Customer Reviews

The Australia Stories: A Novel

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This is a wonderful book, a strange, startling combination of human warmth, passion, local color, wisdom and humor. There is, of course, the Australian setting, new (at least to me) and filled with color and beauty, but it is the people one will remember best, the Uncle, the wives, the mother and grandmother, but mostly the narrator, who guides us through it all and reveals himself as troubled but caring, warm and distant simultaneously, funny and perceptive, and mostly wise without being insufferable. This a really good book, a rare accomplishment.

Todd James Pierce's novel The Australia Stories opens your heart to not one, but two continent's worth of yearning and sadness. This is a book that is as patient and vivid as a bushwalk. Pierce's characters leave the page and enter your world, then invite you back to their world with them. Pierce masters the story, and then steps from behind the storytelling veil in the final section to create a dramatic tension, as well as increased intimacy. A beautiful story unfolds, even as it aches to read it, word after perfect word.

This is an amazing read. Not only does the author build upon his knowledge of the Australian landscape and history, but he engages us with a journey story about familial love and longing. This is a must-read for lovers of all things Australia. Mr. Pierce is a gifted writer with a large appetitite for gorgeous language and rivetting story-telling. I look forward to his next book. Highly recommend it.

The mythology of Australia is central to this novel. Both Sam Browne's grandmother and mother have vanished into the wilds of the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, his grandmother to myth and his mother in search of her own mother's memory. These disappearances (his mother's body is found, his grandmother's never found) have a profound influence on Sam as he remembers the year he spent with his mother in Australia before she was lost forever.

Pierce combines the unfathomable territory of memory with myth-saturated Australia, where the Aboriginal population has produced such ethereal tales from spectacular geography. Pierce also adds a strong feminist content to Sam's identification with his maternal relatives. His mother has had a positive effect on the young boy and the grandmother's journals offer him even more understanding of their unique bond with the land.

After returning to the United States, Sam finishes school, marries and divorces. Yet he remains fascinated by the stories of his mother and grandmother. Sam is able to recover most of his grandmother's original documents and spends his time pouring over their contents. His grandmother's voice speaks to him over the years, seducing him back into the land of myth that plays such an important role in his life. He cannot help but heed the siren call of his mother's native country.

In The Australia Stories, Todd James Pierce perfectly captures female sensitivities and the power of familial ties, reading Sam's mother's emotions with acuity in that short year spent with her in Katoomba, before returning to California. While the maturing Sam Browne feels Australia in the marrow of his bones, the lives of his mother and grandmother are ever more an intrinsic element of his spirit. He begins an intimate journey toward understanding the true nature of intergenerational connections, evolving one into another, spiraling through time. At peace with the past, finally, Sam steps easily into his future, where limitations are allowed no purchase, offering only promise and possibility. Luan Gaines/2003.

Pierce, whose short stories have appeared in numerous literary journals, shapes his first novel as a series of interlocking stories, each exploring different forms of love and loss, from familial to puppy love to the blood's connection to place. The 30-year-old narrator, Sam Browne, spent a year in Australia as a boy, living with his mother who had left his American father to return to her native land. Here he fell in love for the first time, an experience he deftly describes, remembering how, "I felt older, as though my presence filled more of the world than it had just that morning." From his adult perspective he recalls how it distanced him from his mother, "neither of us understanding we had arrived at a crossroads, a place where our paths would slowly move apart, mine leading more toward school and women, hers bringing her more deeply into the country she again called home."

As Sam enjoys the first pangs of love, his mother turns to the past, attempting to understand her own mother through her unpublished writings, essays on life and nature she wrote in the years she lived alone in Australia's Blue Mountains after leaving her husband, a man who had always yearned for England. It was only after his grandmother's death - a "walkabout" into the mountains from which she never returned - that Sam's mother returns to Australia and assembles her mother's papers for publication, becoming so absorbed and intrigued that she follows - too literally - in her mother's footsteps.

Sam's short marriage disintegrates painfully and inevitably. He too, immerses himself in his grandmother's writings, plumbing his own Australian roots as, more vulnerable, but wiser, he grows into a new love, finds new hope.

Pierce has a lot going on - first love, mature love, the emotional resonance of place in self-identity, the difficulty of knowing those closest to us, particularly family. Sam is an introspective, tentative character who makes more effort than most to understand the people in his life. Pierce's writing is nuanced, reflective and assured, with an atmospheric sense of place. A fine debut.

I read this wonderful book when it was first released, but something--summmer weather, I thought--made me pick it up again. Quickly I realized the book had been with me the whole time, and within a few pages, Pierce's voice had lulled me again into a state of high suggestibility where landscape, history and dream comingle. At first the novel seems fragmented, but soon you realize that Pierce's characters, especially Sam Browne, move according to their own timelines. Trauma, uncertainty and loss guide this book on a scavenger hunt of meaning that lead to the Blue Mountains of Australia, a setting that, like an astrological chart, casts its fortune on three generations of soon-to-be wanderers. Todd Pierce's The Australia Stories is just as timeless and influential.

This is a wonderful little book. It sweetly tells the story of one man's family, especially his mother and grandmother, and incorporates the locales and dreams and legends of the Great Southland, Australia. It is a very moving story which reads very true, although the author states that it is fiction. I am hoping that his obvious love for Australia continues and that he will write more about that great country.

I picked this up because a friend told me about it. Took me about two evenings to read. Fabulous story. Stunningly written. Seriously, each paragraph was dazzling. I'm only saddened because (at least on Amazon) this is the author's only work. Hopefully, there'll be more.

This five-star debut uber-novel, a sequence of short stories, takes the reader across oceans of time to Sydney and the Blue Mountains of New South Wales. Pierce risks sentimentality on his poignant journey - and comes up with something like a prose poem I could not put away until I reached its last intense page. Other readers have praised the novel's plot and characters. I'd like to extol its powerful nostalgia, its longing for what Proust called les temps perdu. The Australia Stories creates an almost mythical aura about its setting and characters; it is exponentially more radiant than any travel guide. The wonder of the author of this book is that, rather than living like an aesthete in a cork-lined room, Pierce has performed an enormous service to all writers by maintaining a stellar Web site about literary agents. He is both at home in the fictive world he creates in The Australia Stories - and alive and well in his generosity and tirelessness as a member of the workaday literary community. Cozy up to Pierce's pocket-sized The Australia Stories and let it take you to a magical Down Under!

THE AUSTRALIA STORIES is a wonderful book. I bought it for my wife because she's Australian and knows a great deal about her country, and then when she was through I read it and realized that one doesn't only learn a lot about the history and culture of the place, but Mr. Pierce has a tremendous ability with story-telling. I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I urge all lovers of the Australian continent and of great stories to share this book.