Readings.com.au: Luke Davies

Interferon Psalms

The new book of poetry from award-winning poet and novelist, Luke Davies. The ravaging effects of illness, the breakup of a relationship and the disturbing nature of relocation. These are the subjects under award-winning Luke Davies' meditative eye. Luke Davies' Totem was a grand love poem, a hymn to life; Interferon Psalms is a song of the brutality of time, a song of death, yet equally as beautiful.

Isabelle The Navigator

How do we find ourselves when we lose others?

This striking novel from the author of the widely acclaimed cult bestseller Candy explores the life of a young woman as she deals with the deaths of the two important men in her life: her great love Matthew Smith, and her 'gorgeous, sad father' Tom Airly.

A lyrical meditation on love, loss, betrayal, disintegration and the passage of time, Isabelle the Navigator charts Isabelle's inner journey, as well as her actual travels - from childhood in Sydney, to love in the vast spaces off the Western Australian coast, to grief and eventually hope in Paris. This is a portrait of an extraordinarily vital woman that is at once epic and fable, swirling and intensely focused.

'Isabelle Airly is a triumph of Davies' poetic imagination . . [a] prodigious talent . . staggering prose' - The Age

'... stunningly beautiful narrative' - The Bulletin

'it leaves you admiring Davies's gifts and his desire to take risks.' - The Sydney Morning Herald.

Magpie

My father and I.

We went to the edge of the falls for revenge,

To find my attacker the magpie...

Luke Davies′ poem `Childhood Terror′ describes in 9 lines the fear of a magpie attack and a boy′s reaction as his father helps him face that fear. Together, author and illustrator have created a wonderful picture book that takes this poem and turns into a story of a dog and his pup on a journey to find the magpie. Brilliantly realised, the illustrations bring a whole new level to Davies′ poetry. Tender, funny and courageous.

For ages 5-7.

The God Of Speed

Film mogul, aviator, addict, inventor, visionary, recluse, serial womanizer, political meddler: Howard Hughes was one of the strangest and most significant figures of the twentieth century. His obsessive-compulsive disorder would end up crippling and isolating him; in the end he self-medicated his way into oblivion.

It's a summer night in 1973, and holed up in his hotel penthouse in London, Hughes can't sleep. Tomorrow he takes control of an airplane for the first time in more than fifteen years. As the reclusive, drug-addled billionaire waits for the dawn, the shape and preoccupations of the times emerge from his ruined psyche; a world of oil, flight, money, movies, drugs, sex, power, greed, fear, yearning America.

Blackly funny, muscular and rhythmic, transcendent and debauched, God of Speed is a fever dream, a giant and extraordinary leap of the imagination into the fractured mind of a man who was both great, and greatly fallen.

Totem

Intimate lyrical grace sustained on an orchestral scale. Alive with heat and sex.

Totem confirms Luke Davies' position as one of our most important contemporary poets. An ecstatic hymn to love and life, grandly dense, hallucinatory in its intensity, Totem Poem' glows like a sun at the heart of this book; the diamond-edged 40 love poems', exquisite lyrics of romance, passion and intimacy, circle it like satellites.

In this new collection Davies has created an extraordinarily moving and beautiful poetic universe, at once richly physical and uncompromisingly metaphysical.

Candy

There were good times and bad times, but in the beginning there were more good times. When I first met Candy those were the days of juice, when everything was bountiful. Only much later did it all start to seem like sugar and blood, blood and sugar. . . It's like you're cruising along in a beautiful car on a pleasant country road with the breeze in your hair and the smell of eucalyptus all around you. The horizon is always up there ahead, unfolding towards you, and at first you don't notice the gradual descent, or the way the atmosphere thickens. Bit by bit the gradient gets steeper, and before you realise you have no brakes, you're going pretty fucking fast.'

Candy is a love story. It is also a novel about addiction. From the heady narcissism of the narrator s first days with his new lover, Candy, and the relative innocence of their shared habit, Candy charts their decline. Candy becomes a prostitute, the narrator becomes a scam artist, and smack becomes the total and only focus of their lives. But this is not just another junkie novel: Davies is a very fine writer and Candy is confronting, painful, sexy, tender and at times darkly hilarious. A remarkable novel.