2016 Publisher Picks

Ben Ball I’m fresh from Hannah Kent’s compelling, humane, and utterly convincing The Good People (Picador, 10/16). Kent completely inhabits her material. In this single nineteenth–century Irish valley, she has created a whole world – indeed, a whole cosmology – that we struggle to break free from at the end of the book. The folded landscape, the terrifyingly precarious lives (especially of women), the honest engagement with folk wisdom, the cold – is it too early to think of a Kentland? I also recently read Tara June Winch’s After the Carnage (UQP, 9/16), a remarkable collection of stories roughly a decade after her knockout début, Swallow The Air (2006). Startling without being showy, various but not tricksy, moving, fresh, and beautiful – an extremely potent voice ready to roar. Ben Ball is Publishing Director, Penguin Books Australia. Meredith Curnow Two books examining Australian identities arrested me this year. Stan Grant’s Talking to My Country (HarperCollins) is direct, unadorned, and poetic. You hear his honest and mellifluous voice as you read, and think, and digest. Grant is a storyteller through training and tradition; by combining the language of healing with optimism, he has given us an important call-to-action. Sporting folk, and their avid followers, are often great storytellers. From the Outer: Footy like you’ve never heard it, edited by Alicia Sometimes and Nicole Hayes (Black Inc., 6/16), delighted me and did not shy away from darkness. Meredith Curnow is Publisher, Knopf, Vintage, Random House Books Madonna Duffy As a publisher and a reader, I am always looking for fresh new voices. I was impressed by Rajith Savanadasa’s début novel, Ruins (Hachette, 10/16), and the way it broadens our knowledge about Sri Lanka’s post-civil war period. It also captured a family and a country wedged between its ancient culture and the modern world. I enjoyed Dominic Smith’s The Last Painting of Sara de Vos (Allen & Unwin, 6/16) for its treatment of art forgery, and I loved the behind-the-scenes view of the art gallery world. Madonna Duffy is Publisher at the University of Queensland Press. Sally Heath How good is it to disappear from a world of constant interruptions into a book of 493-plus gloriously written pages? Pretty damn good if it a sumptuous study of a woman and power prompted by the Sarah Palin phenomenon and ending as a seven-year investigation into Queen Victoria. From the opening pages of Victoria: The queen (HarperCollins), historian and journalist Julia Baird wears her extensive and original research lightly with assured and deft writing that is never overawed by her subject. Another highlight was the insights and force of Tim Winton’s memoir The Boy Behind the Curtain (Hamish Hamilton, 12/16). Sally Heath is Executive Publisher, Melbourne University Publishing. Michael Heyward Fiona McFarlane’s collection of stories The High Places (Hamish Hamilton, 1/16) reminds its readers that she is a writer of scary talent. In these stories, just as she did in her novel The Night Guest (Hamish Hamilton, 12/13) McFarlane listens, really listens, to her characters while they puzzle things out, trying to keep life at bay until it becomes comprehensible. But life never waits. The tension in this dynamic shapes her sentences into their marvellous forms, and is a measure of her resistance to false sentiment. You can open this book and begin reading anywhere. Michael Heyward is Publisher at Text Publishing. Nathan Hollier The Art of Time Travel: Historians and their craft (Black Inc., 8/16), by Tom Griffiths, was as entertaining as it was thought-provoking. It sent me off to read Australian historians I should have read but hadn’t (such as Donna Merwick), deepening my understanding of others (especially Geoffrey Blainey, Greg Dening, and Mike Smith), and prompting me to pick up books (by Eleanor Dark and Eric Rolls) that had sat on my shelves for years without me working up the enthusiasm to open them. Other works I admired included Madeline Gleeson’s Offshore: Behind the wire on Manus and Nauru (NewSouth, 8/16) and Ian Lowe’s The Lucky Country? Reinventing Australia (UQP, 8/16). Nathan Hollier is Director of Monash University Publishing. Ivor Indyk I was impressed by Π.O.’s monumental collection of poems, Fitzroy: The biography (Collective Effort Press) Π.O. has always pursued his own path, developing an original and uncompromising poetic, and most of all, celebrating the suburb of Fitzroy – it is his country, and he is its epic poet. This collection dramatises its history in 400 verse portraits; but what is extraordinary is the diversity of fact that goes into their composition, giving the poetry an encyclopedic range that rises naturally from the smallest and most populous suburb in the country. Ivor Indyk is Publisher of Giramondo Publishing. Phillipa McGuinness This year I have read little fiction; all my reading outside work has been in the service of the book I’m writing about 2001. Yassmin Abdel-Magied’s Yassmin’s Story: Who do you think I am? (Vintage) is up there among many striking memoirs published this year – not just because of its mix of faith, fast cars, and working on rigs, but mainly because we hear the optimistic voice of a young Sudanese-Australian Muslim woman entirely herself. Mark McKenna’s eye-opening From the Edge: Australia’s lost histories (Miegunyah) is also about belonging. Read it, if only for the story of an extraordinary walk in 1797. Phillipa McGuinness is Executive Publisher of NewSouth Publishing. Jane Palfreyman Emily Maguire’s An Isolated Incident (Picador, 4/16) is a brilliant and engrossing novel which subverts our responses to reading, viewing, and reporting on violent crimes against women, both actual and fictional. We realise after reading this transformative novel that all violence against all women is connected (hence the ironic title) and accreted by our conditioned responses to it as both news and ‘entertainment’. This is a stunning novel about what really happens when someone is killed. Georgia Blain’s Between a Wolf and a Dog (Scribe, 5/16) is an assured and luminous novel. The book unfolds over a storm-swept Sydney day as family therapist Ester and her family all teeter on the brink of what might be disaster or salvation. This is a profound and beautiful meditation about being alone and human, about our never-ending search for self-knowledge and connection, and, ultimately, forgiveness and love. Blain’s intelligence, compassion, acuity, and sheer talent are a gift for any reader. Jane Palfreyman is Publisher at Allen & Unwin. Aviva Tuffield The two Australian books I’ve most admired this year are Josephine Rowe’s novel A Loving, Faithful Animal (UQP, 5/16) and Maxine Beneba Clarke’s memoir The Hate Race (Hachette, 10/16). At first blush they may seem very different, but both address the ineffable effects of intergenerational trauma, especially as experienced in childhood. Rowe’s kaleidoscopic, polyphonic gem gradually reveals a picture of one damaged family living in the shadow of their Vietnam vet father’s PTSD. Beneba Clarke’s powerful, honest, and haunting account of growing up black in middle-class Australia is a testament to what racism does to a young person’s psyche. Somehow it also contains much humour and tenderness; a timely, essential book. Aviva Tuffield is Publisher at Black Inc. Terri-ann White I have chosen Position Doubtful by Kim Mahood (Scribe, 9/16). My declaration of interest here is that I stayed for five days at Mulan, the community setting for this deep book; Mahood and I ran writing workshops for a book project while she was completing it. Mahood is usually fairly dispassionate about how black and white Australians trade with each other; in this intriguing work about our continent and how people inhabit it, she turns on affinity and long connection. Mahood offers testimonies and stored losses. It’s also a book about maps, how we navigate vast country with maps or different systems of knowing. It’s poetic and wonderful. Terri-ann White is Director of UWA Publishing. Geordie Williamson Ryan O’Neill’s Their Brilliant Careers: The fantastic lives of sixteen extraordinary Australian writers (Black Inc., 8/16) is a thesis wrapped up in a pisstake. Consisting of sixteen capsule biographies of Australian authors who never existed – or rather, who do exist but in altered guises – the book is starts off as a work of cod lit. crit. and ends as a Calvino-esque fable about our national resistance to literature. Meanwhile, in North America, Elizabeth Strout’s My Name is Lucy Barton (Viking) introduces us to one imagined writer who, like all great novelistic creations, becomes more eloquently acute, intimately knowable, and supersensibly attuned than her creator could ever hope to be. Geordie Williamson is Publisher at Picador Australia.

Ben Ball

From the New Issue

The Floating University: Experience, empire, and the politics of knowledge by Tamson Pietsch

Thunderhead by Miranda Darling

‘Calm Voice’, a new poem by Anders Villani

A Memoir of My Former Self: A life in writing by Hilary Mantel, edited by Nicholas Pearson

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