The August Nutshell

Nina Kenwood, devotion, and two great conversations

Dear Reader,

I’m full of unfettered joy at the prospect of attending the Melbourne launch this coming Tuesday of The Wedding Forecast by Nina Kenwood (launch details here), her first adult rom-com after two brilliant, internationally successful YA novels (It Sounded Better In My Head and Unnecessary Drama).

I treasure my position of being one of Nina’s early readers — when I get to write LOL or LOVE THIS in the margins hundreds of times from beginning to end (I’m told this is helpful) — and it’s very special to have witnessed my child grow up reading Nina’s books. An avid reader until she was fourteen, when the demands of school texts and the fear of missing out on anything and everything deprioritised books, *something* in Nina’s work has proved the exception for my daughter. She stayed up all night in Year 9 to devour It Sounded Better In My Head, pushed aside revision to inhale Unnecessary Drama in Year 12, and now at age 20 takes my ARC of The Wedding Forecast on holiday and sends me a text to say she “loves reading again”.

(Related: this episode of Your Kids Next Read on Teens & Reading.)

Nina’s books also have an uncanny ability to draw seemingly disparate readers together. In January 2023 I interviewed Nina about writing comedy for teenagers, and that’s available for all listeners: Writing Comedy for the YA Readership.

Readings have signed copies here, and if you follow Nina on Instagram you can watch her sign the books with her newborn!

Two Great Conversations

The ABC Listen podcast Conversations is consistently wonderful and features authors quite frequently. At the end of last month, I smiled throughout this interview with Irish chef turned novelist Louise Kennedy, whose debut is Trespasses (undoubtedly on my Best of 2024 list). Louise Kennedy on Belfast, bombs and a disastrous pav — link goes to the ABC Listen website.

In Trespasses a young Catholic primary school teacher, living on the outskirts of Belfast in 1975, has a passionate affair with a married Protestant lawyer. Written with absolute conviction and a distilled beauty, it is unnerving, propulsive and understated. The affair is downright dangerous in the middle of the deeply embedded threat of Protestant versus Catholic hostility, and daily reports of bloody beatings and assassinations. He is a lawyer who takes on cases many think he shouldn’t; she is a teacher who goes above and beyond for her vulnerable students. We always know it won’t end well; it still takes our breath away. Trespasses is a novel I’d hold in two hands for as long the instructions told me if I thought some of Kennedy’s raw skill would rub off.

I grew up Catholic in London in the 1980s with both English Protestant and Irish Catholic heritage, and this novel made me seek out a 100-year-old story about one of our Irish relatives being mistakenly assassinated by a rogue gang of revolutionaries who thought he was a spy for the English. If you have an interest in Irish history, I can recommend the documentary Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland (Apple TV).

The second Conversations episode I loved is The trailblazing papergirl, lawyer and playwright, an interview with Suzie Miller that begins with her free range childhood in St Kilda. ‘Prima Facie’ is Suzie Miller’s award-winning one-woman play about a criminal defence barrister whose view of the system is profoundly changed when she is sexually assaulted. It premiered in Sydney and toured Australia before going to the West End and Broadway. But being a bookish hermit, I only know the story through the novel of the same name which came out last year. Although some critics have said the novel doesn’t compare to the play, I found it powerful, well worth your time, and this is an inspiring interview, beautifully steered as always by Sarah Kanowski.

Confession Corner

I’ve slowed down with this newsletter and a few people have noticed and asked me why. It’s harder than I thought to do this alone in the long-term. Voracious was never regular like clockwork but had a different energy in its first year, and with time my confidence in my ability to produce it has waned. I think I’m sick of the sound of my newsletter voice. To that end, I’ve paused payments . . .

. . . but I’m not folding yet. For those with a subscription, this month your feedback on my post Devotion: getting down and dirty to read The End made me glad I hadn’t quit, so thank you for that. ‘Devotion’ is about how I got my latest middle-grade first draft over the line. In July I published some short fiction, You Won’t Know Yourself, and wrote the second part of my encounter with a chatbot in Five Weeks With Leo.

What I’m excited about in Substack Land is that there is a new one devoted to children’s and YA literature by Karys McEwen, school librarian, bookseller and author. I know this one will be so useful for the hundreds of educators and parents who receive Voracious every month, so please do subscribe to I Read a Lot (So You Don’t Have To).

Finally: Dorothy Parker Dissing Winnie-the-Pooh

Anyone else have a massive crush on Dorothy Parker when they were a disenchanted fourteen-year-old? While I’m in confessional mode: I used to walk around my house repeating her poems in my head (By the time you swear you're his / Shivering and sighing / And he vows his passion is / Infinite, undying / Lady make note of this / One of you is lying). Yes, I was fun.

So I was tickled this week to read her 1928 takedown of A.A. Milne, which you can read here in the New Yorker magazine: Far from Well, Our recurrent hero, Winnie-the-Pooh.

What I most enjoy is that it is possible to continue to lovingly adore Winnie-the-Pooh and also see Dorothy Parker’s point. Why not both? When it comes to criticism, we (authors) should try to remember that.

Thank you for reading Voracious.

So long, August; here’s to September. X