. She reads what she sells. http://www.humphreys.com.au/

Felicity Pulman is a young adult author who wrote the Shallott trilogy and The Janna Mysteries series. Felicity talked about the books that informed and inspired The Janna Mysteries, ie Brother Cadfael series by Ellis Peters, When Christ & His Saints Slept by Sharon Penman, and also her new crime series featuring Justin de Quincy, the Queen's man, The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett and Sarum by Edward Rutherford - she recommended that they be washed down with a glass of mead. http://www.felicitypulman.com.au/

John MacRitchie talked about a favourite book of his: Augustus Carp, being the autobiography of a really good man, by Anon. This is a classic of Edwardian humour, about a pompous prig named Augustus Carp, and it features a scene where wine figures prominently, specifically port wine. Carp, the secretary of the local branch of the Anti-Drunkenness League, never takes strong drink. Until... (The entire text of the book can be found online).

John is Manly Library's Local Studies Librarian. He spends four hours a day commuting by public transport so he spends plenty of time reading. John is a regular reviewer and contributor of articles to library journals and to the Manly Library weblog. He is compiling a book of bad poetry to be called ‘Mongrel Doggerel’. Don’t encourage him.

Man Booker shortlist announced

The shortlist for the Man Booker Prize was announced yesterday. Included in the six finalists is Australian author Steve Toltz for his first novel A fraction of the whole.

The Guernsey literary & potato peel pie society

by Mary Ann Shaffer.

It was the pig that started it. The Guernsey Literary Society, I mean. But to tell you about that would spoil a good tale. Anyway, it was really a letter that started Juliet Ashton's story and brought her to the story of the pig.

Juliet is a writer living in post-war London with food rationing, bombed buildings and her own gloom at being unable to find an inspiring topic for a new book. A letter from an unknown man in Guernsey, who has acquired a book Juliet once owned, sparks a correspondence which changes all this. And it's all because of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, the very odd title of which catches Juliet's interest (as it did mine) and draws her into the lives of a group of islanders who are as unusual as their reading group.

Guernsey is one of the British Channel Islands, a group of small islands which lie in the English Channel closer to the coast of France than to England. War-time occupation of the island by the Germans was, it seems, one reason that the Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society came into existence. And as Juliet's correspondence with various members of that group grows she learns much about their lives during the Occupation. Most of all, however, she discovers a group of people whose personalities shine through their letters, and inevitably she feels that she has to meet them and learn more about them. Here, after all, may be material for her next book. It certainly provided material for Mary Anne Shaffer who charts Juliet's life and progress through her letters and those of her various correspondents. The epistolary style is notoriously difficult to bring off successfully, but Mary Ann Shaffer has done it exceptionally well, especially since this is her first book and she was over 70 when she began to write it. Especially, too, as she has woven together several different stories in these letters. Alongside letters from Juliet and her new island friends, are letters to and from her publisher, his sister Sophie (a long-time friend of Juliet's), and another, American, publisher who has suddenly appeared in Juliet's life and is courting her lavishly. Juliet's bubbly personality and her wry view of life, which had made her war-time newspaper column Izzy Bickerstaff Goes to War, so popular, fill her letters, and we gradually learn a lot about her, too.

The islanders' letters and they themselves, when Juliet eventually meets them, are eccentric and full of interest. Their stories of war-time deprivation and of various things which happened on the island are grim and sometimes horrifying, but their resilience, courage and love are readily apparent. Juliet gradually becomes more involved in their lives, and she is particularly interested in their memories of Elizabeth, the accidental founder of their group, and of her arrest and imprisonment in Germany for helping one of the Polish slave workers on the island. This becomes the core of Juliet's book-research, and no-one knows, in this immediately post-war period, whether Elizabeth is still alive and will return to the island to be reunited with her small daughter Kit. The harsh reality of the islanders' war-time experiences adds to the uncertainly about Elizabeth's return, but dark as these memories of the past are, the growing friendship between Juliet and Kit, and with other members of the group, fills the book with light. Mary Ann Shaffer's book is not gloomy reading. By the end, one might be forgiven for thinking that Guernsey is peopled with eccentric herbalists making witchy potions, amiable alcoholics drinking their way through their former employer's wine cellar, starchy matrons and fishermen who concoct bizarrely inventive meals, all of whom write unusually interesting letters, but since we only meet a handful of the 1400, or so, inhabitants we could well be mistaken. So, in spite of its title, this book is not ‘just another cookery book’, or even ‘just another book-group novel’. In spite of some dark subject matter and some harrowing and very realistic moments, it turns out in the end to be an enjoyable and most unusual love story.

- Ann Skea