It is volcano country and the plain is dotted with dormant scoria cones weathered down into soft rounded forms that give the landscape, I have always thought, a sensuous feminine quality. I drove faster than normal as I was running late – I had underestimated the time it would take me – and was worried I would miss my appointment. I was also anxious about how the meeting would go.

`Come to the Seaclaid Coffee shop, on the corner of Commercial Road and Tower Hill Road at 3.30. It’s Irish and has the best coffee for miles.’ The directions came from Vicki Couzens, a Gunditjmara/Kirrae Wurrung artist who lived there with her family.  We had conducted an email correspondence for a couple of months but this was to be our first actual meeting.

I had discovered Vicki’s art when up in the Territory the previous year with my partner Michael. We had gone on one of those small plane tours of remote Aboriginal art communities and, at the end, had been in Darwin for the Telstra Art Awards. We don’t collect Aboriginal art but we were both interested in knowing more about it and seeing a part of Australia we had never set foot in. Walking through the exhibition, I had been stopped in my tracks by Vicki’s artwork, a large possum skin cloak, the skins engraved with a series of beautiful drawings. I knew a lot about cloaks, or so I thought, because I had been researching them for my novel for a couple of years. I had been down to Canberra to the wonderful library at AIATSIS and photocopied everything I could find and had seen the famous Lake Condah cloak behind glass at the Museum of Victoria but to see one in the flesh, up close, was gob-smacking. Still, I figured, it was up here in the Territory, not the Western District of Victoria, and it was a contemporary work, not from the 19^th Century. It would be a different thing, right?

Imagine my reaction when I was given a name and address that was slap-bang in the middle of the very country I was writing about, Gunditjmara country which roughly covers the area from Warrnambool west almost to the Glenelg River and north to the Wannon, in the Western District of Victoria. Tentatively I emailed Vicki, telling her what my book was about and asking her if she would read my manuscript sometime. She emailed me back right away and said she’d be happy to. `Send it as soon as you like’, she said. I stalled. It wasn’t nearly ready although I had been researching it and writing bits of the manuscript for a couple of years. But I thought of all the blind alleys I might go down if I didn’t get feed back from her. I stalled further. What if she hated it and told me I shouldn’t continue? I emailed her back. I would send it soon, I promise.

`Come on Candice,’ she said in her typically direct way, `cough it up.’

So I sent it. Poor Vicki. I really wasn’t ready and over the intervening years she would be subjected to one draft after another as my story altered, as chapters were deleted and put back in and as, most importantly, I developed as a writer. It would have tried the patience of a saint but she never complained and was with me to the end.

But back to Koroit. By the time I arrived I was very late and in a bit of a flap and, as the coffee shop was about to close, we went nearby to her home, a lovely old weatherboard house with a lavender-lined path which was crowded with books and journals and academic papers Vicki was using in her work. I met her partner Robert and three of her five daughters, Yarran, Jarrah and Niyoka, who came and went with telephones ringing and food being prepared for dinner. It was warm and slightly chaotic and very welcoming.

Looking back, I remember how nervous I was. I had been through a bad experience in the late 1990s after spending years and years preparing an exhibition of 19^th century paintings of Aboriginal people only to have it fall over at the last minute, partially through lack of funding and partially because I and my colleague, Anita Callaway, were both non-Aboriginal curators. It was frowned on, not PC, even though both Hettie Perkins and Brenda Croft had agreed to be our indigenous consultants. But there was unease about the racism of many of the images and whether the public would be able to put them in a proper context. Wouldn’t those horrible images just confirm what lots of people thought about Aborigines? Once a new Liberal Government came to power, the exhibition was abandoned.

Now once more, here I was a non-Aboriginal writer writing a story about an Aboriginal woman and her friendship with a Scottish settler. Writing about massacres and racism and frontier violence, but from an Aboriginal woman’s point of view, as well as that of a Scotswoman.

I told Vicki about my story and that I would tread carefully and thoughtfully, that I would be using accurate historical sources but would check with her as I went. I would not use real names and would be considerate about anything culturally sensitive.

Vicki unfurled one of her massive possum cloaks and spread it out along the living room floor. It was huge and heavy. She began to explain to me the meaning of all the symbols she had used and how they were engraved. She and other makers like her (Yorta Yorta as well as Gunditjmara and Kirraewurrung) had to import the skins now from New Zealand because Australian possums were protected.

`They’re big buggers,’ she said, the new skins being almost twice the size of an Australian possum skin so fewer skins are needed. She picked it up and put it around my shoulders and took a photo of me. What a moment. It was heavy and warm, and there was something in that moment that seemed to speak of the history that we shared though we came from such different heritages. Looking at that photo now I look lost in the folds of fur, unsure of the responsibility I was taking on. Overwhelmed.

Then Vicki put the cloak on and as I aimed my camera, I was brought to a halt. She looked like a queen. Totally regal and two inches taller. It just seemed right somehow.

We talked some more and she told me to keep in touch and let her know where I was up to. She would discuss it with her father Ivan Couzens who was a respected Gunditjmara elder but she didn’t have a problem with my writing my story as long as I did it with respect. She walked me out to my car. I was staying that night in Port Fairy so did not have far to go and I was feeling pleased with our meeting. We shook hands warmly and said our goodbyes and I could feel a bubble of excitement swelling inside me. I can do this, I thought. Yes. 

As I was about to get in the car, Vicki said, `Hang on a minute,’ and went back inside. When she came back, she handed me a book.

`You won’t find this in any library yet as it’s still a work in progress,’ she said, `it’s been a sort of joint project but copy it if you like and send it back to me when you’re finished.’ It was a dictionary of Kirraewurrung and related dialects compiled by the Gunditjmara Co Op with a foreword by her father Ivan.

I didn’t realize the true significance of it then but later I would – Vicki had just handed me the key to a door and when I went through it, as I was to do time and again over the ensuing years, the words contained therein told me more than years of research could ever do. Language. The beginning of a discourse between two very different, but also very similar, peoples.

That night back in my hotel, I began to read the dictionary. Beautiful words tumbled from the pages. The names of birds and animals and plants; of insects and snakes and fish and food; spears and clubs and waddies and shields; of kinship relationships; of mountains and creeks and lakes; then, of diseases and illnesses; of grief and loss; confusion and despair.

Here in these pages was the story of what we in Australia euphemistically called `first  contact’. Here was catastrophe – the destruction of a nation. But here too was friendship and forgiveness. Resilience and strength. Here were the Gunditjmara and Kirraewurrung words for hope, for courage, for respect, for memory, for belonging. Here was survival.  

And as I read, I realised that my real journey was only just beginning.

Read a Sample Chapter of THE LONGING >

Candice Bruce has been an art historian, writer and curator for many years. She has worked as a curator at the National Gallery of Australia, Australian National Maritime Museum and Queensland Art Gallery (where she was Curator of Australian Art). Her debut novel THE LONGING is a novel about loss, finding home and the significance of history - what is recorded and what is left unknown.

I countered this in three ways. Firstly, I produced a hugely detailed plan of close to 20,000 words before I even put pen to paper. It took the best part of three months and was probably the most fun thing about writing the book. You get to flesh out the whole story but without any of the boring bits, like actually writing it, and I remember charging round my study acting out the various scenes as I plotted the big climax. Great chunks of it still got abandoned as the book progressed but at least I had something solid to work with.

Secondly, I used multiple viewpoints. There were eight main characters in all-including hotel guests, terrorists, and the cops outside- as well as a host of more minor protagonists- and the book flashed constantly between them as the conditions inside the hotel deteriorated. I wanted the readers to get to know the people trapped inside, to try to put themselves in their shoes, not knowing who out of them was going to live and who was going to die.

And finally, I just improvised. When things didn’t work, I chucked them out. I brought dead characters back to life and killed off survivors; I changed the beginning; I changed the middle; I even partly changed the end. In short, I threw the kitchen sink at this book, and had so many sleepless nights and grisly days while I wrote it, that my friends and family came close to disowning me.

I hope it was worth it. But I guess I’m going to have to let you, the readers, be the judges of that.

Simon Kernickis one of Britain's most exciting new thriller writers. He arrived on the crime writing scene with his highly acclaimed debut novel The Business Of Dying, the story of a corrupt cop moonlighting as a hitman. His latest novel is Siege.

Inspired by historical events, WANTING is a novel about art, love, and the way in which life is finally determined never by reason, but only ever by wanting.

This bestselling, universally lauded, multi-award winning novel from internationally acclaimed writer Richard Flanagan is now available in paperback and as an ebook.

Read a sample chapter from WANTING by Richard Flanagan >

Read more about the book WANTING by Richard Flanagan >

Browse all of Richard Flanagan's books >

Read more about the National Year of Reading >

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë "Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same."

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald "He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete."

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates "The hell with "love" anyway, and with every other phony, time-wasting, half-assed emotion in the world."

Enduring Love by Ian McEwan "When it's gone, you'll know what a gift love was. You'll suffer like this. So go back and fight to keep it."

Still Life With Woodpecker by Tom Robbins "Love is the ultimate outlaw. It just won't adhere to any rules. The most any of us can do is to sign on as its accomplice. Instead of vowing to honour and obey, maybe we should swear to aid and abet. That would mean that security is out of the question. The words "make" and "stay" become inappropriate. My love for you has no strings attached. I love you for free."

Possession by A. S. Byatt "I cannot let you burn me up, nor can I resist you. No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed."

Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami "I was always hungry for love. Just once, I wanted to know what it was like to get my fill of it -- to be fed so much love I couldn't take any more. Just once. "

The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje "The heart is an organ of fire."

Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson "Love is the one thing stronger than desire and the only proper reason to resist temptation."

Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak "They loved each other, not driven by necessity, by the "blaze of passion" often falsely ascribed to love. They loved each other because everything around them willed it, the trees and the clouds and the sky over their heads and the hearth under their feet."

What's your favourite literary love affair? Let us know in the comments below.

Click here to see more books for Valentine's Day

Antonia Hayes is one of our brilliant publicists here at Random House Australia.

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At our latest Last Wednesday Book Club we had a fascinating discussion about THE LIGHT BETWEEN OCEANS, the debut novel by M.L. Stedman (picked by SMH as one of the twelve Australians to watch in 2012!).

We began by discussing the central theme of the novel, as covered by the strapline on the front cover: ‘This is a story of right and wrong, and how sometimes they look the same’. It’s the central core of the story – Tom and Isabel make one fateful decision that has devastating consequences not only for themselves but for others too. But what we loved about the novel was how there is a real blurring between what is right and what is wrong. More importantly it made us all think: what would I do in that situation?

And that’s when opinion divided… Some in the group could understand the decision they made, while others knew they would never have taken that road. But all could understand why the couple did what they did – even if not everyone was 100% sympathetic!

We all agreed how much we loved the central character, Tom, a World War I veteran who has never really been able to leave his horrific experiences in the past. His life is changed by the effervescent Isabel, and his devotion to her is so beautiful and at the same time so heart-breaking. Everyone in the group understood the extraordinary act of sacrifice he makes in the second half, even though it came as quite a shock to most of us. You can’t help loving him, and I for one had to admit that I would have happily coped with living on an isolated lighthouse island in the middle of the ocean if he was my companion!

We discussed how Tom was a man who strives to do the right thing at every turn, but each time he does a ‘right’ thing there is a terrible consequence that sets off another chain of events.

The discussion got very lively and more divided when thinking about Isabel. We all agreed she was a fantastic character who lit up the page. However half the group disapproved of her actions and behaviour from the moment they found the baby. The other half of the group fought her corner fiercely as they could see the emotional turmoil she was already suffering and how she had convinced herself the decision was in the baby’s best interests.

We discussed how it was impossible to predict what was going to happen, and how it was going to end – which for us as readers made it all the more enjoyable and engaging. In fact, it was actually hard to know how we wanted it to end, i.e. what was the right ending for the child, for Isabel, for Tom, for the others back on the mainland?

But a show of hands demonstrated that most of us were in tears when we turned the last page. Some shed a modest tear, while others bawled their eyes out!

Beverly Cousins is Random House Australia's Fiction Publisher.

C           Catch 22, Joseph Heller or Cakes and Ale, W Somerset Maugham
It would be wrong to ignore a work of genius such as Catch 22, something so clever and desperately hilarious and serious, but let’s also consider something that should be more widely read like W. Somerset Maugham’s Cakes and Ale. Fame and celebrity are not new phenomena, there have perhaps always been those who attracted more attention than their talent warranted. Maugham takes his pointy pen to literary poseurs and gives us a heroine to remember.

D          Moby Dick, Herman Melville
Moby Dick is a masterpiece. It resonates far and wide. I loved hearing Julie, the daughter of Coach Taylor on Friday Night Lights, insouciantly tell her father “Moby Dick is actually the perfect metaphor for this town. The cold black sea representing the season in all its uncertainties. The magical white whale is the Holy Grail”, as he anguished over the coming game.

E           Emma, Jane Austen
Emma is my husband’s favourite Austen novel. I think it is delightful - clever and sly and witty and true. I just feel declaring a favourite would somehow minimise the others and they have each given me such pleasure.

F           The Collector, John Fowles
Fowles is one of those writers where the first work of theirs I read will never be surpassed by any of their others because I was so captivated by their style, boldness, voice and prose. I was travelling with a friend and we had The Collector and The Magus. I read The Collector first and she The Magus, it could so easily have been the other way around, but for me my favourite Fowles novel is, and forever will be The Collector. The milliner, Philip Treacy, is designing a new cover for The French Lieutenant’s Woman. An enticing reason to re-acquaint myself with that novel.

G           Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift
What a pleasure it is to return to stories you knew and enjoyed as a child and find they have so much more to offer. Gulliver’s Travels is way beyond clever. Why are books like this no longer published? Are we no longer generous enough readers to consume satire without being offended?

H           The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
I hated The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn when I studied it for my HSC exams. The fault belonged to the system and not Mr Twain. I read it again at University and listened to Dr Don Anderson talk around and about it and came to enjoy it very, very much.

I              A Single Man, Christopher Isherwood
People make bad movies from good books. Can you make a good movie from a rubbish book? Tom Ford made a sexy, compelling and deeply affecting movie of A Single Man. He had a wonderful novel to start from.

J              Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
What a romance is Jane Eyre. Plain and good heroine, dark and troubled hero, and how I love them both. They are forced to strive hard to achieve their happy-ever-after and it is all the more satisfying and enduring for all they learnt along the way. The prose is powerful and perfect. Open this novel on any page and you will have read 10 more before you even pause to take a breath.

K           Just So Stories, Rudyard Kipling
Do you recall The Beginning of the Armadilloes? How the Rhinoceros Got His Skin? Give yourself a giggle and settle down with Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories – with or without children by your side. Though be careful if you are reading on the train, the jaunty rhythms demand to be read aloud.

L             Independent People, Halldor Laxness
What is the use of creating a list unless I too find something to add to my reading pile? Scandinavian literature is enormously popular, so why not try the work of the Nobel Laureate from Reykjavik? The New York Review of Books said this of Independent People by Halldor Laxness “There are good books and there are great books and there may be a book that is something still more: it is the book of your life.”

M            The Master and Margareta, Mikhail Bulgakov or Middlemarch, George Eliot or Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie
Why do so many of my favourite novels start with M? Read Middlemarch, then The Master and Margareta follow up with Midnight’s Children. You will have crossed centuries, continents and cultures and learnt almost all you need to go on to lead a good, useful and satisfying life.

N         Selected Poems of Pablo Neruda
How many poets could fill a stadium with 100,000 people cheering to hear them read? How many poets have had Oscar Award-winning films inspired by their lives? How many poets were forced into exile by their political and national activities? For some there is Pablo Neruda the man and for others Pablo Neruda the poet, as he said of himself in his Nobel acceptance speech “A Poet is at the same time a force for solidarity and for solitude.”

O             Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson
This is another case where the first Winterson novel I read will always be my preferred. Others vehemently support The Passion, or Sexing The Cherry, generally because it is how they discovered this remarkably upbeat, bold, courageous, humorous and challenging writer. It is impossible to read Oranges are Not the Only Fruit and be unchanged by it.

P             Possession, A.S. Byatt
You know the feeling? You are at work/ having a meeting/ in a lecture / catching up with a friend / listening to your mother on the phone, but really you are so deeply anticipating being home again with your nose in a book that you are invisible in the present. That is what I was like with Possession. It is a literary detective novel and it had me racing back to its pages time and again to work out what was going to be discovered next, and to gauge how all the love stories were progressing. The new purple edition is simply gorgeous.

Q             Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes
Don Quixote is a wonderful novel and what a character is Alonso Quijan aka Don Quixote de la Mancha. It has everything; humour, pathos, deception, insanity, the search for romance and meaning. We have adopted so many ideas and phrases - tilting at windmills, quixotic – from this novel, perhaps without even reading it. The memories it will leave with you will be long-lasting.

R           Remembering Babylon, David Malouf
David Malouf writes contemporary and historical work, re-imagined and invented tales, stories of the land and of its many different peoples. Remembering Babylon shares the life of Gemmy Fairley.  The displacements and suspicions he endures are horrifying and yet this novel is full of hope. All of David’s work is wise and moving and memorable.

S              The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin
The Songlines is a book that has attracted controversy on a number of grounds, but when I read it all I noticed was its beauty and that it spoke to me.

T           The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway the man has come to dominate the words he wrote. (Did you see Midnight in Paris? Hilarious!) But it is time we all reminded ourselves that the man was a great writer. Start with the fable The Old Man and the Sea and you will soon be tracking down copies of his other books. So few words, such strong images they create and of course, lessons for life.

U             Tess of the D’urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
Is there a more heartbreaking novel than Tess of the D’Urbervilles? The reader is completely immersed in Tess’s world for the duration of the novel. If I was an actor, it is scenes from this novel that I would call upon to make me cry on cue.

V             Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
It is wonderful when an excellent contemporary novel such as Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, and its subsequent film version, bring readers back to the classics. A novel taking place in the course of one day is enormously difficult to craft.  Joyce took rather a few more pages to make Ulysses work than Virginia Woolf needed to ensure Mrs Dalloway was an entirely provoking and satisfying experience.

W           Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
I hope I am not starting to look like a hopeless romantic … Can you think of a better way to spend a rainy weekend than ensconced in an armchair, pot of tea by your side battling with wilful Cathy and the choices she makes in Wuthering Heights? Doesn’t matter how many times you read it, the complex undertones will have you switching sides and back again with every new reading.

X             The Rape of the Lock, Alexander Pope
I first read The Rape of the Lock at university and still recall the shock and pleasure each couplet provided. This mock-epic is rude! The celebrities of the early 1700s seem rather familiar. Pope’s brilliant and funny jibes and judgements are every bit as pertinent today.

Y             We, Yevgeny Zamyatin
We is a novel I have meant, for many years, to read. It is time to move it up the pile. We, the first modern dystopian novel and a satire on state control, was banned on publication in Russia in 1921. The hero of the novel, D-503 finds himself caught up in illegal activities – love and rebellion. My theme continues!

Z             The Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum
Wonderful books are so often the starting points for successful films. It is hard to read The Wizard of Oz without picturing Judy Garland in plaits, but Baum’s delightful prose does makes it possible to dream even more vividly than the technicolour film.

Meredith Curnow is the Knopf Vintage Publisher here at Random House Australia.

Susie Burrell completed both her nutrition and dietetics and psychology degrees at the University of Wollongong. She is the author of Lose Weight Fast which is available now.

Once upon a time power was more honest about its fear of novels and placed them on such lists of the banned as the Catholic Church’s Index Librorum Prohibutorum. And yet, then as now, what power forbids we desire. Perversely, voraciously, we keep reading the classics. And again and again as we bite into these strange, forbidden fruit there comes a shocking discovery: we like them.

Because classics are ours and we are theirs. Only after tens of thousands of readings by mostly anonymous readers over many years, decades, centuries; only then when the cumulative wisdom of these readings is that the book contains some fundamental truth that exists beyond its subject and style; then and only then does a novel become a classic. It is we who make classics, for it is we who find our own rejected souls within them, and we can no more forsake them than we can our nose or eyes.

These books are written not to flatter the stupidities of their age, of the past, which is why many of them were often reviled and even lost at the time of their first publication. They were written for us, now. And that is why they have endured, why they have grown, why they refuse to die. Because great novels always belong to the future. To us.

It is true that great novels do not get the washing done or wars stopped. Great novels cannot even halt indigestion, flatulence or bad breath. A suburban pharmacy is more help than Ulysses; Nurofen more use than Kafka. Yet if great novels offer neither guidance nor even hope, no path through this vale of mystery, they do remind us of the sheer wonder of passing this way. Rather than being oppressive we find these amoral grammars liberating, which is perhaps why they have been so long feared.

Perhaps in the end we are above all other things a story-telling species. And it is this—this unique capacity to divine the world and invent it anew in stories—that has led us to our particular destiny. Our stories are hardly restricted to novels—long before Cervantes we had religion, politics, history. Lately we have had science, economics, the market—to name but a few. All of them stories of often cosmic complexity. But it was in the novel that human beings invented a particular form for the telling of stories that is one of the great inventions of the human spirit.

Great novels can never be reduced to an aesthetics, an ideology, a message. They are the light from a long dead star that continues passing through the universe. They are conceived mysteriously in love and carry a soul, and they can only be apprehended by the opening of our own souls to that love. What sort of love? Perhaps that love which begins with Don Quixote putting a chamber pot on his head and stepping out into the modern world convinced of his glorious destiny only to be laughed at; a profound expression of love for stupidity, frailty and mortality, which is an unkind way of saying humanity.

The gods keep calling us back for the wars and horrors waged in their various names. But great novels remind us that we should live not in fear of hells or heaven beyond, but with what we can feel and touch and smell. The everyday, the here and now,  the marvelous real. That we must take joy and find wonder in our world now.  For there is no other.

Why then do I value classics? Because they remind me —in my weakness, in my folly, in my terror, in my passion, in my hate, in my love—of one liberating, exhilarating, extraordinary thing.

I am not alone.

Richard Flanagan is one of Australia's finest novelists. He is the author of the critically acclaimed WANTING, THE SOUND OF ONE HAND CLAPPING, DEATH OF A RIVER GUIDE and many more. Richard's works are now avaliable as Vintage Classics.

1. Sorry, set in remote Western Australia during WWII, is as intense and colourful as the land where it is set. Isolation encourages the most intense loyalties and friendships and allows the imagination to fly.  But it also enables terrible behaviour to be inflicted upon others and rationalised as acceptable. This is a novel of many layers, all of them exquisite.
2. Everyone has read The Slap, but have you read Loaded, Christos Tsiolkas’s first novel? As Tolstoy noted, families are endlessly fascinating and often just waiting for the final trigger to implode.
3. David Malouf is a storyteller with a gift for illuminating humanity through poems, libretti, short stories and novels. Evident in all his work is his other life as a reader, one who burrows further than the work on the page into the life behind it. Read An Imaginary Life, you will see what I mean.
4. Peter Carey never writes the same novel twice, different terrain, different characters and flaws are explored with every new release. I have loved many of his novels but as the rivers of Northern NSW threaten to burst again I am reminded of the long-lasting effect Oscar and Lucinda has had on me.
5. Have you met Edith Campbell Berry? Do yourself a favour and start on Grand Days this very day. And while you are making your purchase order a copy for each young person you know who has just completed their HSC or degree. Optimism and ambition, burst out of its pages as do adventure and inspiration.
6. The Good Parents is one of those novels where readers almost forgot someone had written this story with intent. Each person I discussed it with - and it is one you have to talk about - had a different journey in mind for each Toni, Jacob and Maya. But just remember, it is called The Good Parents.
7. Crying comes to me quite naturally when I am reading and watching films and TV. Even though I love to laugh in real life the fictional world I visit doesn’t bring me to a guffaw too often. The Book of Emmett took me up and down and round and round and left me breathless.
8. Quite a few first novels have entered my list today, hmmm. Three Dollars by Elliot Perlman grappled with economic rationalism at the same time we were first living it. I love it when the real world and the fictional collide.
9. What’s not to love about a novel in which every line reads as poetry and characters become heroes, fall, get back up and strive to just be human. When Colts Ran ranges across decades, paddocks and townships and exposes - in intimate detail - our fears, hopes and dreams of a fulfilling life.
10. Australian novels do not need to take place on Australian soil. We all seek the universal and the personal in stories. Summertime is dark and funny and excoriatingly honest and I urge you to read it.
    
    A few more than ten books here, but the forecast is bad from what I can see. It is going to be too wet or too hot to head outside, so why don’t you curl up on your couch with a pot of tea and a lamington and read?

Meredith Curnow is the Knopf Vintage Publisher here at Random House Australia.

The film adaptation of Kaui Hart Hemmings’s THE DESCENDANTS picked up a multitude of nominations, including Best Film, Directing, Film Editing and Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Actor for George Clooney.

The animated film, PUSS IN BOOTS was nominated for Best Animated Feature Film, while THE ADVENTURES OF TIN-TIN picked up a nomination in the Music (Original Score) category.

The Iron Lady also picked up nominations in the Make-up category as well as Actress in a Leading Role for Meryl Streep. The biopic of Britain’s only female Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, has garnered critical and popular acclaim since its release. The life of Ms Thatcher is documented in John Campbell’s award-winning two volume biography MARGRET THATCHER: THE ABRIDGED.

See the full list of nominees here.

The winners will be announced on 26 February 2012. So stay tuned for more news.
 

So what does the title HHhH mean? Well, it is an acronym of a phrase that was apparently used in Germany during Hitler’s time: “Himmlers Hirn heist Heydrich” (Himmler’s mastermind was named Heydrich.) The book blurb describes the story well:

"We are in Prague, in 1942. Two men have been enlisted to kill the head of the Gestapo. This is Operation Anthropoid: two Czechoslovakian parachutists sent on a daring mission by London to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich - chief of the Nazi secret services, 'the hangman of Prague', 'the blond beast', 'the most dangerous man in the Third Reich'. His boss is Heinrich Himmler but everyone in the SS says 'Himmler's brain is called Heydrich', which in German spells HHhH. All the characters in HHhH are real. All the events depicted are true. But alongside the nerve-shredding preparations for the attack runs another story: when you are a novelist writing about real people, how do you resist the temptation to make things up? HHhH is a panorama of the Third Reich told through the life of one outstandingly brutal man, a story of unbearable heroism and loyalty, revenge and betrayal. It is improbably entertaining and electrifyingly modern."

I haven’t been so immersed in a book in ages and so thrilled by its achievements. I cannot lavish enough praise on this most original and bold, award winning novel. Laurent Binet took some big narrative risks in writing HHhH and they all work. I am in awe of his talent. I guarantee that as you read the last page your heart will be racing and your spirit will shudder at the thought of it all.

HHhH by Laurent Binet is in stores May 2012.

I reluctantly started reading Maggie McKellar’s memoir, WHEN IT RAINS, on our publishing director’s recommendation. Although this was an important and big book for us at Random House I was hesitant because on the face of it this sounded like a really sad story and I didn’t know if that’s what I felt like reading. How wrong was I. WHEN IT RAINS is a magnificent, honest and inspiring true story of an Australian  woman – a wife and mother and how she rebuilds her life, and that of her family’s, after her husband’s death – in fact, his suicide. It’s about falling in love, devastating secrets, horses, children and the redeeming qualities of the land and of family and community. Even though Maggie’s story is so far removed from my life her staggering ability as a writer pulled me in and I was able to see how her story had meaning for mine. I was and remain inspired by Maggie’s fortitude and the decisions she made in piecing a whole life back together – I also admire her courage and her writing skills in being able to share her story in such a powerful and authentic way.

This book, originally published last year, is now out in paperback and is also available as an ebook. I highly recommend WHEN IT RAINS and guarantee you’ll never forget reading it.

WHEN IT RAINS by Maggie McKellar is in stores now.

Read a FREE sample chapter from WHEN IT RAINS >

The other day when I was sorting through my files, I found this poem I wrote while I was actually living and working in the camp. If you haven’t read, “The Girl in Steel-Capped Boots”, I hope this little piece puts you in the mood.

The Pilbara

Red beaches
Gentle slopes
Fresh clean breeze
Life upon the Pilbara
Surely is with ease

Taunting creeks
Fishing rods
Water filled with game
If you’re not on the rocks this night
You’ll be deemed insane

Mud Crab bubbles
Barbeques
Warm autumn nights
Feel the calmness on the Pilbara
As the red sun sinks from sight

Hard work
Long days
Hours filled with toil
Iron in the Pilbara
Is hidden in the soil

Cold beer
Picnic benches
Stories long and true
Shared upon the Pilbara
Where life’s a kangaroo

Loretta Hill is the author of GIRL IN THE STEEL CAPPED BOOTS, a delectable novel of red dust and romance which is available in January 2012.

THE INFORMATIONIST launched onto the New York Times and Publishers Weekly bestseller lists. Comparisons flew, and a number of readers surmised that my heroine and her history—a woman who’d suffered traumatic violence as a teenager—was certainly drawn from my own life. It took me awhile to realize that this projection, frustrating as it was to be publicly psychoanalyzed by people who didn’t know me, was one of the highest compliments I could be paid as a storyteller; I came to realize that although the history of the characters—especially that of the anti-heroine Vanessa “Michael” Munroe—were complete fabrications, they were drawn with enough realism and emotional pain that the natural assumption for readers was that the story could only be partially autobiographical.

It wasn’t.

To be fair, I did live in West-Central Africa, the setting for most of THE INFORMATIONIST which was realistically portrayed. And up to the point of trying my hand at fiction life had provided plenty of dark emotional material upon which to draw. But truthfully, when writing THE INFORMATIONIST my focus was so entirely set on bringing Africa to life—specifically Equatorial Guinea where much of the story takes place—that the thought of throwing events from my own childhood into the mix didn’t even cross my mind.

However, THE INNOCENT, the second Michael Munroe novel, is a very different story.

People often ask me, “what was it like for you growing up, can you tell me just a little,” and really, that’s impossible, because there is no “little” bit of telling. I wrote THE INNOCENT partly because I felt sending Michael Munroe to rescue a kidnapped child would be a way to showcase a side of her that we didn’t get to see in THE INFORMATIONIST, but also so that now, whenever I’m asked what it was like growing up, I can point to this book and say, “it’s all in there.”

As with THE INFORMATIONIST, the characters are entirely made up—they are not based on any particular person/ people, and specifically the teenage Hannah and all of her experiences are emphatically not me or mine. But the world of The Chosen does very much mirror what I and many of my friends experienced growing up in The Children of God, and it wasn’t difficult to understand Hannah’s thoughts and emotions because all I had to do was put myself back into my own mind at thirteen and fourteen and then transfer into words what I couldn’t at that time. THE INNOCENT is entirely fiction and yet—thriller elements aside—probably the closest I will ever come to writing an autobiography.

Taylor Stevens is the author of THE INFORMATIONIST and THE INNOCENT. Both books feature the extraordinary, take-no-prisoners heroine Vanessa Munroe. Out now.

Kathleen Alleaume is a trusted health expert in the field of nutrition, fitness, and wellness. She is also the author of the brilliant new book, What's Eating You: Find Your Balance With Food and Lose Weight which is available now.

Right about now most of us are breathing a sigh of relief – Christmas, is (thankfully) done. The chaotic schedule of breakfasts, lunches and dinners is complete; the presents are open (with the wrapping in the recycling) and our stomachs are looking a bit worse-for-wear from the copious amounts of food and drink consumed.

We persisted through the uncomfortable and exasperating family gatherings where Aunty reminds us we're looking a bit chubby (again); the kids are flying high on cordial and sweets as they jump in and out of the pool; we're force-fed mince pies by our Nanna and we wonder what pattern our Christmas socks will have this year.

Rather a dull perspective? Scrooge-like, would you say? Yes, but it doesn't have to be like this.

Now begins the peaceful lull before the storm of a New Year begins, when we catch up on sleep, snack on leftovers, lie in the sun on the beach (if the rain holds off) and decide to fight against the Christmas belly with a fitness regime . . . but not just yet! It can wait a little longer.

For those of us who love a good read, this is finally the time to knock off that list of '2011-must-reads' or, if our family knows us well, a time to add to that list with a book gifted under our Christmas tree. Or perhaps a chance to kick-star someone else's reading addictiaon with a gift given. Our 2012 reading list also starts here – oh how long it is!

For the tech-savvy this is your chance to figure out exactly how that e-reader works. You're a gadget lover – you'll figure it out (best of luck and enjoy!).

Either way, this time doesn't have to be about mumbling the word, 'Humbug!', under our breath as we endure the pains of Christmas, but rather a chance to centre our thoughts on the joys of family (no matter how quirky), the delights of food and drink, enjoying our Christmas gifts and a good book in your hand or the hand of someone you love.

Hope you had a very Merry Christmas and hope you'll have a joyous New Year!

A CHRISTMAS CAROL by Charles Dickens, part of the Vintage Classics collection. Browse more Vintage Classics books.

Jess Starreveld is the Marketing Administrator at Random House Australia.

3. They're classics for a reason. Chinos, knitted ties, canvas tennis shoes, rugby jumpers, trench coats, tweed blazers, flat caps. Hockney never wore anything that wasn't tried and tested, and on many other men would have looked staid & drab, but it was how he put them together and how he wore them that made him stylish.
Click here for an example of point 3

4. Don't be afraid of colour. Hockney's paintings are vibrantly coloured and so were his clothes. To quote style site Mr Porter, 'he was a one man revolution that killed forever the ridiculous mantras of the 'boys don't wear pink' variety that had held men back for centuries.'
Click here for an example of point 4

5. You have to know the rules before you can break them – unless you're fortunate enough to be born with an innate sense of style like Hockney's then, like anything else, you need to walk before you can run. Educate yourself, take mental notes, learn what works and what doesn't and why. Then you can start to bend the rules and finally, make your own. Style – just take what you want, don't let it trap you.
Click here for an example of point 5

HOCKNEY: THE RAKE'S PROGRESS, the authorised biography of David Hockney, is published by Random House this month.

Justin Ractliffe is the Sales & Marketing Manager of Children's Books at Random House Australia.

There is also a promotion running in conjunction with the exhibition, which offers visitors a chance to WIN a limited edition copy of Murakami's 1Q84, worth $1,500, in their 'Murakami Mayhem' competition.

Head to The Galeries Facebook Page to enter.

Read more about the promotions and exhibition from The Galeries website

If you're around Sydney City, make sure you head down to join in on the festivities and celebrate the joy and love of books and literature.

The Galeries centre is situated at 500 George St, Sydney

Read more about THE SELECTED WORKDS OF T.S. SPIVET by Reif Larsen.

Jean-Pierre Jeunet will team up once again with longtime screenwriting collaborator Guillaume Laurant to adapt the story. Laurant had also worked on AMELIE and A VERY LONG ENGAGEMENT.

Jean-Pierre Jeunet is also set to try his hand at 3D technology. This film will also signal the director’s return to working in the English language. The shooting for the film will take place early next year,  with an estimated release date in the second half of 2013.