Thanks to Murdoch Books here's the recipe for Chocolate Self-Saucing Pudding as found within the new Matthew Evans cookbook The Real Food Companion.

As you can see below, it looks completely scrumptious. Enjoy!

The 2010 Orange Prize for Fiction longlist has just been announced. The Orange Prize recognises the writing of female authors as it 'is awarded to the woman who, in the opinion of the judges, has written the best, eligible full-length novel in English'. Here is the 2010 longlist:

• The Very Thought of You by Rosie Alison (out in Australia next month)
• The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton
• Savage Lands by Clare Clark (out in Australia in May)
• Hearts and Minds by Amanda Craig
• The Way Things Look to Me by Roopa Farooki
• The Twisted Heart by Rebecca Gowers
• This is How by M.J. Hyland
• Small Wars by Sadie Jones
• The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver
• Secret Son by Laila Lalami
• The Long Song by Andrea Levy
• Black Water Rising by Attica Locke
• Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
• The Wilding by Maria McCann (out in Australia next month)
• Black Mamba Boy by Nadifa Mohamed (out in Australia next month)
• A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore
• The White Woman on the Green Bicycle by Monique Roffey
• The Still Point by Amy Sackville (out in Australia next month)
• The Help by Kathryn Stockett
• The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

The shortlist will be announced on April 20, with the eventual winner to be revealed on June 9 2010.

The longlist of books in contention for this year's Miles Franklin Literary Award has just been announced. The Miles Franklin is Australia's most prestigious literary award and 'is awarded for the novel of the year which is of the highest literary merit and presents Australian life in any of its phases'.

• Lovesong by Alex Miller (Allen & Unwin)
  Read our interview with Alex Miller about Lovesong.

• The Bath Fugues by Brian Castro (Giramondo Publishing)
  Read our interview with Brian Castro about The Bath Fugues.

• Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey (Allen & Unwin)
  Read our interview with Craig Silvey about Jasper Jones.

• Sons of the Rumour by David Foster (Picador)

• The Book of Emmett by Deborah Forster (Vintage)
  Read our interview with Deborah Forster about The Book of Emmett.

• Siddon Rock by Glenda Guest (Vintage)

• Boy on a Wire by Jon Doust (Fremantle Press)

• Figurehead by Patrick Allington (Black Inc.)
  Read our interview with Patrick Allington about Figurehead.

• Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey (Hamish Hamilton)

• Truth by Peter Temple (Text Publishing)

• Butterfly by Sonya Hartnett (Penguin)
  Read our interview with Sonya Hartnett about Butterfly.

• The People's Train by Thomas Keneally (Knopf)

Congratulations to all the longlisted authors, and the editors and publishers involved with each book. The shortlist will be announced next month, with the winner being announced on 22 June 2010.

My favourite words of the moment are:

Bulb.

Shrub.

Shale.

Love.

and

Alchemy.

Words that sound the most whole, feel the most rounded and give flight to the most expectant of expectations as they come out of our mouths. Words that are onomatopoeic in their creation. They feel, mean and sound as full of their truth, their measure, as full of themselves, as they are so terribly, so beautifully, ordinary in our day-to-day conversations.

So, a book called Bulb will be promising and beautiful, with soft, rounded, tulip-y delights on every page. A book simply titled The Rose, written by THE rose-man, David Austin, has to be absolutely all about roses, and beautiful, so beautiful I'm sure there is a 'scratch and sniff' element in the binding. The Life and Love of Trees similarly, is quite absolutely definitive of our intimate connectedness to trees - even if we don't realise, understand or can't imagine it. From the boreal forest at the edge of the Arctic to rainforests girdling the planet; from giant, unseen, underground life forms to the possibility of life-saving unknown treasures in the high canopies - our life, our need, our love, of trees.

Sissinghurst sounds a little too sharp and sibilant for it's subject matter, one of the oldest estate gardens in England re-designed by the fanciful Vita Sackville-West and now written up as a fascinating history by her grandson, Adam Nicolson, but the story is a joy, a laugh, and an inspiration for the gardening dreamers amongst us. And similarly, Garden of a Lifetime: Dame Elisabeth Murdoch at Cruden Farm is a wonderfully produced history of her garden, with sections originally mapped out by Edna Walling, and followed through over 80 years, by the Dame herself.

But why the words 'shale', 'shrub', 'love' and 'alchemy'? Because of a number of things, but also because of the exquisite and heartbreaking book by Derek Jarman, Derek Jarman's Garden which was the last book he ever published. In it he documents his shingle and shale, lost-and-found garden created in Dungeness on the coast of Kent in England, overlooked by a nuclear power station. His little wooden shack and garden drawn with driftwood were (are) desolate, yes, but this artist, this extraordinary visionary, could find beauty, belonging, purpose and love in places we wouldn't even notice. To hold this book, to think about a life, a rose, a tree, a shrub and love. That is magic, there. True magic.

Toni Jordan tells why Madeleine St John's delicious novels of manners are Australian classics.

Madeleine St John was, until recently, one of those Australian writers more recognised overseas than in her home country. (She was shortlisted for the Booker in 1997, yet few Australians knew her name before last year.) Text Publishing is in the process of resurrecting this remarkably fine, utterly seductive writer, re-releasing her novels in handsome new editions, with endorsements from everyone from Helen Garner to Michelle De Kretser. The Women in Black came first, followed by The Essence of the Thing – and now, this month, A Stairway to Paradise. Toni Jordan looks back over St John’s inviting oeuvre and tries to locate just what it is that makes her books bona fide Australian classics.

I would like to invite Madeleine St John to tea. Or better yet, cocktails. After reading the three of her novels reissued by Text over the past year – The Women in Black, The Essence of the Thing, and A Stairway to Paradise – I feel I know her.

We would meet in a dimly lit bar filled with worn leather couches. She would know the bartender by name. I can see her wearing a simple black shift, something by Gucci or Chanel. She would smoke, possibly balancing a thin ivory cigarette holder between her manicured fingers. She would drink martinis without ever becoming tipsy. She might wear gloves. She would be like the voice of her books: witty and cutting, insightful but ultimately compassionate.

‘Melbourne,’ she might say, tossing her head, ‘is a sad town, not, by the way, a city as they choose to pretend, not that they can know the difference. Sydney at any rate is undoubtedly a city, whereas Melbourne – well, there are of course some serious paintings in the Gallery, but nothing whatsoever more that pertains to a city; except of course for the cake.’

You see the difficulty? With St John, it is tempting to make the classic reader’s mistake: confusing the author with the characters in a book. Of course, she never said this line about Melbourne and especially never said it to me. I never met her and I don’t know if she’d ever been here. I have stolen this from a character in her first book, the glorious The Women in Black. But it sounds like something she might have said.

One of St John’s great literary gifts is dialogue, and every line in each of her books sounds like something that a real person might have said. Authenticity, though, is not the same as entertainment, and St John’s characters are as enthralling as they are true. The Women in Black is set in Sydney in 1960, in the ‘Ladies’ Cocktail Frock’ department of a thinly-disguised David Jones.

Australia is on the cusp of many revolutions: multicultural and sexual, as well as the breakdown of class structures. For some of her characters, the 1950s are hard to leave behind. Miss Baines, speaking about her supervisor: ‘It’s that Miss Cartright who’s a pain in the neck, excuse my French.’

And when Lisa, the teenage temp who’s just finished ‘the Leaving’, asks her mother if she can go to university, she asks her father.

‘No daughter of mine is going anywhere near that cesspit,’ said he, ‘and that’s final.’

I had forgotten that people spoke that way, but they really did.

For European immigrants Magda and Stefan, the world is a bigger place than Sydney, and ‘French’ doesn’t mean ‘pain in the neck’. Stefan is in bed, ‘reading a page of Nietzsche, as was his wont last thing at night’, while Magda was straightening the living room.

‘There is no law in this country,’ said Magda, ‘against men helping their wives to clear up the mess, is there?’
‘As a matter of fact,’ said Stefan, ‘I think there is.’

St John’s next two books are set in London, her home from the late 1960s. The Essence of the Thing, her masterpiece of manners that was shortlisted for the 1997 Booker Prize, is particularly rich in these genuine conversations that mix humour with sadness and the familiarity of people who know each other well. When Nicola’s long-time boyfriend, Jonathon, dumps her with no warning, she feels she has ‘died and gone to hell’. It takes her friends some time to realise that Nicola’s perfect relationship has come to an end. Geoffrey says:

‘Not her. That chic little Notting Hill set-up with the deluxe plumbing and the stuffed shirt laying down old claret. No way.’

At first Nicola is struck dumb with grief and shock, but eventually her spirit rises up: when Jonathon says he has no explanation for his decision, she says, ‘If you truly haven’t then I’m well rid of you, because in that case, it looks as if you’ve had a brain transplant, and I hope it didn’t cost much because if it did then you’ve been ripped off. I should see the Trading Standards Officer if I were you.’

Just like in real life, after this spurt of courage Nicola’s resolve falters and she backslides. After Jonathon asks her to leave the flat they own together she moves in with a friend, but she can’t stop thinking about him.

‘I hadn’t done a proper shop for ages,’ Nicola says. ‘There can’t be a scrap of food in the house.’

Her friend Susannah says, ‘You should worry.’ But, just like a real person, Nicola does. And she keeps ironing his shirts. Her friends despair of her.

‘You’re incorrigible,’ said Lizzie. ‘A hopeless case. Wherever did you come from? A nineteeth-century orphanage?’

Nicola’s father has his own advice to give about the straight-laced love rat, Jonathon.

‘He was well camouflaged,’ said Michael. ‘One has a ridiculous prejudice in favour of people wearing traditional costume. Better try one of these chaps with spiky hair and black boots next time around, he might take proper care of you.’
Nicola began to laugh and then to cry again.

A Stairway to Paradise, the latest St John book re-released, is again rich in her trademark dialogue, at once subtle and revealing. Barbara, an aimless young woman working as a nanny, has moved in to Claire and Alex Maclise’s house to care for their two children while Claire is away on a business trip. A lesser novelist would spend pages waxing lyrical about Barbara’s growing attraction to Alex, with whom she is destined to have an affair. St John does it in four lines of dialogue: Barbara talking to the housekeeper.

‘If you could find the time to iron Mr Rochester’s shirts,’ she said to Mrs Brick, ‘it would be such a help.’
‘Mr Rochester?’ said Mrs Brick.
‘Oh, God,’ said Barbara. ‘I must be dreaming. Sorry. I mean Mr Maclise of course. Goodness!’
‘It’s those kiddies addling your brain,’ said Mrs Brick. ‘Kiddies do that to you. You wait until you have your own. Mr Rochester’s the least of it.’

The ‘kiddies’ in this book are wonderfully drawn, funny little people. I can almost feel St John laughing as she wrote them: ‘Nothing so thin, so pale, so stick-like as a little boy. He seemed to be made of wire, his cranium full of tiny wheels and rods all turning, endlessly turning, producing their endless stream of speculations and conclusions, notes and queries’. Fergus, the ‘fiend in human form’ who distracts Barbara from her troubles, is delightful and energetic.

‘What would I do without you, Fergus?’ said Barbara.
‘You’d be in really bad trouble,’ said he.

There’s also a sense of playfulness in the linkages between the books. I loved discovering that Mrs Brick is the housekeeper in both of the London novels. In The Essence of the Thing, Jonathon faces a long drive from his parents’ house, so he listens to a ‘bootlegged talking book ... some footling tale about some shop assistants in an antipodean department store, fretting about their wombs and their wardrobes and other empty spaces – ye gods!’ There are others, but I won’t spoil them for you.

Perhaps St John’s pitch-perfect ear was tuned at Sydney University where she studied English and graduated in 1963, part of that astonishing year that produced Germaine Greer, Clive James, Les Murray, Robert Hughes, John Bell and Bruce Beresford. Her dialogue seems perfect for the screen and Beresford, her literary executor, has announced he will soon direct the film version of The Women in Black, to be called Get it at Goode’s, starring Guy Pearce, Monica Bellucci and Miranda Otto.

If she were alive today St John would be 69. All we have to remember her by are these wonderful lines. Does she really think that ‘the average man I suppose would rather be caught with his prick in his hand than a novel’? Or that ‘the thing that’s wrong with women is that they go on and on, and the thing that’s wrong with men is that they don’t’?

She died of emphysema in 2006, undoubtedly caused by all those cigarettes in her imaginary ivory holder. Text Publishing will be releasing the fourth and final Madeleine St John novel, A Pure Clear Light, later this year.

This story belongs to a friend of a friend of a friend, one of those other people who you pass every day without recognizing.

She was on a motorbike. She was crossing an intersection. And then she was caught under a truck somehow, being dragged across the asphalt with the bike sparking beside her. Two paramedic students, who happened to be passing at the time, attended to her body. The news crew arrived and filed the report of her death. The truck and carnage was in the background of the shot no doubt, just out of focus. The reporter would have been standing beside the road looking ruffled, kindly, saddened, urgent.

Except that she wasn’t dead.

The ambulance arrived eventually and she lived, against all odds. Some weeks after that, while she was recovering, she received a package. I don’t know how it arrived, perhaps through a friend of a friend of a friend. It was a DVD. She watches it at every opportunity now. And yet no one else shares the intensity of her fascination. They find it too difficult, too eerie. It’s the news report that never went to air, the story of her death.

In 2002, while the Hungarian writer Imre Kertesz was preparing his Nobel Prize Lecture, he received a large brown envelope in the mail. The letter had been sent to him by the director of the Buchenwald Memorial Centre, the concentration camp where Kertesz arrived, in 1945 at the age of sixteen. Contained within the envelope was a copy of the original camp report from that day, February 18th. In one of the columns, Kertesz was able to read about the death of prisoner #64,921 – factory worker, born 1927. Kertesz had made himself two years older, so that he wouldn’t be classified as a child, and had given his occupation as “worker” rather than student in order to “appear more useful to them.” The war ended before he was able to fulfill the Nazi prophecy.

It would be too easy, as Kertesz himself realizes, to draw from these stories, some belief in an otherworldly order, in some sort of providence, or “metaphysical justice.” To do so, would be to sever “the deep and tortuous ties with the millions who perished and who never knew mercy. But if we are destined to be exceptions”, Kertesz continues, “we must make our peace with the absurd order of chance, which reigns over our lives with the whim of a death squad, exposing us to inhuman powers, monstrous tyrannies.”

Thinking of these stories, I think also, though aslant, almost inappropriately I know, of Tom Ford’s recent, somewhat overrated film, A Single Man, and how, in the face of his immanent suicide, the main character’s world acquires again the colour and smell of miracle. For less than a day, he lives like an angel, drenched in the last beauty of things, in the toxic Californian luminosity. In one particular scene, he stops a woman on the street, so that he can smell the ears of her small dog, a smell that reminds him of buttered toast.

I can understand that desire to watch and re-watch the scene of my own death. I can imagine it becoming an obsession, the desire to feel the drug of its liberation as often as possible – that uncanny trick of time, and the taste of coffee perhaps, since I would watch it over breakfast, and drink coffee that I shouldn’t be able to taste, in the wash of morning sun that I shouldn’t be able to feel washed by.

The privilege which Kertesz shares with this motorbike survivor, is the tangible evidence of his own miraculousness. While the rest of us, survivors in our own less cataclysmic manner, and without the adamancy of such proof, must find our own ways to die, our own ways, every morning, to get reborn.

The rise and rise of Melina Marchetta continues as her new book The Piper's Son - helped by events with Melina at the State Library and Readings Hawthorn over the weekend - sold more than any other title at Readings last week. See what our St Kilda kids' book specialist Callie Martin thought of The Piper's Son in her review.

Here are our best selling fiction and non-fiction titles from last week, excluding book sales from the Atheist Convention over the weekend.

BESTSELLING FICTION

1. The Piper's Son — Melina Marchetta
2. The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets' Nest — Stieg Larsson
3. Alone In Berlin — Hans Fallada
4. Cloudstreet — Tim Winton
5. A Stairway To Paradise — Madeleine St John
6. We Are All Made Of Glue — Marina Lewycka
7. Mr Rosenblum's List — Natasha Solomons
8. The Pregnant Widow — Martin Amis
9. Wolf Hall — Hilary Mantel
10. Lovesong — Alex Miller

BESTSELLING NON-FICTION

1. The Good Soldiers — David Finkel
2. The Age Cheap Eats 2010
3. Requiem For A Species: Why We Resist The Truth About Climate Change — Clive Hamilton
4. The Greatest Show On Earth: The Evidence For Evolution — Richard Dawkins
5. The Guide To Ethical Supermarket Shopping 2010 — Ethical Consumer Group
6. Malcolm Fraser: The Political Memoirs — Malcolm Fraser and Margaret Simons
7. Abla's Lebanese Kitchen — Abla Amad
8. On Passion: Little Books On Big Themes — Dorothy Porter
9. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: Our Year Of Seasonal Eating — Barbara Kingsolver
10. Excess: Anti-Consumerism in the West — Kim Humphery