"What people read revealed so much about them that she considered our card catalog a treasure house of privileged secrets; each card contained the map of an individual‘s soul." - Alice Hoffman.
One of my favourite things: giving someone you love a book you love. Years ago I gave this Dutch translation of The Ice Queen to my soul sister. When I see it on her bookshelf in Amsterdam, we share a wink; it's a map to some place in both of our souls.

"Love more, not less."
One of my favourite summer reads, perfect for long afternoons lying on the grass. This beautiful book tells the story of Pissarro, the father of Impressionism, and his mother, Rachel, set between the tropical island of St Thomas, and the silver rain of Paris winters. It is a fairytale feast for the heart and the senses from the queen of magical storytelling, Alice Hoffman.

For most of human history, 'literature,' both fiction and poetry, has been narrated, not written — heard, not read. So fairy tales, folk tales, stories from the oral tradition, are all of them the most vital connection we have with the imaginations of the ordinary men and women whose labor created our world. - Angela Carter
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When you get snail mail from a beloved who knows what your heart is made of, and sends you the perfect book to feed it.

Reads like a fairytale dairy in the sensory paradise of an English garden over the course of 4 seasons. Since I found it in a musty secondhand bookshop I have taken it across the world with me, read it over glasses of winter wine, spring teacups, frosty summer beers & autumn tea. It is transformative, transporting magic. Turning its pages alters time; I could be in a garden melancholy with late summer sadness 50 years ago, or here, now. Magical.

The research behind Bitter Greens, Kate Forsyth's richly imagine and seemingly-effortless retelling of the Rapunzel fairytale, thrums inside this story like an ever-constant but never obtrusive heartbeat. It is bewitching, brutal, and highly imaginative, a historical, fairytale saga that swept me up in its braid of three women, their fates and their stories.

"Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." — Lewis Carroll.
Last year I had a particularly magical experience: the 1st chapter of my novel won a weeklong fellowship at Varuna, Australia's iconic national writing residency. It was the home of Eric & Eleanor Dark; Eleanor was a prolific writer & wrote many of her books there. I stayed & wrote in her room, where I found this bewitching copy on her book shelves.

It was a delicious honour to read early drafts of this gem written by my dazzling friend, Jenn. Next up on my TBR pile is the finished product, generating much buzz. FELL is a sorrowful, magical, and tender hearted book set in England's northwest. The Guardian has recently described it as, "Dark, compelling, beautifully written, Fell adds another powerful story to the mythology of our strange hinterlands." Shivery, haunting, and long-lingering.

Published as The Burial in some territories or The Untold in others, this is an extraordinary novel, genuinely unlike any I've read before. The bewitching story is inspired by Australia's last bush ranger, a young woman named Jessie Hickman and is a page turner, with writing so beautiful in places I had to sometimes stop and let it sink in. A confronting, compelling & staggeringly beautiful read, not for the faint hearted but utterly recommended.

Joe lives–despite himself. Driven by the need to be alone after a tragic night that took his love and his future, he works nothing jobs and just exists. On the other side of the city, Elise retreats to the tiger enclosure at the zoo – where, for reasons she barely understands, she starts to sketch the beautiful killers. LEAP is a beautiful urban fairytale about human and animal nature, and the transformative power of grief. I LOVED this book hard.

I recently saw Jessie talk about The Muse, her highly anticipated 2nd novel. I was moved by her humility and generosity as she shared her writing life, especially her lived experiences of high-functioning anxiety since childhood & depression following the success of The Miniaturist (1 million copies sold). She wrote The Muse on tour for The Miniaturist & it was, she said, much a part of her recovery. A firm favourite at the top of my TBR pile.