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Vellum
In the crypt of an old stone church in Sydney, a translator and linguist uncovers a vellum-bound, illuminated manuscript. Written in a mysterious alphabet, Jack's not sure if his discovery is a hoax, a code, or even the only written record of a now forgotten language. Intrigued, he starts investigating. Using forensic and linguistic techniques, Jack starts unveiling the manuscript's history and soon discovers that he is not the first to try and decode its secrets. His predecessors were shadowy figures, monks from furtive religious orders, cryptographers and alchemists. As his researches take him ever deeper into the labyrinthine past - to the crusades, the library of Alexandria and even earlier - Jack's obsession grows. He realises that what he has stumbled across has put his life at risk and the only way to save himself is to break the manuscript's code and learn its secrets...The title, "A Little Rain on Thursday", comes from a Russian colloquialism that loosely translates as 'never' - much like the English phrase 'on a cold day in Hell'.
- GenresFiction
Paperback
First published July 1, 2007
About the author
Matt Rubinstein
8 books2 followersI started writing when I was six years old. "Writing" for me meant typing out Enid Blyton books on an old typewriter, word-for-word. Later I learned that writing was more than typing, it was invention; but I also heard that great writers like Hunter S Thompson had also copied out books like The Great Gatsby, in order to feel their construction from the inside.
When I was eleven my mother became a writer, and later she became another writer: first the children's author Gillian Rubinstein, and then the historical fantasy writer Lian Hearn. She taught me the true occupation of writing: I read early drafts of her books and saw the way she revisited and refined them, turning them from ideas into great stories.
At university I wrote a novel in sonnet form inspired by Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate. That book was Solstice, which was shortlisted for the Australian/Vogel literary award for unpublished manuscripts and later published by Allen & Unwin. I was asked to turn it into a play for the Adelaide Festival; I was lucky enough to work with some of Australia's best actors and musicians. After that I wrote Nomad, a novel based loosely on my travels in Europe, and it was published by Hyland House.
I then wrote Death of the Author, a post-modern serial killer thriller about a sinister character called The Reader who hunts down writers gathered for a festival of "multiple homicide fiction" in Adelaide. It was accepted by a publisher who then restructured and stopped publishing fiction; and it got me an agent who retired shortly afterwards. The book had kind of fallen between the cracks but I published it as an e-book this year.
I wrote a sequel to Solstice called Equinox, which was serialised on the website of the Sydney Morning Herald and which I am now tweeting over the course of a year. At the same time I wrote a literary mystery novel featuring an untranslatable manuscript that has a dangerous effect on anyone who tries to translate it, a little like the real-life Voynich manuscript. That book was runner-up for the Vogel award and was published as A Little Rain on Thursday in Australia by Text, as Vellum in the UK by Quercus, and by various European publishers.
While working on my most recent novel I became interested in the opportunities technology presents for writers and readers: I built my website, started to use Twitter, and wrote and spoke a lot about the future of the book. In 2012 I won the Calibre Award for my extended essay "Body and Soul: Copyright Copyright Law and Enforcement in the Age of the Electronic Book", which argues that traditional publishers are in real danger from alternative publishing models. I'm now putting my money where my mouth is and experimenting with electronic publishing.
When I was eleven my mother became a writer, and later she became another writer: first the children's author Gillian Rubinstein, and then the historical fantasy writer Lian Hearn. She taught me the true occupation of writing: I read early drafts of her books and saw the way she revisited and refined them, turning them from ideas into great stories.
At university I wrote a novel in sonnet form inspired by Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate. That book was Solstice, which was shortlisted for the Australian/Vogel literary award for unpublished manuscripts and later published by Allen & Unwin. I was asked to turn it into a play for the Adelaide Festival; I was lucky enough to work with some of Australia's best actors and musicians. After that I wrote Nomad, a novel based loosely on my travels in Europe, and it was published by Hyland House.
I then wrote Death of the Author, a post-modern serial killer thriller about a sinister character called The Reader who hunts down writers gathered for a festival of "multiple homicide fiction" in Adelaide. It was accepted by a publisher who then restructured and stopped publishing fiction; and it got me an agent who retired shortly afterwards. The book had kind of fallen between the cracks but I published it as an e-book this year.
I wrote a sequel to Solstice called Equinox, which was serialised on the website of the Sydney Morning Herald and which I am now tweeting over the course of a year. At the same time I wrote a literary mystery novel featuring an untranslatable manuscript that has a dangerous effect on anyone who tries to translate it, a little like the real-life Voynich manuscript. That book was runner-up for the Vogel award and was published as A Little Rain on Thursday in Australia by Text, as Vellum in the UK by Quercus, and by various European publishers.
While working on my most recent novel I became interested in the opportunities technology presents for writers and readers: I built my website, started to use Twitter, and wrote and spoke a lot about the future of the book. In 2012 I won the Calibre Award for my extended essay "Body and Soul: Copyright Copyright Law and Enforcement in the Age of the Electronic Book", which argues that traditional publishers are in real danger from alternative publishing models. I'm now putting my money where my mouth is and experimenting with electronic publishing.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
November 12, 2014
This book took me forever to read. It was not a bad book but took a lot of concentration and I am ready to read something else.
April 15, 2020
How do you define the indefinable? It’s not an easy job that’s for sure and that is the main reason why it has taken me months to strike up the courage to write a review for this amazing and highly original book.
Rubinstein has taken on a mammoth task and for the most part succeeded. How many people can actually come this close to writing something so original? Not many and I dare a writer to try. Even his prose is original and lyrical even in the simplest of paragraphs:
“It had rained and then stopped, and the harbour seemed fuller than usual. A mild Saturday night: the autumn was holding on. Low clouds travelled between the two shores, and the city lights grew haloes of red and white and blue. Dozens of charters and cruises wandered among the bays and bridges: farewells and stag nights, office parties. They all looked slightly lost behind their salty windows, their old carpets.”
For me A Little Rain on Thursday is about perception. What we truly make of things. Each of the characters are trying to understand something - to evaluate and then hopefully to accept. As the back cover says “Jack lives in a world of words. His work is a search for the perfect translation, the phrase that will capture the poetry of an elusive idiom. His love for Beth is a thing of intimate word-play and half told stories.”
As Beth struggles to come to terms with her father’s death and also the appearance of a man hovering close in her childhood; Jack discovers a fragile manuscript in the crypt of an old Sydney church that Beth’s family used to own and has now been left to her.
I love the letters of the strange alphabet that feature in the book and can’t help but wonder how the author came up with them. The language worries Beth:
“‘Can we find out what it is?’
He’d seen all kinds of alphabets: not only Cyrillic but the scrawl of Arabic, the landscapes of Chinese. He’d picked his way through them, learned a few of their meanings. This writing looked harder; it looked fused and ancient.
‘I don’t know,’ he said.
‘Maybe there was something in Beth’s expression. The unreadable writing made him nervous, but he had to help her if he could.
‘We’ll go tomorrow,’ he said. ‘First thing.’”
The search to identify and understand the manuscript drags Jack away from the real and the tangible: away from his friends and Beth into a world where everything is murky and the purpose of the manuscript impossible to comprehend. The end left me a little mystified, making me think I must read this book again. There is something I missed. Something I didn’t perceive. And only the best books do that. Make us question ourselves. I challenge you to read this fascinating book!
Rubinstein has taken on a mammoth task and for the most part succeeded. How many people can actually come this close to writing something so original? Not many and I dare a writer to try. Even his prose is original and lyrical even in the simplest of paragraphs:
“It had rained and then stopped, and the harbour seemed fuller than usual. A mild Saturday night: the autumn was holding on. Low clouds travelled between the two shores, and the city lights grew haloes of red and white and blue. Dozens of charters and cruises wandered among the bays and bridges: farewells and stag nights, office parties. They all looked slightly lost behind their salty windows, their old carpets.”
For me A Little Rain on Thursday is about perception. What we truly make of things. Each of the characters are trying to understand something - to evaluate and then hopefully to accept. As the back cover says “Jack lives in a world of words. His work is a search for the perfect translation, the phrase that will capture the poetry of an elusive idiom. His love for Beth is a thing of intimate word-play and half told stories.”
As Beth struggles to come to terms with her father’s death and also the appearance of a man hovering close in her childhood; Jack discovers a fragile manuscript in the crypt of an old Sydney church that Beth’s family used to own and has now been left to her.
I love the letters of the strange alphabet that feature in the book and can’t help but wonder how the author came up with them. The language worries Beth:
“‘Can we find out what it is?’
He’d seen all kinds of alphabets: not only Cyrillic but the scrawl of Arabic, the landscapes of Chinese. He’d picked his way through them, learned a few of their meanings. This writing looked harder; it looked fused and ancient.
‘I don’t know,’ he said.
‘Maybe there was something in Beth’s expression. The unreadable writing made him nervous, but he had to help her if he could.
‘We’ll go tomorrow,’ he said. ‘First thing.’”
The search to identify and understand the manuscript drags Jack away from the real and the tangible: away from his friends and Beth into a world where everything is murky and the purpose of the manuscript impossible to comprehend. The end left me a little mystified, making me think I must read this book again. There is something I missed. Something I didn’t perceive. And only the best books do that. Make us question ourselves. I challenge you to read this fascinating book!
August 12, 2020
I so wanted to love this book being a fellow Australian, but sadly I did not. I was taken in by the blurb on the book jacket. An ancient manuscript is discovered in a crypt of an old church in Sydney and Jack and his wife Beth (who inherits the church from her minister father) set out to discover who and why this manuscript ended up in the crypt. Parallel to this theme is the hint at a mystery surrounding Beth’s childhood and her father’s obsession with renovating the dilapidated church before his death. I found the writing to be self-conscious, the characters undeveloped and some of the exchanges between characters implausible. I also found the narrative disjointed and although I finished the book, I did not enjoy it at all and founding the ending rather flat.
January 22, 2024
The book is well-written as it truly captivated me at the very epilogue, however I was genuinely disappointed with the ending as it absolutely lacked structure :/
Regardless, I got to read more about the manuscript that the book was based on, the Voynich Manuscript, which I found to be very interesting. I recommend checking out the manuscripts’ pictures online, truly fascinating!
Regardless, I got to read more about the manuscript that the book was based on, the Voynich Manuscript, which I found to be very interesting. I recommend checking out the manuscripts’ pictures online, truly fascinating!
June 17, 2016
περίμενα κάτι αντίστοιχο,ίσως και καλύτερο του κώδικα ντα Βίντσι.Το βιβλίο αποδείχτηκε κατώτερο των προσδοκιών μου και μόνο προς το τέλος απέκτησε ελάχιστο ενδιαφέρον.Κατά τα Αλλά έμοιαζε σαν να έλειπαν ολόκληρες σελίδες ανάμεσα στις παραγράφους.πολλοί χαρακτηρες που δεν είχαν λόγω ύπαρξης και στο τέλος δεν πήραν το φινάλε που θα δικαιωνε την εμφάνιση τους
March 19, 2008
probably good for a bookclub but i think it was the cover that attracted me to the book rather than the blurb.
Read
August 4, 2011This book sounded like it would be exciting, but it was so boring I couldnt even finish it...
April 21, 2012
sounded good at first,has some interesting details here and there,but is - all in all - not really recommendable :/
February 26, 2013
Ok not very much action at all so a bit disappointing.
November 26, 2014
Για ένα τέτοιο βιβλίο,με τέτοιο περιεχόμενο και τόσο μπερδεμένο που να με φτάσει σε σημείο απελπισίας,μπορώ να συνοψίσω την κριτική μου σε μια φράση: ΒΑΡΕΤΟ ΜΕΧΡΙ ΑΗΔΙΑΣ!
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews