Sienna is reading Beeswax and Tall Tales by Jane Crowley and Athol Salter
As an antique dealer, Athol Salter has peddled in other people’s stories for over sixty years. From humble beginnings in his Junque Shop in country New South Wales in the 1960s to Dirty Janes in the Southern Highlands, he has rummaged through ramshackle huts, dealt with dubious property from deceased estates and cleared grand country properties and crumbling mansions looking for pieces filled with stories to pass on. Beeswax and Tall Tales includes not just snippets from Athol’s hilarious and poignant life, but the stories told in the antiques he trades and the enchanting people he meets along the way – from farmhands, colourful eccentrics and Italian migrants to long-lost relatives, British squires and a charming cockatoo…
Clair is reading But Have You Read the Book? by Kristen Lopez
Within these pages, Turner Classic Movies offers an endlessly fascinating look at 52 beloved screen adaptations and the great reads that inspired them. Some films, like Clueless—Amy Heckerling’s interpretation of Jane Austen’s Emma—diverge wildly from the original source material, while others, like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, shift the point of view to craft a different experience within the same story. Author Kristen Lopez explores just what makes these works classics of both the page and screen, and why each made for an exceptional adaptation—whether faithful to the book or exemplifying cinematic creative license.
Lisa is reading The End of the Morning by Chairmian Clift
‘In those days the end of the morning was always marked by the quarry whistle blowing the noon knock-off.
Since everybody was out of bed very early, morning then was a long time, or even, if you came to think about it, a round time — symmetrical anyway, and contained under a thin, radiant, dome shaped cover…’
During the years of the Great Depression, Cressida Morley and her eccentric family live in a weatherboard cottage on the edge of a wild beach. Outsiders in their small working-class community, they rant and argue and read books and play music and never feel themselves to be poor. Yet as Cressida moves beyond childhood, she starts to outgrow the place that once seemed the centre of the world. As she plans her escape, the only question is: who will she become?
