ma.ttrubinste.in

The launch of A Little Rain on Thursday at Gleebooks last week went very well. Delia Falconer said some very kind things about the book and there was a great crowd there, so thank you very much if you were part of it. That’s me looking pleased with myself, Delia looking indulgent and the book looking as wonderful as ever (if a little flashed out).

The book’s first review is in the June 2007 issue of Australian Book Review, and it’s a nice one. It’s not available on the Internet, but I’ll argue fair use and extract the opening paragraph:

I realise it is a stretch, but imagine The Da Vinci Code with brains. No, that’s not fair: it obviously takes brains of a kind to top best-seller lists for several years. So try thinking of how a serious intellect, as distinct from a facility for page-turning compulsiveness, might have gone to work on it. Such effort won’t tell you all you need to know about Matt Rubinstein’s new novel, but A Little Rain on Thursday is inter alia about old manuscripts, church history, subterranean chambers, Templars and libraries – and it is compulsive reading.

Shucks! I mean, I’m always bit ambivalent about comparisons to Dan Brown’s book, but I’m not going to complain if they’re all like that. The review also draws in AS Byatt, Michelangelo Antonioni and Peter Carey, which I absolutely love.

There was also a bit of a profile of me in Saturday’s Advertiser, and it is available online here. It was my first interview in a while, so I hope I don’t sound like too much of a dork. It starts:

Matt Rubinstein’s new novel, A Little Rain on Thursday, seems like many books rolled into one: it’s a mystery, a novel of ideas, a meditation on faith, grief, love and the quest for knowledge – and it’s a rollicking page-turner.

I’d sure buy a book like that—wouldn’t you?