Twenty years on, this collection of interviews and features remains one of the best dissections of the contradictions, hypocrisies and joys women experience in Islamic countries.Ĭaustic rare-book expert Hanna Heath is given the chance to conserve the Sarajevo Haggadah, one of the oldest surviving Jewish illuminated texts. Brooks made use of these obstacles, focusing instead on telling the personal stories of women in Islamic countries, getting intimate access to women in royalty and the poor. While working as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, white female Brooks had a hard time doing her job shunned by Muslim men for interviews, refused access to politicians and denied opportunities that were offered readily to male colleagues.

Here are five to get you started on a Brooks bender:ġ Nine Parts of Desire: the Hidden World of Islamic Women (1995, revised 2007) As she wrote in March: “To know a man’s library is, in some measure, to know a man’s mind,” and only good things could be said about a shelf with even one Brooks title sitting on it. But she is not as famous as either, at least outside Australia – in Australia, Brooks is a national treasure and shifts hardbacks accordingly.įor all yet to discover her, I envy you: Brooks somehow manages to write both clear, authoritative non-fiction – she is about to return to the Middle East on an unnamed assignment – as well as warm, overwhelming lyrical fiction. She also writes often about nature, painting landscapes of brutal, untamed beauty reminiscent of Annie Proulx. Given how universal Brooks’s books are, why then does she remain so under-appreciated outside of Australia? In her fiction, she returns most frequently to the beauty and blood found in religion, exploring faiths in a quiet, reverent voice that recalls Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead. As a fan, it is nice to see a self-described “feminist tree-hugging pinko” officially recognised for her body of work.

It’s an apt description: whether the setting is the rocky American wilderness or pre-biblical Israel, all Brooks’s books have an underlying fascination with the wider world, frequent references to multiculturalism and mutual understanding, and warnings against the corrosiveness of class prejudice – all wonderfully Australian roots. The American-Australian author was awarded the Order of Australia on Tuesday, to mark her “essentially Australian” contributions to writing, as she called them in an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald.

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