Kylie Ladd is a novelist and freelance writer. She has published four novels: After the Fall, Last Summer, which was highly commended in the FAW Christina Stead Award for fiction, Into My Arms, chosen as one of Get Reading's 50 Books You Can't Put Down for 2013, and her latest, Mothers and Daughters.
The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
The English Patient is my literary touchstone, the book I come back to again and again to be soothed, inspired and awed by the magic that words on a page can create. Following the fates of a disparate group of characters at the end of World War II, The English Patient is a novel, at its core, about compulsion and patriotism, about what, exactly, is worth dying for. Ondaatje was already a poet before he turned to prose, and this is evident in every sentence. Not a word is wasted; every image is polished until it glows. I would happily sell my soul to write like this.
Flambards by KM Peyton
Like many girls, I was mad about horses in my pre-teen years, and couldn’t get enough of reading about them. I devoured the Jill series by Ruby Ferguson, shot through everything the Pullein-Thompson sisters ever wrote… and then along came Flambards. Flambards is about horses, yes, but it is completely removed from the pony-club-and-gymkhana oeuvre. It’s about love and grief and class and war; it’s about growing up and discovering passion- not just for boys or horses, but for life itself. These days I have a pony-mad daughter of my own, but I am, as yet, too afraid to give her Flambards. If she doesn’t like it I will have to disown her.
Another Country by Nicholas Rothwell
Rothwell is the Northern Australia correspondent for The Australian, and Another Country is a collection of his essays for the newspaper. In it, Rothwell details the realities and inequities of life in the top end, an Australia that is so different to the one most of us inhabit that it may as well be another country. I was handed this not long after my family moved to live in Broome for a year, and three years later found the questions it raises insinuating themselves into my latest novel, Mothers and Daughters- questions, but no answers. A discomfiting read.
Regeneration by Pat Barker
Amidst all the hoopla over this centenary year of World War I, I am dearly hoping that Pat Barker’s moving novel will reach an even wider audience than it already has. Set in Britain in 1918, Regeneration explores the experiences of returned soldiers being treated for shell shock in a country that doesn’t quite know what to do with them. As a psychologist, I was fascinated by these early forays into understanding and managing post-traumatic stress disorder; as a writer I was deeply impressed by how Barker turns the standard war narrative on its head and makes the aftermath the all.
The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas
Reading The Slap for the first time was just that- a brutal, stinging, eye-opening wallop of a novel. I knew these people, or ones just like them; I loved that they were selfish and opinionated and crude and funny. In The Slap, the story of what happens after one man hits another man’s child at a suburban barbeque, Tsiolkas turns his gaze on middle Australia, and the picture he paints makes us wince. Readers seem to either adore or abhor the novel, and I can only admire Tsiolkas’s skill in creating such a divide. Great books shouldn’t soothe, they should agitate.
