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| photo: Jack Robert-Tissot | |
Australian author Heather Rose has written seven novels, and her fourth novel for adults, The Museum of Modern Love, was just published in the U.S. by Algonquin. It's set during Marina Abramović's seminal art event The Artist Is Present at New York City's Museum of Modern Art in 2010. Rose also writes the much-loved Tuesday McGillycuddy series for children under the pen name Angelica Banks with co-author Danielle Wood. Rose lives on the island of Tasmania.
On your nightstand now:
Haruki Murakami's Killing Commendatore, Kate Atkinson's Transcription, Dr Joe Dispenza's Becoming Supernatural, Colson Whitehead's Zone One
Favorite book when you were a child:
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
Your top five authors:
Okay, I have to bend the rules a little here. Here are nine because it's too hard to name just five: Haruki Murakami, Kate Atkinson, Kazuo Ishiguro, David Mitchell, Elizabeth Strout, Elizabeth Gilbert, Virginia Woolf, Cormac McCarthy, Philip Roth. I am always looking for brilliant, haunting characters, rich world creation and a deep ocean of emotions.
Book you've faked reading:
War and Peace. I love Tolstoy but that one just tangles my brain.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Naomi Alderman's The Power. It's a book for every woman. Superb to the very last sentence.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Middlemarch by George Eliot (a cloth-bound edition) and Elizabeth Gilbert's The Signature of All Things in that original hardback with the botanical art. In truth I love collecting multiple editions of my favourites. My library is like an ideas atlas of my life.
Book you hid from your parents:
I hid a lot from my parents, but books were not part of that subterfuge. I don't think they thought my peril lay in books--and they were right, upon reflection.
Book that changed your life:
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. It was the first book my father selected for me from the adult section of our state library. I was six years old and I already knew I wanted to be a writer, but that book made me realise what was possible. I can still see the marlin skeleton on the beach.
I remember thinking that books didn't just take you places, they made you feel things.
Favorite line from a book:
"But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive; for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs." --George Eliot, Middlemarch
Five books you'll never part with:
Anna Karenina--an edition my Dad gave me.
My original The Hobbit from when I was nine.
The Wreck of the Zephyr--a picture book by Chris Van Allsburg that was a favourite with my children.
The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert because Alma Whittaker is indelible.
Kate Atkinson's Life After Life--because Ursula Todd is also indelible.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Middlemarch by George Eliot.
One book you wish you had written:
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez. This story touched my heart in ways I couldn't imagine. Such a vivid and emotionally intelligent book.