John Purcell
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bookeboy.bsky.social
John Purcell
@bookeboy.bsky.social
530 followers 330 following 360 posts
Head of Books Australia - The Nile Group. Also a bestselling author - The Girl on the Page, The Lessons & The Secret Lives of Emma trilogy. New thriller coming in 2026.
My blog (yes some people still have blogs): https://www.johnpurcellauthor.com/blog
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bookeboy.bsky.social
Seascraper is such a perfect little novel. Keeps within its world. Happy to be a small story beautifully told. Captures the strange pull of dreary places so well. The power of being expert in one thing, no matter how small. The sharp tang of the new. And the tug of big, unlikely dreams on all of us.
Photo of the cover of the hardback edition of Seascraper by Benjamin Wood
November 13, 2025 at 6:59 AM
bookeboy.bsky.social
November 8, 2025 at 10:33 PM
bookeboy.bsky.social
'A stunning tour de force, Man in the Holocene constructs a powerful vision of our place in the world by combining the banality of an aging man's lonely inner life and the objective facts he finds in the books of his isolated home.'

Delightful Saturday reading.

Or my life.
Photo of the paperback of Man in the Holocene by Max Frisch
October 3, 2025 at 10:45 PM
bookeboy.bsky.social
I haven't read this one. I have a copy in a box in the UK.

My favourite Lehmann is The Echoing Grove.
Cover of the paperback of The Echoing Grove by Rosamond Lehmann
September 9, 2025 at 10:28 AM
bookeboy.bsky.social
I have never been made to feel so complicit in my own demise and the demise of all that is good about modern democracy. A chilling but necessary read.
A photo of the paperback of Gliff by Ali Smith resting awkwardly on a white painted windowsill by a mottled glass window seemingly wondering why it has been placed there.
September 8, 2025 at 9:19 PM
bookeboy.bsky.social
I am surprised every time I rediscover John Galsworthy won The Nobel Prize for Literature. According to Wikipedia 'Galsworthy himself did not think he deserved the award. "As the least worthy of the Nobel prizemen honoured today I shall have but few words to say", he wrote in his acceptance speech.'
September 6, 2025 at 3:24 AM
bookeboy.bsky.social
I read that one of the young men was based on E.M. Forster, who was her children's tutor for a short while and later accompanied her on the caravan trip that inspired the novel. He wrote a memoir of his time with her that I haven't read.

I have a strong sense of deja vu - am I repeating myself?
August 31, 2025 at 9:53 PM
bookeboy.bsky.social
This nutty book works every time. I've never come close to finishing it. I always drop it and start writing.

Release the Bats: Writing Your Way Out Of It
by DBC Pierre
Cover of Release the Bats: Writing Your Way Out Of It by DBC Pierre
August 18, 2025 at 7:51 AM
bookeboy.bsky.social
'I'll tell you what's the greatest power under heaven,' said Felix...

George Eliot - Felix Holt, The Radical
Screenshot of text: 'I'll tell you what's the greatest power under heaven,' said Felix, 'and that is public opinion - the ruling belief in society about what is right and what is wrong, what is honourable and what is shameful. That's the steam that is to work the engines. How can political freedom make us better any more than a religion we don't believe in, if people laugh and wink when they see men abuse and defile it? And while public opinion is what it is - while men have no better beliefs about public duty - while corruption is not felt to be a damning disgrace - while men are not ashamed in parliament and out of it to make public questions which concern the welfare of millions a mere screen for their own petty private ends, - I say, no fresh scheme of voting will much mend our condition.' George Eliot - Felix Holt, The Radical
August 5, 2025 at 9:32 PM
bookeboy.bsky.social
Airy apartment with views. Plenty of storage. Available immediately. $1000 per week.
Photo of a bin room between two unit blocks with a view of the Opera House.
July 26, 2025 at 11:36 AM
bookeboy.bsky.social
Left the house to have Harold Pinter's words performed live in front of me. The play, Betrayal, is a close look at affairs - how they start, how they end, who they hurt.

All done without the help of Coldplay.

Go see it if you can. Old Fitz Theatre in Woolloomooloo.
Poster for the play Betrayal by Harold Pinter being performed at Old Fitz Theatre in Woolloomooloo, Sydney. Poster for the play Betrayal by Harold Pinter with photos of the four actors as performed at Old Fitz Theatre in Woolloomooloo, Sydney.
July 20, 2025 at 10:05 PM
bookeboy.bsky.social
Not sure why the Australian Children's Book page didn't share, but here it is.
Screenshot of The Nile's Australian Children's Books page featuring books by Australian Children's book authors and illustrators.
July 11, 2025 at 11:25 PM
bookeboy.bsky.social
Since taking on the role of Head of Books Australia at thenile.com.au I have been busy hand curating pages on the new website (launched this week). I am most proud of the work I have done promoting local Australian authors and illustrators.

Please let me know what you think.

TheNile.com.au
Screenshot of The Nile's Australian First Nations Collection page featuring books by First Nations authors. Screenshot of The Nile's Australian Genre Fiction page featuring books by Australian Genre authors. Screenshot of The Nile's Australian Literature page featuring books by Australian literary authors. Screenshot of The Nile's Australian Stories page featuring books by Australian authors.
July 11, 2025 at 11:22 PM
bookeboy.bsky.social
ChatGPT is just the latest way for the ambitious, impatient or lazy to try to gain the benefits of a lifetime of judicious reading without reading much at all.
Photo of a book: The BLUFFER'S GUIDE To LITERATURE. Introduced by David Frost. Know your jargon and hold your own in any company. INSTANT ERUDITION
July 6, 2025 at 9:11 PM
bookeboy.bsky.social
I broke the unspoken rule for those reviewing On The Calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle: Don't mention Groundhog Day.
Photo of the cover of the novel On The Calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle: Screenshot of my Goodreads review of On The Calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle: A novel about a woman who gets stuck living the same day over. It reads like a mental exercise. Like the author (and the trapped character) are nutting out how they would react if this happened to them. Sometimes with beauty, sometimes with illuminating insight, and sometimes with plodding obviousness. Neither appear to have caught a rerun of Groundhog Day on television and so don't know that the way out of the endlessly repeating day is to become a good person, learn the piano and win the heart of Andie MacDowell. Maybe I am jumping the gun. After all, there are more volumes to come. Bill Murray might appear to her in a dream in a later volume. I'm just not sure if I will be the one reading them.
July 6, 2025 at 6:17 AM
bookeboy.bsky.social
I owned a copy for decades before finally reading it.

In my defence, I was mentally blocked. There is a famous, and wonderful, Australian novel called My Brother Jack which somehow made me deeply, albeit largely subconsciously, suspicious of the more famous Jack.
Goodreads review of Brother of the More Famous Jack by Barbara Trapido: God I enjoyed Brother of the More Famous Jack by Barbara Trapido. So lively, so true and so good. I have had a copy on my shelves for decades. So many people (women) have recommended it to me over the years. What a dope I was for waiting. So good on big families and small, on relationships, on people, on love, sex and marriage. Her many characters walk off the page into your life. But enough of me going on. Loved it.
July 4, 2025 at 9:39 PM
bookeboy.bsky.social
Does anyone know the number for Theatre Phone?
Photo of text from How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton: A: Take the unemotive example of the telephone. Bell invented it in 1876. By 1900, there were thirty thousand phones in France. Proust rapidly acquired one [tel. 29205] and particularly liked a service called the 'theatre-phone', which allowed him to listen live to opera and theatre in Paris venues.
July 3, 2025 at 10:08 PM
bookeboy.bsky.social
Excuse my ignorance but I don't recall ever having heard of Joaquín Sorolla before I stumbled across his paintings today. How marvelous they are.
June 28, 2025 at 12:14 PM
bookeboy.bsky.social
I couldn't agree more.
Screenshot of a review of the Lessons: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Totally immersive with a completely satisfying, unexpectedly happy ending. Adored this.
June 28, 2025 at 3:31 AM
bookeboy.bsky.social
Winter in Australia is the pits...
June 28, 2025 at 12:37 AM
bookeboy.bsky.social
What? Another Anita Brookner?

Yes, and another bruising, desperately sad exploration of old age, loneliness and our failure to connect at a level that satisfies all parties.

Highly recommended 😀
Screenshot of a Goodreads review of Strangers by Anita Brookner: Another desperately sad and lonely subject for Anita Brookner to explore, a retired bank manager. Bachelor. Family reduced to a tenuous claim to a cousin's widow, who he visits without ever knowing whether he clings to the association as desperately as she does, or whether she just endures his monthly Sunday visits. And he never does know for sure either way. Of course, Anita Brookner doesn't let our retired bank manager be. She inserts two very different complications into his life, a strange bird-like sponge of a woman, and a defeated, prematurely old, ex-girlfriend. I can't say gaiety ensures. No, this is Anita Brookner after all. A minute examination of his current life, his past and his fanciful futures follows, circuitously, deadeningly, to the very last page. Just my cup of tea.
June 21, 2025 at 4:29 AM
bookeboy.bsky.social
My novel, The Lessons, is on sale at Booktopia for $10.

Though bright yellow, it isn't a bright and cheery book, it's quite brutal in its way.

One reader likened it to that other cheerful book, Atonement.

$10. Fairly cheap for a large chunk of my soul.

www.booktopia.com.au/the-lessons-...
Screenshot of the novel The Lessons by John Purcell as it appears on Booktopia bookshop.
June 20, 2025 at 11:27 PM
bookeboy.bsky.social
One can always rely on literature to cheer one up before bed.
Photo of text: His reading now was confined to diaries, notebooks, memoirs, anything that contained a confessional element. He was in search of evidence of discomfiture, disappointment, rather than triumph, over circumstances. Circumstances, he knew, would always overrule. Those great exemplars of the past, the kind he had always sought in classic novels, usually finished on a note of success, of exoneration, which was not for him. In the absence of comfort he was forced to contemplate his own failure, failure not in worldly terms but in the reality of his circumscribed life. He knew, rather more clearly than he had ever known before, that he had succeeded only at mundane tasks, that he had failed to deliver a reputation that others would acknowledge. Proof, if proof were needed, lay in the fact that his presence was no longer sought, that, deprived of the structure of the working day, he was at a loss, obliged to look for comfort in whatever he could devise for himself. His life of reading, of walking, was invisible to others: his friendships, so agreeable in past days, had dwindled, almost disappeared. Memories were of no use to him; indeed, even memory was beginning to be eroded by the absence of confirmation. As to love, that was gone for good. Whatever he managed to contrive for himself would not, could not, be construed as success. Sarah wessh
June 12, 2025 at 11:18 AM
bookeboy.bsky.social
Brilliant writer. A Boy's Own Story is the gay Catcher in the Rye. Sharp essayist, iconoclastic biographer, honest memoirist and startling novelist White has been with me my whole reading life. Bravo sir.
Screenshot of Guardian headline: Edmund White, novelist and great chronicler of gay life, dies aged 85 The American essayist, playwright and author of books including A Boy's Own Story and The Married Man has died
June 4, 2025 at 9:52 PM
bookeboy.bsky.social
Just finished watching season one & the devastating season two of The Empress on Netflix and have been left hanging. Season three is not out until 2026!

I will have to make an effort not to accidentally educate myself on late 19th century Habsburg history in the meantime.

(I'm sure it ends well.)
Poster of The Empress tv series on Netflix
June 3, 2025 at 10:17 AM