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Ten reasons why The Hungover Cookbook makes a fantastic (adult) stocking filler this Christmas: 1. Booze and Christmas go together like Santa Claus and Reindeer. This also means that hangovers come along for the ride too (there’s a downside to reindeer too: they create a lot of shit, but no-one ever mentions that). It means that this gift will be put to immediate practical use (always gratifying...
The Australian book honoured by the American Library Association
This is one of my favourite recipes – a truly hearty breakfast for when you’re in a mood to eat and eat. It’s pretty much exactly what it says it is: the essential ingredients of an English breakfast cooked in a single pan which ends up resembling a Spanish tortilla (but full of fun bits). This is how to cook it: Ingredients (for 2 people) Olive oil 4 outdoor-bred pork chipolata sausages,...
It would be quite easy, writing a book about hangovers and inevitably having to be hungover in order to do so, to create a chaotic book that had no structure and made no sense at all. How fortunate I was, then, to have comic novelist P. G. Wodehouse’s decisive statement on the classification of hangovers to help me. Wodehouse wrote in his 1940 Jeeves and Wooster novel The Mating Season that there...
Many great writers have been great drinkers too, or perhaps, as The New Yorker suggests, that should be drunks. Dylan Thomas famously said that ‘An alcoholic is someone you don’t like, who drinks as much as you do’. The distinction between the two categories surely lies in a question of productivity. If you drink a lot and produce great writing, you’re a writer that drinks a lot. If you drink a lot...
The Hungover Cookbook was inspired by hangovers, of course, but also by being hungover with friends who had crashed out at my house after a hard night’s revelry. In the morning we’d wake up and resume talking and have some food together. It felt like a disjointed continuation from the previous evening. We filled in gaps. We laughed again about the same things we had laughed about while drunk. There...
Two books honoured as Best in Australia
As an American who has recently moved to Australia I am VERY excited for my first holiday season on the beach. Since moving here with my husband we have embraced the lifestyle, new TV shows, Australian authors, music and more. The first show we started watching was Top Gear (not widely available in the US), followed by Master Chef! He is now totally obsessed with Top Gear (James May is his favourite)...
I’m sure I wasn’t the only author with a book in her bag queuing along Macquarie Street yesterday, heading towards the woman who runs the biggest book club in the world. One must think positively and, let’s face it, it’s free to dream. As I marched silently with 6000 others through security to ‘Oprah’s Australian Adventure’ stage in the forecourt at Bennelong Point, I was excited about seeing the...
THE SOCIAL NETWORK Scoops Up Golden Globes Nominations
by Random House Australia on 15 December 2010
The movie based on THE ACCIDENTAL BILLIONAIRES earns seven nods
