Mrs. M
2017
Fourth Estate, hbk, $AUD 29.99, ISBN 9780732271817
"I think readers will be swept up by this creation. The narrative would grab me with moments of exquisite cadence and perfect emotional truth. The difference of grief endured in winter when nearby neighbours have decamped; the weight and colour of Sydney’s air around a storm; the sinuous gestures of eucalypts; the particular light in a room whose windows are “paned inexpertly with varied depths of glass”; a flight of black swans parting into a V-formation over Sydney Harbour. Told in Elizabeth’s voice, and seen through her eyes, the sensuous descriptions of her Scotland and her Sydney — as well as her own inner world — rise off the page with a poet’s perfect pitch." Ashley Hay. The Weekend Australian.
“Moving, intricate ... Slattery’s achievement is to render, subtly and powerfully, both a human love story, and a love story to the nation.” Anna Funder, author of Stasiland and All That I Am
From one of Australia's foremost journalists, Luke Slattery, comes a bravura literary achievement, a rich and intense novel of an imagined history of desire, ambition and dashed dreams, and a portrait of one passionate, unforgettable woman, Elizabeth Macquarie.
Elizabeth Macquarie, widow of the disgraced former Governor of New South Wales, Lachlan Macquarie, is in mourning - not only for her husband, but the loss of their shared dream to transform the penal colony into a bright new world. Over the course of one long sleepless night on the windswept isle of Mull, she remembers her life in that wild and strange country; a revolution of ideas as dramatic as any in history; and her dangerous alliance with the brilliant, mercurial Francis Greenway, the colony's maverick architect.
The First Dismissal
2015
Penguin Specials, ISBN 9780143572473
How Governor Lachlan Macquarie invented an idea of Australia, a convict built it –
and how Britain tried to tear it down.
“Short and snappy … It is exciting to see a writer of Slattery's quality take on the extraordinary history of colonial Australia with such zest and conviction and present it, properly, as a story with universal human meaning … [a] fierce little book.” Grace Karskens, The Sydney Morning Herald
While violent revolution and social upheaval rocked Europe, far away in New South Wales, Governor Lachlan Macquarie was sowing the seeds for the Australian idea of the “fair go”. Macquarie was a reformer and an emancipator. He believed that a person's worth - be they gentry, infantry or convict - lay in what they were capable of doing, not what they had done in the past. He freed the brilliant, mercurial convict Francis Greenway and appointed him government architect for the buildings that would shape a new nation. But to the Tory British government of 1820, Macquarie and Greenway's unconventional alliance threatened NSW's very legitimacy as a penal colony. Here Luke Slattery breathes dramatic life into Australia's first political dismissal and, along the way, maps Macquarie and Greenway's bold collaborations and extraordinary architectural - and cultural - legacy.
Reclaiming Epicurus: Could an Ancient Philosophy
of Happiness Save the World?
2012
Penguin Specials, ISBN 9780143570431
"Writing with a pleasing lightness of touch, Slattery argues that Epicurus
and his followers were greens centuries before the modern
environmentalist movement, and that their emphasis on community and cultivation
is more relevant now than ever." Sun-Herald
Epicureanism is not just for gourmands – Luke Slattery argues it can help us rethink our materialistic ways and face the challenges of
man-made climate change. Rather than appealing to altruism, or calling for economic revolution, the Epicurean philosophy counsels that genuine happiness comes from the quieting of desire: from less, not more. And that might just be the mindset we need to rein in unsustainable development. Could answers to the big questions faced in the 21st century be found on fragments of petrified scrolls in the Villa of the Papyri, buried along with Pompeii?
Dating Aphrodite: Modern Adventures in the Ancient World
2005
ABC Books, ISBN 0 733317006
“The ache of loneliness is a classical emotion, there almost from the start.
It inspired Alexander, created Rome, the Renaissance, revolutionary France.
Luke Slattery, light-footed traveller and passionate guide, movingly recovers for us
a world that made our own and which we have never quite forgotten.
This book is his Odyssey, his long journey home.” David Malouf
Dating Aphrodite is a modern celebration of the classics of ancient Greece and ancient Rome – their wisdom and humour, as well as the insights they offer our contemporary world. In the best tradition of Alain de Botton and Simon Schama, Luke Slattery illuminates the classical ideas underpinning so much of modern civilisation in a combination of travel book and history book, and a meditation on what it means to be an Australian in the 21st century.
“To call the book an essay may imply both discipline and liberty, and these are to be found here. Slattery is a lucid expositor ... and also a skilful narrator of his own fugitive experiences, as befits a highly focused journalist. But he can keep imagination on the stretch, too; can be nerved by admiration into question.”
Peter Steele, Australian Book Review
“It is hard to imagine a more companionable guide to the myths and heroes, ideas and attitudes of the ancient Greeks and Romans than Luke Slattery. He weaves his elegant discussions of the stories and personalities of the ancient world into the narrative of his own wanderings on classic soil ...
Slattery's work is representative of a movement in modern thought - one that, as yet, has no special name. He is unafraid of being serious. He wants to understand and discuss the great topics of life; but he is generous and easy with his knowledge; he focuses on why ideas matter, how they connect with experience. He liberates the university ideal (love of knowledge) from its typical failings (obscurity, technicality, gracelessness); he absorbs the postmodern vision of freedom - why not mix the genres of travel writing and ancient history - but avoids its irritating "cleverness" and irony. The reader is treated as a friend, someone with whom the writer can be sincere as well as entertaining. Perhaps such writing needs no name, other than the name it has always had: humane literature.” John Armstrong, The Age
"Luke Slattery’s search for antiquity as he retraces the journey of Odysseus in Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey is beautifully written, erudite, and rich with meaning about the impact of the classics on modern life... Slattery’s tale captures the classic traveller’s experience of coming to a place with expectations of finding something, and being disappointed by the reality, but finding rich, unanticipated treasures nonetheless." Vivienne Wynter. Online Opinion.
Crisis in the Clever Country: Why Our Universities are Failing
1994 - By Geoffrey Maslen & Luke Slattery
Wilkinson Books, ISBN 1 863501630
