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Fiction

The first book I ever properly owned – pored over, slept with, inscribed – was an elaborately illustrated hardback copy of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. One can imagine the producers of the attractively packaged Tollins: Explosive Tales for Children hoping it might assume similar significance for a contemporary seven-year-old boy. Conn Iggulden’s secret and quirky world of the Tollins involves old, greybearded men, intricate maps and plenty of adventures and derring-do by the book’s unlikely hero, Sparkler.

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One of the things I am often called on to do as a bookseller is to make recommendations, particularly when it comes to fiction. This involves making a judgement about what a customer wants from a book, rather than what a book may want from its reader. Many readers declare from the outset that all they want from a novel is a good story they can escape into. They happily admit that they don’t want to be challenged, don’t want to work for their enjoyment.

This is the frequently offered rationale for mass-market fiction: pure escapism. It exists to entertain, not to edify. Hackneyed storylines and wooden dialogue don’t matter, so the argument goes; all that does matter is giving people the kind of uncomplicated enjoyment they crave. The writing might not be stylish, but neither is it pretentious. Fair enough, perhaps. If you are the kind of reader who sees nothing wrong with lines such as ‘a fresh spike of fear gripped him’ or ‘there was only one way to heal his thirst for revenge’ or ‘Iris has always been blindly attracted to people who don’t fit the mould’, then criticism of this book is probably redundant. If, however, mixed metaphors, clichés and melodramatic flourishes make you cringe, be warned that Fiona McIntosh’s Fields of Gold is full of them.

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The sticker on the cover assured me that if I had enjoyed The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society I would ‘love’ Stillwater Creek. Had I been browsing the bookshop shelves, this would have been fair warning not to part with my money. Myriad readers obviously did love Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows’s international bestseller. Alexander McCall Smith certainly did: he chaired the committee that recently voted it The Times WHSmith Paperback of the Year. TGLAPPPS bored me so much that I failed to finish it, but I can see why McCall Smith, who writes novels in a similar vein and with similarly whimsical titles, championed it.

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Stealing Picasso is an art heist caper based on the sensational theft in 1986 of Picasso’s Weeping woman from the National Gallery of Victoria. The crime, attributed to a nebulous gang of militant aesthetes calling themselves the Australian Cultural Terrorists, remains unsolved. Anson Cameron, a Melbourne writer best known for the novel Tin Toys (2000), takes this historical loose end and runs with it, discarding all but the most cursory details of the source story.

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Set in Sydney, Wendy James’s third novel, Where Have You Been?, an intriguing story of family, loss, memory and identity, is just as compelling as her previous ones, Out of the Silence (2005) and The Steele Diaries (2008).

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Soon after the end of World War II, Robert Booker, husband of Catherine, returns from service in New Guinea to their home in Sydney. It is immediately apparent that their relationship has deteriorated. With Catherine’s hasty disposal of a telegram from an American soldier named Lewis, we learn that she has had an affair, and also a child, in Robert’s absence. The story then moves back to 1944, when the liaison began. Eventually it returns to the present, and Catherine has a hard time concealing her affair and child from her husband.

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Keeping Faith, Roger Averill’s first novel after his non-fiction début, Boy He Cry: An island odyssey (2009), is a quiet and resonant piece of work. Befitting a novel set partly in a labour ward and beginning with a description of a stillborn baby, it proceeds with the knowledge that finding the right words can be difficult. It speaks carefully and tactfully, in a spare language of great focus.

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Soon after the end of World War II, Robert Booker, husband of Catherine, returns from service in New Guinea to their home in Sydney. It is immediately apparent that their relationship has deteriorated. With Catherine’s hasty disposal of a telegram from an American soldier named Lewis, we learn that she has had an affair, and also a child, in Robert’s absence. The story then moves back to 1944, when the liaison began. Eventually it returns to the present, and Catherine has a hard time concealing her affair and child from her husband.

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Brian Castro has been leading his readers on an exhilarating chase since Birds of Passage in 1983, and his allusive, melancholy but sensual work leads Bernadette Brennan to being confidently: ‘Brian Castro is one of the most innovative and challenging novelists writing in English today.’ In her attempt to prove the justice of this assertion, Brennan is far too attuned to the richness of Castro’s work to try to establish any sort of total explanatory grid, and her book is less an attempt to tidy Castro up than a guide to some of the places where we might most profitably enjoy him.

One of the principal characteristics of Castro’s work, after all, is the ambition with which he calls out to his readers, inviting us to rise to the challenge and participate in the enjoyment of the dazzling multiplicity of issues, references, allusions, plays on words, and theoretical gambits that rub shoulders (and other parts) throughout his books.

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'What’s in a name?’ as C.J. Dennis and Shakespeare asked. Maybe much, as in nomen: omen – maybe naught, as in the case of the narrator Michael Meehan’s fourth novel, Below the Styx. For this chap’s name is Martin Frobisher, a distinctive name that rings several bells. Sir Martin Frobisher (c.1535–94) was an English navigator who made three attempts from 1576 to 1578 to discover the North-West Passage, giving his name to a bay on Baffin Island and bringing back to England ‘black earth’, which was mistakenly thought to contain gold. He later served against the Spanish Armada and raided Spanish treasure ships.

Meehan’s protagonist would appear to have nothing whatsoever in common with his Tudor namesake, and his name may be a subspecies of that great Australian comic trope, the furphy. From the first page of the book, it is all but impossible to shake the conviction that ‘Martin Frobisher’ has a weighty significance, while it may in fact be empty, a linguistic terra nullius. It may be a Shaggy Dog, happily at home in this benignly witty and whimsical novel, which is also a murder mystery.

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