Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living by Carrie Tiffany

Sister Crock wags her matronly finger at anyone who dares cross her path on the topics of womanliness and mothering practices. Mary Maloney, Jean’s levelheaded confidante, teaches cooking. An assemblage of eccentric experts staffs the train, including sewing instructor Jean Finnegan, a remote young woman orphaned at a young age by a mother who died giving birth to her and a father killed in battle and Robert Pettergree, a soil expert raised as an only child in a brothel (two siblings died of spina bifida) who has the uncanny ability to identify a soil’s origin by its taste. In 1934, the Better-Farming Train rolls through Depression-wracked wheat-farming towns of the Mallee - a hot and dry region in northwestern Victoria, Australia - bringing advice in the form of “lecturettes” on everything from child nutrition and cooking to animal husbandry to chicken sexing to soil improvement. Many readers around the globe have heard of it, but in the U.S. It was named Best Debut of the Year by the Sydney Morning Herald. So it is with trepidation that I attempt to substantiate a claim about a novel that has, until now, fallen into the category of the unspeakable, and that recently (apparently in a moment of temporary insanity) I publicly declared “the best book no one’s ever heard of.” To be clear, Carrie Tiffany’s Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book (2006), the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction, and the Guardian First Book Award. I don’t even want to hear that you, too, treasure them (my delicate heart grows faint at the thought of my beloved’s polygamy). I don’t want to describe why or how they’ve moved me, lest the spell be broken. The books and stories that have changed me unequivocally (a poet friend describes this as being wrecked), on the other hand, sit quietly and deeply inside me, like secret treasure to which only I have the crumpled, ink-faded map. dissecting) purposes is far from a collection of desert-island favorites and the books I would most eagerly review for public consumption are those that strike me unevenly, with a healthy mix of strengths and flaws to approach with cerebral clarity.

The collection of fiction I keep on file for teaching (i.e. Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living by Carrie Tiffany

Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living by Carrie Tiffany