Me and Mr Booker
Text Classics
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
I know what Mr Booker would say on the topic of experience. He would say what you lose on the swings you gain on the roundabouts.
Martha could have said no when Mr Booker tried to kiss her. But Martha is sixteen, she lives in a dull town, her father is mad, her home is stifling. Of course she would kiss the charming Englishman who brightened her world with whiskey and cigarettes, adventure and sex—whatever the consequences. Me and Mr Booker, Cory Taylor’s acclaimed debut, is a novel about feeling old when you’re young and acting young when you’re not.
Cory Taylor was born in Queensland in 1955. She was an award-winning novelist and screenwriter who also published short fiction and children’s books. Her first novel, Me and Mr Booker, won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Pacific Region) in 2012 and her second novel, My Beautiful Enemy, was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award in 2014. She died on 5 July 2016, a couple of months after Dying: A Memoir was published.
‘Cory Taylor’s characters are magnificently created.’ Australian
‘A vibrant, questioning and unpredictable read.’ West Australian
‘Me and Mr Booker is sharply observed and blackly comic, but it is also a tender depiction of love, sex, power and one girl's heartbreaking step into adulthood.’ Australian Bookseller + Publisher
‘Cory Taylor's Me and Mr Booker has the heart of Lolita and the soul of Catcher In The Rye, this is one of the most assured debut novels I have ever read. These characters feel so real that they become almost family. Refreshing, surprising, sexy and ultimately very moving.’ Krissy Kneen
‘Elegant and controlled and wickedly funny.’ David Vann
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Restlessness pervades Taylor's debut novel of suburban claustrophobia and the difficulty of cutting ties to even an unhappy home. "Everyone in it was like me, trying to move on and start something, anything at all, even if it was almost certain to go bad," explains 16-year-old narrator Martha. Like the town's other residents, she drinks copiously and waits for something to happen that will give color to her humdrum life. She finds Mr. Booker, a smooth-talking Englishman, who, fueled by mutual feelings of being trapped and bored with life, begins an affair with her made all the easier by his wife's proclivity for falling asleep in a boozy haze. After years of watching her father manipulate her mother and having an outsider status at school, Martha feels like her life has finally begun. Meanwhile, her mother throws parties to "get her through the weekends" and her father becomes increasingly unstable, prompting the return of her aloof older brother, Eddie. Taylor's straightforward prose captures the nuances of being at an age where you cannot see the differences between being a teenager and being an adult. Unfortunately, the characters, although well-drawn, are forgettable, and the novel leaves only impressions of discontent.
