On my recent holidays I had the great pleasure of reading an advance of the new Colm Tóibín novel, Nora Webster (due for release in October). I have to confess that the only Tóibín I’ve read is The Testament of Mary, which I was fairly diffident about, and read, largely, because I’d been invited by his publisher to have dinner with Tóibín when he was here last year for the Melbourne Writers Festival. Tóibín was charming, witty and slightly the worse for wear. He’d been out drinking till the early morning with Christos Tsiolkas and Andrew O’Hagan. O’Hagan later confessed to me that this was not the kind of thing he normally did, although it was he who was still playing pool while Tóibín and Tsiolkas were sprawled, asleep, on the bar. The point of all this is that Nora Webster is such a beautiful and sensitive book – not what you’d expect from an Irish party boy. The book is set in a medium-sized town in Ireland in the 1960s and follows Norah Webster, who loses her beloved husband to cancer and is struck by grief. Her husband, a loved and respected teacher, helped define her and now she is left alone with her four children to find a new life for herself. It is a gentle and understated novel that affected me greatly.

The downing of the Malaysian aircraft over the Ukraine is a great tragedy. Among the passengers were Australian novelist Liam Davison and his wife Frankie. His novel Soundings was the recipient of the National Book Council Banjo Award for Fiction in 1993, and his short stories were frequently anthologised. Liam was also a book reviewer for publications such as the Age and ABR. Sadly none of Liam’s books are currently in print – they may be a candidate for republication now. Liam lived on the Mornington Peninsula, so we didn’t see much of him in the city, but when we did catch up it was always a great pleasure to chat about writing and his teaching at Chisholm TAFE Institute in Frankston. I hadn’t heard from him for a while; I hope he was enjoying himself and writing.

The Melbourne Writers Festival starts on 21 August. It will be the second festival led by Lisa Dempster, and the program reflects her desire to offer a diverse festival. The opening night address will be presented by Helen Garner, whose new book, This House of Grief, will be published in time for the festival. The book is the product of many years’ work and is about the case of Robert Farquharson, who was charged and convicted of murdering his three sons after his car, carrying his children, swerved off the road and plunged into a dam on Father’s Day in 2005. Garner is a very appropriate choice by the festival, as she was on the original organising committee of the first festival in 1986 – that year Elizabeth Jolley gave the keynote address, which was on sex.

Mark Rubbo