The Book Club: June 3

This week on The Book Club, Jennifer Byrne, Marieke Hardy and Jason Steger are joined by international guests from the Sydney Writers’ Festival author A.M. Homes (who was recently my guest at a SWF forum on TV) and Vikram Chandra.

They will be discussing Karen Joy Fowler’s 2014 PEN/Faulkner Award-winning We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves and A.M’s choice of classic, Peter Carey’s The Chemistry of Tears.

Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves redefines the concept of family. Rosemary, a 22-year-old university student when we meet her, tells the story of her broken family – her missing ‘twin’ sister who she last saw when she was five and her older brother who she hasn’t seen in over a decade. We learn of Rosemary’s unusual upbringing and are asked to question what constitutes family and what it means to be ‘human’? Funny and heartfelt, this is a book that will get under your skin and have you thinking about it for ages.

Peter Carey’s The Chemistry of Tears (2012) is a portrait of grief and love that is both ethereal and earthly. When museum horologist Catherine Gehrig finds out her colleague and secret lover of 13 years has died suddenly, her compassionate boss gives her a project to distract her from her crippling grief – to reconstruct a beautiful 19th century mechanical bird. She soon discovers the diaries of Henry Brandling, the man who originally commissioned the strange creature, and their obsessions begin to merge.

A.M. Homes is an American writer whose novels include This Book Will Save Your Life, Music for Torching, The End of Alice and most recently May We Be Forgiven. She was also a writer/producer on TV for The L Word and one of her short story collections was adapted into the 2003 film The Safety of Objects.

Vikram Chandra was born in New Delhi, and moved to the US as an undergraduate. His first novel Red Earth and Pouring Rain won Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book. Other works include novel Sacred Games and short story collection Love and Longing in Bombay. He worked as a computer programmer while he was a student and his latest book Geek Sublime draws on his love of programming and classical Indian aesthetics.

10pm Tuesday June 3 ABC1.