Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living by Carrie Tiffany

Humour often comes out of being uncertain or perplexed - a common state for me.'' She doesn't try to write comedy but, she says, ''I love humour when I'm reading I love writing that is black and wry. Tiffany recalls that when she read aloud from the novel, ''people would start laughing and I would think there was a comedian or a magician up the back of the room, or they had pumped in laughing gas''.

Reviewers were charmed, as were many readers. Tiffany sold rights to a publisher in Britain before Australia and later the US, where The Rocky Mountains News compared her ''debut of the year'' to the writing of Steinbeck and Hemingway.Įveryman's was shortlisted for awards from the 2006 Miles Franklin (the year McDonald won) to Britain's Orange Prize, longlisted for the Booker and won several others. Their interest perked up after it won the Victorian Premier's Award for an unpublished manuscript. That manuscript was ''universally rejected'' by Australian publishers, who thought it was well written but wouldn't sell. Based on real history, it is funny, sexy and darkly serious as it presages the damage done to the land by super-phosphate and rigid rationalism. Set in 1934, it follows an eccentric group of experts on the Better Farming Train that took the latest scientific methods to farmers in Victoria's wheat country. Go no further than Tiffany's first novel, Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living, published seven years ago. Plenty of other outstanding examples, as recent as last year's Foal's Bread by Gillian Mears, prove readers will follow a talented writer into the bush.

She cites Roger McDonald's Miles Franklin Award winner, The Ballad of Desmond Kale, as ''a fantastic novel about sheep''. She hates the notion that because Australians live mainly on the coast we are no longer interested in country life and that Henry Lawson is considered ridiculous. A whole genre of popular fiction has emerged recently, known in the trade as ''farm lit'' or ''rural romance'', mostly written by women for women and seething with farm animals.īut Tiffany belongs to a more literary tradition. But years later her anger, overlaid with laughter, is still emphatic. The characters are human this is not Animal Farm. She was working on her second novel at the time and Mateship with Birds is, in fact, a story about cows and birds - and one tragic sheep. Carrie Tiffany is ''not interested in novels set in coffee shops''.

Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living by Carrie Tiffany