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Hello from the Gillespies – funny and heartfelt novel about miscommunication and mayhem in a family

hello_gillespies
Published:24/09/2014
Format:Paperback, 528 pages
ISBN-13:9781921901812
ISBN-10:1921901810
Origin:Australia
Imprint:Michael Joseph
Publisher:Penguin Aus.

International number one bestseller Monica McInerney brings us a sparkling and hilarious new novel about the ups and downs of family life.

For more than thirty years, Angela Gillespie has sent friends and family around the world an end-of-year letter titled 'Hello from the Gillespies'. It's always been cheery and full of good news. This year, Angela surprises everyone including herself – she tells the truth . . .

The Gillespies are far from the perfect family that Angela has made them out to be. Her husband seems to be having a mid-life crisis. Her grown-up twins are having career meltdowns. Her third daughter, badly in debt, can't stop crying. And her ten-year-old son spends more time talking to his imaginary friend than to real ones.

With fantasy thoughts of a life before marriage and motherhood becoming more than just an innocent daydream, Angela's real life is slowly slipping out of focus. But, as the repercussions of her ruthlessly honest letter begin to pile up, a shocking event takes Angela from her family, and she realises she should have been more careful of what she wished for... Without Angela, the family would fall apart. But when Angela is taken from them in this most unexpected manner, the Gillespies pull together – and pull themselves together – in wonderfully surprising ways . . .

From the bestselling author of The House of Memories comes a funny and heartfelt novel about miscommunication and mayhem in a family like no other.

About the Author

Australian-born Dublin-based Monica McInerney is the author of nine novels, including the best-sellers The House of Memories, Lola's Secret, At Home with the Templetons and Those Faraday Girls, which are published across the world. Monica grew up in a family of seven children in the Clare Valley wine region of South Australia. Since then Monica has lived all around Australia, in Ireland, and in London. She and her Irish husband move back and forth between Australia and Ireland.

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The latest from George R.R. Martin

dangerous_women This first volume features an original 35,000 word novella by George R.R. Martin.'The Princess and the Queen' reveals the origins of the civil war in Westeros (before the events in A Game of Thrones), which is known as the Dance of the Dragons, pitting Targaryen against Targaryen and dragon against dragon. Other authors in this volume of warriors, bad girls and dragonriders include worldwide bestselling authors Brandon Sanderson, Lawrence Block and Nancy Kress. Read more here >>> http://bit.ly/1v2v027









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Today’s must-read – Killing Jodie

killing_jodieKilling Jodie: How Australia's Most Elusive Murderer Was Brought to Justice

by Janet Fife-Yeomans


Winner: Best True Crime, Sisters in Crime Davitt Awards


Daryl Suckling's arrest in remote NSW in the late 1980s revealed his disturbing connections with the disappearance of Jodie Larcombe from Melbourne. Charged with the murder of Jodie, then a sex worker on St Kilda's streets, Suckling was allowed to walk free, as police investigators struggled to prove a homicide without a body. He'd previously escaped conviction more than once after brutally abducting several women.


Frustrated by legal obstacles and bad luck, one officer resigned from the force in disgust, but the case was never forgotten and investigators closed in as Suckling stalked his next victim. The grisly murder linked St Kilda with the lonely, windswept sandhills of the NSW outback near Mildura, and brought two hardened policemen close to a brave family pushed to breaking point - in the end, it was too much for Jodie's mother, who committed suicide when Suckling appealed his eventual conviction.

Suckling is now one of 15 prisoners serving life in NSW, never to be released.

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Today’s must-read – The Wordy Shipmates

The Wordy Shipmates

by Sarah Vowell

wordy_shipmatesEssayist and public radio regular Vowell (Assassination Vacation) revisits America's Puritan roots in this witty exploration of the ways in which our country's present predicaments are inextricably tied to its past. In a style less colloquial than her previous books, Vowell traces the 1630 journey of several key English colonists and members of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Foremost among these men was John Winthrop, who would become governor of Massachusetts. While the Puritans who had earlier sailed to Plymouth on the Mayflower were separatists, Winthrop's followers remained loyal to England, spurred on by Puritan Reverend John Cotton's proclamation that they were God's chosen people. Vowell underscores that the seemingly minute differences between the Plymouth Puritans and the Massachusetts Puritans were as meaningful as the current Sunni/Shia Muslim rift. Gracefully interspersing her history lesson with personal anecdotes, Vowell offers reflections that are both amusing (colonial history lesson via The Brady Bunch) and tender (watching New Yorkers patiently waiting in line to donate blood after 9/11).


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Atlas Shrugged is absurd but strangely compelling

Ayn Rand's libertarian rant is unpleasant, daft and deeply flawed. I hated it - but I couldn't put it down

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Today’s Must-Read – Letter to my daughter

letter_daughterLetter to My Daughter

by Maya Angelou

From the mellifluous voice of a venerable American icon comes her first original collection of writing to be published in ten years, anecdotal vignettes drawn from a compelling life and written in Angelou's erudite prose. Beginning with her childhood, Angelou acknowledges her own inauguration into daughterhood in "Philanthropy," recalling the first time her mother called her "my daughter." Angelou becomes a mother herself at an early age, after a meaningless first sexual experience: "Nine months later I had a beautiful baby boy. The birth of my son caused me to develop enough courage to invent my life." Fearlessly sharing amusing, if somewhat embarrassing, moments in "Senegal," the mature Angelou is cosmopolitan but still capable of making a mistake: invited to a dinner party while visiting the African nation, Angelou becomes irritated that none of the guests will step on a lovely carpet laid out in the center of the room, so she takes it upon herself to cross the carpet, only to discover the carpet is a table cloth that had been laid out in honor of her visit. The wisdom in this slight volume feels light and familiar, but it's also earnest and offered with warmth.

Best Price at Amazon  $13.47

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Today’s Must-read – The Slap

The Slapby Christos Tsiolkas

At a suburban barbecue, a man slaps a child who is not his own. This event has a shocking ricochet effect on a group of people, mostly friends, who are directly or indirectly influenced by the event. In this remarkable novel, Christos Tsiolkas turns his unflinching and all-seeing eye on to that which connects us all: the modern family and domestic life in the twenty-first century. The Slap is told from the points of view of eight people who were present at the barbecue. The slap and its consequences force them all to question their own families and the way they live, their expectations, beliefs and desires. What unfolds is a powerful, haunting novel about love, sex and marriage, parenting and children, and the fury and intensity - all the passions and conflicting beliefs - that family can arouse.

Image: View an image of author Christos Tsiolkas

PDF Download: Read an excerpt from The Slap
Warning PDF contains language which could offend.
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Latest must-read – A fraction of the whole

SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2008

A Fraction of the whole

by Steve Tolz

fraction_whole“A Fraction of the Whole is that rarest of long books–utterly worth it…The story starts in a prison riot and ends on a plane, and there is not one forgettable episode in between…It reads like Mark Twain with access to an intercontinental Airbus…This book moves; it bucks and rocks in a world that feels more than a hemisphere away…So comically dark and inviting that you have no choice but to step into its icy wake.” —Esquire
“Rollicking…laugh-out-loud funny.” —Entertainment Weekly
“A rich father-and-son story packed with incident, humor, and characters reminiscent of the styles of Charles Dickens and John Irving…Occasionally, a big, sprawling first novel fights its way into print with a flourish, at which point its ambition and the eccentricities of its ‘firstness’ can become its best marketing tools. Such is the case with A Fraction of the Whole, a book that is willfully misanthropic and very funny…like Irving, Toltz makes minor characters leap off the page…He’s a superb, disturbing phrasemaker…this long novel, which lives or dies in the brilliance of its writing, has a subtle, compelling structure

…A Fraction of the Whole soars like a rocket.” —Los Angeles Times

“Combines the hilarious high-low reference points of early Martin Amis with the annihilating punk inventiveness of Chuck Palahniuk.” —Best Life

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A Visit to Crusoe’s Island

In 1704, a 28-year-old Scottish sailor named Alexander Selkirk found himself in a fix. He had taken up privateering—piracy with an official seal, in other words—and had spent too much time cooped up on a galley with an irascible captain of the sort Geoffrey Rush so ably portrays in the Pirates of the Caribbean film franchise. Grievance boards and human-resources departments being nonexistent in that line of work, Selkirk made a potentially catastrophic decision: when he was demoted after a squabble with the captain about the seaworthiness of their ship, which was apparently riddled with shipworms, he asked to be put ashore on an island (pictured here) far away from anything in particular, 400 miles west of the port of Valparaiso, Chile, in the Juan Fernandez archipelago. Though remote, the 36-square-mile island contained large stores of sweet water from which passing ships would replenish their supplies, and Selkirk apparently figured that it would not be long before another ship came along.

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Robinson Crusoe's Island, Chile. Photograph [c] by Leonardo Ramirez

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Latest book highlighted on the Pivotal Network – Working the room

working_room

How to Move People to Action through Audience-Centered Speaking

by Nick Morgan

Give Powerful Speeches to Audiences of Five or Five Hundred

Through entertaining and insightful examples, Morgan illustrates a practical, three-part process—focusing on content development, rehearsal, and delivery—geared toward engaging an audience on every level: emotional, intellectual, and physical. more …