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Brett Hetherington

Goodreads Author


Born
in Canberra, Australia
Website

Twitter

Genre

Influences
George Orwell, Paul Theroux, Isabel Fonseca, James Baldwin, Doris Less ...more

Member Since
January 2014


I am the author of "Slow Travels in Unsung Spain" and "The Remade Parent."
I am a regular commentator on Spain's social and cultural life for Australia’s ABC Radio and a columnist for Catalonia Today magazine.

I am also a freelance writer and teacher. Some of my other writing has appeared in The Australian Journalism Review, Barcelona Metropolitan and Monocle guides.

I live with my partner/wife Paula near our young adult son Hugo in Catalonia's Barcelona region.

You can visit my homepage at: http://www.bretthetherington.net/

https://bretthetherington.substack.com/

or Twitter: https://twitter.com/BrettHethering

or Youtube
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6tn...




























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Average rating: 4.5 · 24 ratings · 16 reviews · 4 distinct works
Slow Travels in Unsung Spain

4.37 avg rating — 19 ratings3 editions
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The ReMade Parent: Why We A...

it was amazing 5.00 avg rating — 4 ratings — published 2013 — 2 editions
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THE REMADE PARENT: Why We A...

it was amazing 5.00 avg rating — 1 rating
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Viagens sem pressa pela Esp...

by
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* Note: these are all the books on Goodreads for this author. To add more, click here.

New post and Last post: Please join me now over on my new Substack page

I'm afraid it's goodbye.

But thanks for the memories...and thanks for reading!

After 14 years here and 832 posts, and my intro to online posting, it's all over because I've found someone new to share my life with! Well, you know what I mean...

Please join me now over on my new Substack page: https://bretthetherington.substack.com/

All my old blogposts are there so for nostalgia's sake we are not reall

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Published on October 13, 2023 12:03
Elephant Complex:...
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Brett’s Recent Updates

The Summer Before the Dark by Doris Lessing
"This story has really stayed with me the last few days since I finished it. Middle aged London-based Kate has come to a crossroad as the nest empties and her husband takes a short term assignment in New England. Her summer and autumn away from sublim" Read more of this review »
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With Open Arms by Matthew Felix
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Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee
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Journey Out Of Asia by Katharine Sim
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Amsterdam by Geert Mak
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Bury Me Standing by Isabel Fonseca
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A book that mixes styles so well. A superb blend of personal interpretation, research, and first hand reporting. I've re-read it several times over the years and will keep dipping back into it in the future, I'm sure. ...more
Bury Me Standing by Isabel Fonseca
""The biblical suffering of Roma has always been met by commensurate indifference." This book expanded my knowledge of the Roma by 1000%. Parallels can be drawn between every disgusting choice made by humanity, from the genocide of Indigenous American" Read more of this review »
Bury Me Standing by Isabel Fonseca
"Between 1991 and 1995, Isabel Fonseca journeyed among the Roma through Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, Poland & Germany, among other places. Unusually, she manages to gain the trust of many of these people, and was accepted into their lives - although Am" Read more of this review »
"After a book I wrote was accepted for publication, I received an eight-page questionnaire from the company’s publicist. She wanted more information about me than my doctor asks for. Who was the book’s primary audience? Who did I know in the media ..." Read more of this blog post »
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Conversations With Brando by Lawrence Grobel
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Quotes by Brett Hetherington  (?)
Quotes are added by the Goodreads community and are not verified by Goodreads. (Learn more)

“Later that night, I passed through a public garden [in Córdoba] that was
displaying hundreds of small multi-coloured flags. They were part
of a protest against the Israeli government’s military action in
Gaza and were accompanied by a prominent list of the names of
those who had been killed. I was heartened to see that in a
provincial city like this one there were people who were well aware
of events a long way outside their own area. The continuing existence of this display in a public place was an example of local
government tolerance towards left-wing causes, and I wondered if
the same attitude would be shown by the town hall in conservative
Madrid, 400 kilometres away.”
Brett Hetherington

“I love wide stretches of open land, but to the average Spaniard, who typically thrives in company and is most at home in a crowd, these fields of Extremadura (which literally means “extremely tough”) could even be intimidating, only partly because not far back in time there were bandits in the region.

They were named as the ‘extreme’ end of the country.

If it is at least not totally empty, there is certainly a sense of that great lonesome feeling created by the far-off, long, long line at which the earth's surface and the sky meet: a pleasant melancholy of an imagined solitary truck crawling across a plain, the ancestral memory of a caravan trail or a child’s drawing of a single emblematic tree on a small hill.”
Brett Hetherington, Slow Travels in Unsung Spain

“I wasted time, and now doth time waste me;
For now hath time made me his numbering clock:
My thoughts are minutes; and with sighs they jar
Their watches on unto mine eyes, the outward watch,
Whereto my finger, like a dial's point,
Is pointing still, in cleansing them from tears.
Now sir, the sound that tells what hour it is
Are clamorous groans, which strike upon my heart,
Which is the bell: so sighs and tears and groans
Show minutes, times, and hours.”
William Shakespeare, Richard II
tags: time

“When I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.”
George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

“But the fact is that writing is the only way in which I am able to cope with the memories which overwhelm me so frequently and so unexpectedly. If they remained locked away, they would become heavier and heavier as time went on, so that in the end I would succumb under their mounting weight. Memories lie slumbering within us for months and years, quietly proliferating, until they are woken by some trifle and in some strange way blind us to life. How often this has caused me to feel that my memories, and the labours expended in writing them down are all part of the same humiliating and, at bottom, contemptible business! And yet, what would we be without memory? We would not be capable of ordering even the simplest thoughts, the most sensitive heart would lose the ability to show affection, our existence would be a mere neverending chain of meaningless moments, and there would not be the faintest trace of a past. How wretched this life of ours is!--so full of false conceits, so futile, that it is little more than the shadow of the chimeras loosed by memory. My sense of estrangement is becoming more and more dreadful.”
Winfried Georg Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

“The best things in life aren't things.”
Art Buchwald

“One thunderbolt strikes
root through everything”
Heraclitus, Fragments

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