John Purcell

@bookeboy.bsky.social

565 Followers 338 Following

Bookseller, reviewer, interviewer and author - The Girl on the Page, The Lessons & The Secret Lives of Emma trilogy. The Amateur's Guide to Killing Bad Guys out Sept 2027. My blog (yes eople still have blogs): https://www.johnpurcellauthor.com/blog

Photo of the paperback advanced reading copy of Glyph by Ali Smith
Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash book description: The Flynns are not alright. It's been disastrous since Bud and Catherine opened up their marriage, and none of the Flynns can remember the last time a meal was cooked, a load of laundry done, or a social code abided by. Their daughters spiral in their own chaotic orbits: Abigail, the eldest, is dating a man in his twenties nicknamed War Crime Wes; Louise, the middle child, maintains a secret correspondence with an online terrorist; the brilliant youngest, Harper, is being sent to wilderness reform camp due to her insistence that someone or something - is monitoring the town's citizens. Casting a shadow across their lives, and their small coastal town, is Paul Alabaster, a nefarious local billionaire. Rumours of corruption circulate, but no one dares dig too deep. No one except Harper, whose obsession with Alabaster's machinations sends the family hurtling into a criminal conspiracy - one that may just, finally, bring them closer together. Rippling with humour, warmth and style, Lost Lambs offers a stunning portrait of the perverse pleasures and perils of our most intimate reality: our family
Wiki: Tigerlily is the debut studio album by American singer-songwriter Natalie Merchant, released on June 20, 1995, following her departure from the alternative rock band 10,000 Maniacs.
A screenshot of The Nile Online Bookshop's Classic Literature page featuring books by Dostoyevsky, Spark, E.M. Forster, Yates and many others.
Photo of the cover of the hardback edition of Seascraper by Benjamin Wood
Photo of the paperback of Man in the Holocene by Max Frisch
Cover of the paperback of The Echoing Grove by Rosamond Lehmann
A photo of the paperback of Gliff by Ali Smith resting awkwardly on a white painted windowsill by a mottled glass window seemingly wondering why it has been placed there.
Cover of Release the Bats: Writing Your Way Out Of It by DBC Pierre
Screenshot of text: 'I'll tell you what's the greatest power under heaven,' said Felix, 'and that is public opinion - the ruling belief in society about what is right and what is wrong, what is honourable and what is shameful. That's the steam that is to work the engines. How can political freedom make us better any more than a religion we don't believe in, if people laugh and wink when they see men abuse and defile it? And while public opinion is what it is - while men have no better beliefs about public duty - while corruption is not felt to be a damning disgrace - while men are not ashamed in parliament and out of it to make public questions which concern the welfare of millions a mere screen for their own petty private ends, - I say, no fresh scheme of voting will much mend our condition.' George Eliot - Felix Holt, The Radical
Photo of a bin room between two unit blocks with a view of the Opera House.
Poster for the play Betrayal by Harold Pinter being performed at Old Fitz Theatre in Woolloomooloo, Sydney.
Screenshot of The Nile's Australian Children's Books page featuring books by Australian Children's book authors and illustrators.
Screenshot of The Nile's Australian First Nations Collection page featuring books by First Nations authors.
Photo of a book: The BLUFFER'S GUIDE To LITERATURE. Introduced by David Frost. Know your jargon and hold your own in any company. INSTANT ERUDITION
Photo of the cover of the novel On The Calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle:
Goodreads review of Brother of the More Famous Jack by Barbara Trapido: God I enjoyed Brother of the More Famous Jack by Barbara Trapido. So lively, so true and so good. I have had a copy on my shelves for decades. So many people (women) have recommended it to me over the years. What a dope I was for waiting. So good on big families and small, on relationships, on people, on love, sex and marriage. Her many characters walk off the page into your life. But enough of me going on. Loved it.
Photo of text from How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton: A: Take the unemotive example of the telephone. Bell invented it in 1876. By 1900, there were thirty thousand phones in France. Proust rapidly acquired one [tel. 29205] and particularly liked a service called the 'theatre-phone', which allowed him to listen live to opera and theatre in Paris venues.
Screenshot of a review of the Lessons: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Totally immersive with a completely satisfying, unexpectedly happy ending. Adored this.
Screenshot of a Goodreads review of Strangers by Anita Brookner: Another desperately sad and lonely subject for Anita Brookner to explore, a retired bank manager. Bachelor. Family reduced to a tenuous claim to a cousin's widow, who he visits without ever knowing whether he clings to the association as desperately as she does, or whether she just endures his monthly Sunday visits. And he never does know for sure either way. Of course, Anita Brookner doesn't let our retired bank manager be. She inserts two very different complications into his life, a strange bird-like sponge of a woman, and a defeated, prematurely old, ex-girlfriend. I can't say gaiety ensures. No, this is Anita Brookner after all. A minute examination of his current life, his past and his fanciful futures follows, circuitously, deadeningly, to the very last page. Just my cup of tea.
Screenshot of the novel The Lessons by John Purcell as it appears on Booktopia bookshop.
Photo of text: His reading now was confined to diaries, notebooks, memoirs, anything that contained a confessional element. He was in search of evidence of discomfiture, disappointment, rather than triumph, over circumstances. Circumstances, he knew, would always overrule. Those great exemplars of the past, the kind he had always sought in classic novels, usually finished on a note of success, of exoneration, which was not for him. In the absence of comfort he was forced to contemplate his own failure, failure not in worldly terms but in the reality of his circumscribed life. He knew, rather more clearly than he had ever known before, that he had succeeded only at mundane tasks, that he had failed to deliver a reputation that others would acknowledge. Proof, if proof were needed, lay in the fact that his presence was no longer sought, that, deprived of the structure of the working day, he was at a loss, obliged to look for comfort in whatever he could devise for himself. His life of reading, of walking, was invisible to others: his friendships, so agreeable in past days, had dwindled, almost disappeared. Memories were of no use to him; indeed, even memory was beginning to be eroded by the absence of confirmation. As to love, that was gone for good. Whatever he managed to contrive for himself would not, could not, be construed as success. Sarah wessh
Screenshot of Guardian headline: Edmund White, novelist and great chronicler of gay life, dies aged 85 The American essayist, playwright and author of books including A Boy's Own Story and The Married Man has died
Poster of The Empress tv series on Netflix
Excerpt from Henry Handel Richardson by Nettie Palmer with HHR writing about the development of Laura from The Getting of Wisdom: As before, my original plan was merely to paint a milieu. But again the chief character took command: almost insensibly the book grew to what it is: a more or less subtle story of a young girl's inner growth. But a girl with a difference. For this particular one was a writer in the making, and, even thus early, the taint of her calling was in her, marking her off from the rest of her school-mates. She lived among them, but not of them; and, strive as she might, for she longed to be one with them, she never succeeded in bringing her thoughts and feelings in line with theirs. She suffered where they laughed; enjoyed where they wept or condemned; took a lively interest in things from which they turned decorously away; meanwhile all unconsciously laying up, squirrel-wise, a store of her own peculiar brand of wisdom.
Photo of the Penguin paperback of Maigret Gets Angry by Georges Simenon
Screenshot of Larrikin House's announcement of signing me, John Purcell, for a new thriller.
Photo of the 1964 Penguin paperback of Maigret Mystified by Georges Simenon
Photo of the paperback of Myself When Young by Henry Handel Richardson
Photo of the paperback of The Details by Tegan Bennett Daylight
Photo of the paperback of Joshua Spassky by Gwendoline Riley
Screenshot of my Goodreads review of Unless by Carol Shields: Such a powerful book. Brilliant and moving and unforgiving and intelligent. Endlessly thought-provoking. Unflinching, true and beautiful on grief, on love, on gender, on writing, on relationships, on family, on women, on men, on everything. It can be read on so many levels. The delivery never settles on one mode. Light, changeable, shocking and spare. And beautiful. And dark. A writing course in its style, tone, inventiveness as well as being overtly about writing in the narrative. And yet, this is writing as a pathway to further understanding. A lesson in listening as well as telling. As you can probably tell, I liked Unless and admired it, and marvelled at it, and learnt from it. Boys schools should teach it in the final year. Unless is at once a bomb set to go off in the hands of men and a balm in the hands of women. Bravo, Carol Shields. Bloody brilliant.
Photo of text from Unless by Carol Shields: I too am aware of being in incestuous waters, a woman writer who is writing about a woman writer who is writing. I know perfectly well that I ought to be writing about dentists and bus drivers and manicurists and those folks who design the drainage beds for eight-lane highways. But no, I am focusing on the stirrings of the writerly impulse, or the "long littleness," to use Frances Cornford's phrase, of a life spent affixing small words to large, empty pages. We may pretend otherwise, but to many writers this is the richest territory we can imagine. There are novelists who go to the trouble of cloaking their heroes in loose crossover garments, turning them into painters or architects, but no one's fooled. This matters, the remaking of an untenable world through the nib of a pen; it matters so much I can't stop doing it.
Photo of the paperback of Unless by Carol Shields
Photo of the paperback of Diving, Falling by Kylie Mirmohamadi
Photo of the hardcover of Maigret and the Headless Corpse by Georges Simenon.
Photo of a stack of paperback books that include Fanny BURNEY'S CAMILLA, Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel, You Can't Go Home Again and The Web and the Rock and NIKOLAI TOLSTOY'S PATRICK O'BRIAN The Making of the Novelist
Text by Ann Patchett: I could buy books because I write books and I co-own a bookstore and books are my business. Could I have made it a full year without buying books? Absolutely. I could have used the library or read the books that were already in my house, but I didn't, I bought books.
Goodreads review of Cakes and Ale by Somerset Maugham: A delicious treat of a book for writers. A satire of the literary life. As true now as it was then. The opening twenty pages are like stumbling into the middle of a fire fight. Shots fired from every direction. No one left uninjured. Those alone are worth the cost of admission. But then the book goes in for the kill. Cold hearted killer of a book. Highly recommended
Photo of the Vintage Classic paperback of Cakes and Ale by Somerset Maugham
Very green lawn, trees and the harbour. Pyrmont.
My Goodreads review of How Novels Work by John Mullen: Quietly breaks the novel down into its component bits and examines them (with examples), revealing the odd workings behind the magic of a good read.
Photo of the paperback of How Novels Work by John Mullen.
Footage of a glassy harbour and Anzac Bridge in the background.
Anzac Bridge at sunset
Photo of the paperback of Georges Simenon's The Investigations of Inspector Maigret
Screenshot of the first paragraph of The Novel by Michael Schmidt: Ford Madox Ford chose as his guide through the vast, haunted house of fiction not critics, experts, or theorists but "artist-practitioners." He describes them as "men and women who love their arts as they practice them." These people feel "hot love" for the books they advocate, unlike what Cyril Connolly in Enemies of Promise describes as "literary die-hards, old cats that sit purring over the mouse-holes of talent in wait for what comes out." The forms their advocacy takes also illuminate their own lives and times.
Screenshot of a Goodreads review of The Friend by Sigrid Nunez: Highly recommend The Friend by Sigrid Nunez. It is one of the best books I've read lately - like having access to a very intelligent, well read and interesting old friend who for some inexplicable reason you've never spoken to before. But it is dark - suicide is a major theme and some might find this difficult to cope with. Even it's lighter moments are tinged with sadness. But overall it is life affirming. Well, no, that's not it. Overall it encourages you to be more interesting and interested. Life is neither here nor there.. : And you will want to underline lines and passages throughout. I didn't because I'm not a monster. But you might. Oh, and there is a dog in it.
Screenshot of my blog post: Not in the Job Description - How Authors Became Accidental Marketers
My Goodreads review of A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel: After a hundred pages or so I forbade myself from asking after each page, how did Mantel do this?, and just read it as though such achievements are commonplace. A Place of Greater Safety gives us a very plausible, utterly human, account of the French Revolution. A novelist's view of The Terror - smashing to pieces the ordered view of historians. Coming only a few years after Simon Schama's brilliant and angry and unforgiving account of the revolution, Citizens, I can't help wondering if Mantel wrote this in reply.