Fiction

The War Within Me is the second book in Tracy Ryan’s trilogy on the Queens of Navarre, a kingdom precariously sandwiched between the powerful monarchies of France and Spain. In 1512 Navarre had lost much of its territory to Spain; its continued survival thereafter depended upon a complicated diplomatic dance with the French court. The first book in Ryan’s series followed the life of Marguerite of Angoulême, sister of François I of France, who married Henri II of Navarre in 1526. Now Ryan turns attention to their only daughter, Jeanne d’Albret, who succeeded to the throne after her father’s death in 1555.

It would diminish this novel to describe it as ‘timely’. ‘Timeless’ is nearer the truth. The risk of a catastrophic breaking out involving Iran is a symptom of decades of tragedy, which novelist Shida Bazyar has conveyed here with a rare balance of vivid social realism and intimate introspection. The results are masterful.

Billing itself as a ‘gay Bildungsroman’, Thomas Vowles’s Our New Gods follows Ash, a young man with a dark past, in his move from rural Western Australia to the ultra-hip enclaves of Melbourne’s Inner North. Ash immerses himself in the city’s queer scene and soon finds himself in a viper’s nest of sexual and emotional entanglements. First up is his new friend James, a rich blond Adonis; James is in an open relationship with the volatile Raf; Raf has a connection with a troubled soul called Booth.

One of the advantages of the novel, and a major reason for its endurance into this messy century, is its elasticity. The novel’s willingness to contain a multiplicity of forms can defeat even the most radical attempts to shatter its structure. Another, perhaps contradictory advantage of the novel is its capacity for direct insight, opening a portal into another human mind at a particular time in human history.

‘Maybe narrative structures didn’t work at all in the world of nature, the real world. Story arcs, character development. Maybe that was part of the problem – our need to make everything a stupid story, to narrativise, when really all this wasn’t a “story” at all. It was something else altogether.’

For a long time, Antigone Kefala was thought of as a migrant writer. This lens confined discussion of her work to the territory of biography and witness and obscured the migratory poetics of the writing itself. In her spare, bristling poems and candid journals, and across her non-fictional prose and fiction, Kefala’s restive work hinges on precision and vision.

Australia is a weird place. A backwater colonial outpost settled by racist squatters and their indentured convict servants, it is a country forever defined by its isolation, in every sense, from the rest of the world. Faster than Barron Field could say ‘kangaroo’, an Empire crashed onto the shores of the First Peoples who had been cultivating a narrative tradition since time immemorial, and set about writing a (manifest) destiny of its own.

In one of the later short stories in Michael Farrell’s The Victoria Principle, a man anonymised as ‘Bill’ is prompted by an anecdote recounted in a university swimming pool change room to reflect on possible excuses not to arm-wrestle. This does not seem to have been a topic of interest for Bill previously. Indeed, the narrator concedes that for Bill’s ‘milieus (overlapping academic and creative)’ arm-wrestling was given little thought, if any.

Crime fiction is one of the most popular genres worldwide. It caters for a variety of audiences: readers who launch themselves into an intense competition with the detective for who is going to identify the villain first; those who enjoy being thrilled from the comfort of their armchairs; and those who like to be immersed in the social and political issues that arise from confronting investigations. Author of the acclaimed The Mother (2022), Walkley Award-winning journalist and social commentator Jane Caro returns with a second crime novel, Lyrebird, that will appeal to crime fiction enthusiasts interested in delving into major issues of our times, such as gender violence and climate change. The titular bird first appears in the Prologue, when student ornithologist Jessica Weston films its mating dance and song in the remote New South Wales Barrington Tops National Park. Suddenly, a lyrebird mimics an unknown woman screaming for her life in what sounds like Spanish. Terrified, Weston goes to the nearest police station but nobody accepts her video as evidence that a crime has been committed, apart from a junior police detective, Megan Blaxland, who is then asked to close the case. The ‘lyrebird case’ is ignored for twenty years until a landslip reveals a woman’s skeleton in the Burraga Swamps, exactly where the lyrebird danced. Now a retired senior sergeant, Blaxland returns to the police force as a consultant to reopen the case. Blaxland teams up with her original partner, Philip Arlott, and a small team of eager young cops. She is also helped by Weston, who, in the meantime, has become a biology professor and is also the mother of a rebellious daughter, fifteen-year-old climate activist Sheridan. Soon, other bodies are discovered in the Burraga Swamps and the search for a possible serial killer exposes horrific crimes, such as illegal sex work and human trafficking, as bushfires close in on the investigators and suspects.