The story behind the fairytale of Melbourne Cup winner Michelle Payne tops the ratings this week

THE story behind the fairytale of Melbourne Cup winner Michelle Payne tops the ratings this week

1 BIOGRAPHYLife As I Know It Michelle Payne with John Harms, MUP $32.99

THE Melbourne Cup creates heroes most years but few will have a place in history like Michelle Payne. Hollywood could well have written the fairy-tale script of how a petite young woman with a winning smile rides a “no-hope’’ horse in the biggest race of the year — and triumphs.

It just wasn’t that easy. Before she was one, her mother Mary was dead, killed in a car crash, leaving 11 children in the care of Paddy, their horse-training father.

Payne is steeped in the racing game — seven of her 10 siblings also became jockeys — but she battled prejudice and injury just to get rides. Overcoming the odds is the strongest thread of this journey to the first Tuesday in November that is simply told and possibly a bit too folksy for some folks. But the first female to ride the winner of the Melbourne Cup marches to the beat of her own drum — and if you don’t like it, just as she told those people who didn’t believe women could compete in the Sport of King’, you can probably just “get stuffed”.

CRAIG COOK ****

2 HORRORThe Last Days of Jack Sparks Jason Arnopp, Orbit, $29.99

Before the current infatuation with vampires and werewolves, horror thrillers were about devil worship, possession and things that go bump in the night. British author Arnopp harks back to this, even name-checking the seminal works. And as is traditional, even obvious warnings are ignored.

Obnoxious Jack Sparks has made his name writing books in which he not only stars but delves first-hand into topics such as drugs and gang culture. Now he’s turned to the supernatural, witnessing exorcisms and joining a bunch of oddballs trying to conjure up a spirit.

Sharp prose and witty dialogue offset the scary bits and for those who care to read deeper, it’s a cutting commentary on the me-generation — where everyone is talking but no one is listening.

SHELLEY ORCHARD ****

3 FICTIONThe Interpreter Diego Marani, Text Publishing, $29.99

Diego Marani has worked as a translator and even invented a language called Europanto, so it’s not surprising he keeps returning to the subject. This latest novel follows on from The Last of the Vostyachs and New Finnish Grammar and serves as the culmination of a trilogy on language and identity.

Felix Bellamy is head of interpreters at a university but is forced to fire one, Gunther Stauber, when his translations break down into a series of whistles and shrieks. Stauber protests he has found the earth’s original language then disappears, but not before infecting Bellamy with the same disease. What follows is a weird, surreal, funny journey through Europe as Bellamy seeks treatment from a doctor who prescribes him a fulltime course in Romanian as a cure, before he runs away to hunt down Stauber and becomes a gun-toting outlaw.

MICHAEL MCGUIRE ***1/2

4 NONFICTIONEnemy Ruth Clare, Penguin, $32.99

The war in Vietnam lives on, in America at least, as an unwelcome reminder of imperialist intervention, many of its returned combatants broken and ignored still.

Australia’s Vietnam involvement remains as much unknown as it is pushed aside. More than 19,000 young Australians fought there however, Ruth Clare’s father among them.

He came back unchanged on the outside but deeply wounded within. She would have loved to have known him before says Clare, before his shredded emotions inflicted physical hurt upon her, her sister and mum. But why?

Clare, now in her 40s, writes well and her reflections are structured and empathetic, yet she is overly hard on herself, easing only when she becomes a mother.

Redemption though doesn’t lift what is, unsurprisingly, a rather depressing journey from one wound to the next.

It’s well told but don’t pack it for a holiday.

RICHARD EVANS ***

5 TEENAGE FICTIONYellow Megan Jacobson, Penguin, $19.99

Fourteen-year-old Kirra is trying desperately to keep up with the airhead in-group at her coastal high school, but it’s not easy when your father has moved out and your mother has taken to alcohol as a result. When her mother turns up drunk at the school social it is heart-throb neighbour Noah and misfit Willow who help out under the sanctimonious gaze of the shocked in-group.

Kirra’s only other friend is a lonely ghost at the far end of a phone line that rings in an old Telstra box on the beach. Kirra and the ghost make a pact: she’ll bring his murderer to justice and he will make her popular and get her parents back together. Nothing, of course, is that simple and the ghost turns out to have made some miscalculations, but with the help of her new friends Kirra sets her sights on her own bright future.

An engaging debut, full of heart.

KATHARINE ENGLAND ***1/2

Originally published as The story behind the fairytale of Melbourne Cup winner Michelle Payne tops the ratings this week