Bernice Barry lives on Western Australia's south-west coast near the place where the pioneering botanist Georgiana Molloy arrived in 1830. She researched the lives of Georgiana and John Molloy for more than a decade, travelling in Australia and Europe to access original sources and historical sites for her biography Georgiana Molloy: The Mind that Shines (Picador Australia).
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A Child's Garden of Verses
Robert Louis Stevenson
This was the first poetry anthology I owned. I always read the poems aloud, a reminder today of childhood's easy pleasure in predictable patterns of rhyme and metre. In these pages I recognised a child like me who spent much time alone, watching the real world and imagining others. A writer, an adult who had never met me, knew my thoughts. At eight years old, I learned (and remembered) that words can connect people and places, past and present.
Dictionnaire Philosophique
Voltaire
A collection of essays on just about everything people argued about in 1764. Encountering this as an undergraduate in London, away from home for the first time, I was launched into a new universe of literature that shifted my thinking and dragged me willingly away (temporarily) from Jean-Jacques Rousseau and everything Romantic. I admired, then and now, Voltaire's rebellious, ironic wit and determination to write the truth of his thinking, even though it meant condemnation and banishment.
The Shell Seekers
Rosamunde Pilcher
Two decades living right in the middle of England meant terrible, geographical claustrophobia. I yearned for the far southwest, the land's edges and the sea. Penelope's childhood memories of Cornwall, and her dreams of returning, mirrored my own. She felt what I felt and so this book was my comfort. "Before it was too late, she would take the road west to that rugged claw of England where, once, she had lived, and loved and been young."
Four Letters of Love
Niall Williams
If forced to choose one favourite novel, this would be it, an enduring inspiration. "Some things do not bear much telling", but Williams finds the way: glorious, simple words placed next to one another in ways that shake you up and then soothe again. The setting, a remote Irish island, is literally magical. The characters are vivid, flawed, real. Lives are bleak but love burns through it all, miracles happen and the end leaves you breathless with relief.
