Australian Fiction
The unnamed narrator of Ronnie Scott’s second novel, Shirley, is a socially engaged thirty-something foodie from Melbourne’s inner north. She works as an internal copywriter for a health insurance company. She has an encyclopedic knowledge of the vegan-friendly bars and eateries within a five-kilometre radius of her small apartment in trendy Collingwood. She also cooks: scrambled tofu and vegan chorizo soup; Korean vegan pancakes and Cantonese soy sauce noodles; pan-fried gnocchi with blended basil and gochujang. She might wash these down with a glass of wine or whisky, or even a michelada, followed by the occasional menthol cigarette. She has been confined to her apartment alone for 262 cumulative days of lockdown (‘and the wild, long days that have fallen between them’), imposed by the Victorian government to curtail Covid-19. She also happens to be the daughter of a celebrity.
... (read more)Tony Hughes-d'Aeth reviews 'Praiseworthy' by Alexis Wright
An ochre-coloured haze has gathered permanently over the town of Praiseworthy somewhere in the Gulf country. It is composed of dust, soot, broken butterfly wings, memories, and grief – and it isn’t going anywhere. Meanwhile, on the ground, thousands of feral donkeys are being corralled into the town cemetery by an Indigenous leader called Cause Man Steel. Most call this man Planet because he is always banging on about the collapse of the planet.
... (read more)Jennifer Mills reviews 'A Country of Eternal Light' by Paul Dalgarno
When a book takes its title from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, you can expect the shock of something supernatural. But although Paul Dalgarno’s A Country of Eternal Light is narrated by a dead woman, there is little here to horrify.
... (read more)Laura Elizabeth Woollett reviews 'Dark Mode' by Ashley Kalagian Blunt
An early-morning jogger. An alleyway. A young woman’s mutilated body. A set-up familiar enough to warrant its own Television Tropes category (‘Jogger Finds Death’). Yet before catching sight of the latter-day Black Dahlia being pecked at by ibises somewhere off Enmore Road, unlucky passer-by Reagan Carsen is caught in a spider’s web: a simple but effective visual metaphor for the wider web that connects her to the first victim of the fictional ‘Sydney Dahlia’ serial killings.
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Peter Ward’s stunningly inadequate review of Passenger in the Weekend Australian has at least the virtue that it compels a reply. The first came from Keneally himself, who finished his account of the novel’s favourable reception in other English-speaking countries by saying ‘I just don’t want people to avoid Passenger because of any antipodean twitches. So don’t miss it. Believe me.’
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In American culture, the baseball novel is virtually a genre unto itself, baseball offering a metaphor through which the American dream – the rise and fall and rise again of unlikely heroes – might be interrogated. The prologue of Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997) offers a stunning example: within all the noise and spectacle of a baseball final an entire nation, as it teeters on the edge of the atomic age, is apprehended.
... (read more)An interview with Martin Flanagan.
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Metempsychosis is the transmigration of a soul at death into the body of another being. The plot of this novel turns neatly on an incident of metempsychosis. I don’t wish to explain what happens, because one of the charms of the book lies in that moment, and readers must be free to enjoy it.
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Ten years ago historical novels were an unwanted rarity in Australian children’s publishing. Instead, there was a vogue for time-slip novels where a contemporary kid went travelling back into the past, as though history would be too hard for younger readers to handle without some sort of tour guide.
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