Hello my name is Indyana Schneider and I am the author of 28 Questions which is being released
this month I'm very excited to say. 28 questions tells the story of two young Australian women
Alex and Amalia who meet at university and fall in some kind of love at first sight. At
first they think it's friendly love and then the story sort of follows their relationship
over the next four years through five different cities and a central question of the novel is
how do we tell the different kinds of love apart and why does the perfect friendship
not necessarily translate into the perfect relationship. And I'm yeah very excited
to share this with you as well as three other love... novels that I ('lovells' - it's cause I
love them!) that I really adore and have inspired me both as a writer and a reader. So the first of
those is How Should A Person Be by Sheila Heti. I love this book. I read it a very long time ago and
so many of the scenes have stayed so clearly in my mind and so many of the lines as well.
It was my first introduction to both Sheila Heti and to auto-fiction as a genre and tells
the story of Sheila, the narrator and her group of artist/writer friends over the course of a year,
basically interrogating the title question, how should a person be? There's a brilliant sort of
subtext storyline of a competition who can make the ugliest art. There's a brilliant line where
Sheila writes that irresponsibility looks really good on this character and responsibility looks
really good on that character, what will look really good on me? And there's just so many,
it's just such a brilliant, genius novel and actually features in the book that I wrote
because my characters have read it and really loved it as well. So that would be my first
recommendation. The second is Artful by Ali Smith. This novel, yeah it's sort of breathtakingly good,
tongue-tyingly good. It's basically, the narrator is haunted by the ghosts of a former lover who
sort of steals things and watches television and the book is a sort of marriage of fiction and
like narrative writing and essays and sort of a meditation on grief and words and art and
memory. And yeah I don't want to say too much more almost because I just, you should all
read it. It's so beautiful and it's a book I've bought as a gift for so, so many friends and
actually received it as a gift myself. So, yeah it really has a very special place in my heart.
And then the third book I actually don't have a physical copy with me but I have downloaded
the cover of the book, Such A Fun Age, so that I can share it with you like this.
Such A Fun Age is such a good book. It is brilliant as a story in the way that it just is so
page-turny and exciting and such a good well thought out, brilliant twisty plot.
But aside from that, actually the writing of it I just found a masterclass in pace and character
and relationships. And the book basically starts out with a young black babysitter,
Emira, who is about to age out of her parent's health insurance in America and she babysits for
a white family. And the sort of, this setup is a high-end supermarket and she's with the child that
she babysits who's a white young kid and she's accused of kidnapping the kid and that sort of
is the beginning of this novel. And the sort of two central characters I guess are the
mother of the young kid, Alix, and Emira, the babysitter, and it's just so good and
the way it deals with theme of race and marriage and hypocrisy and forgiveness
is fabulous and I didn't even have it on my shelf with me because my copy's in Australia
with my family and I had to mention it. So, yeah, those would be my three recommendations.