Fiction

This is a novel about a mother, daughter, and granddaughter. Two of these women are artists, and the third is a medical practitioner. Wendy James explores creativity and the price it exacts, especially if the artist is a woman. James is also interested in biography, its limitations and potentially destructive effects. The title, The Steele Diaries, refers to the journals of a celebrated book-illustrator, Zelda Steele. In the 1960s, Zelda is a young mother of two, temporarily living separately from her husband when, mysteriously, she dies by drowning in the local river. This occurs just as she is fulfilling her potential as an artist. The main narrative is a first-person account by Zelda’s (now adult) daughter, Ruth, a doctor who has spent her life resenting her famous mother and modelling herself on her beloved father, Richard, the respected GP of an outback country town. Ruth’s inner journey towards an adult understanding of her mother and, thence, herself provides the central narrative. The trajectory begins immediately after her father’s death in the late 1990s, when Ruth is contacted by Douglas Grant, an international art critic and biographer of her long dead grandmother, modernist landscape painter Annie Steele. Annie was the first wife of painter Ed Steele, Australia’s most famous modernist artist. Douglas Grant, a lover of Zelda’s when they were young, is aware that she kept a journal and now wants to base a biography upon it. Grant is convinced that it must have been in Richard’s possession during the years since Zelda’s death.

Julienne van Loon won the Vogel Literary Award for 2004 with Road Story. Now, with Beneath the Bloodwood Tree, van Loon has passed the hurdle or hoodoo of getting a second novel written and published, although not with ease, and apparently with no resolved sense of the kind of novel she was intending to write.

Sarah Hay’s new novel is set in north-western Australia against a background of intense heat and bone-hard country, a continent away from the grim southern island setting of her previous novel, Skins (2001). Although this second novel by the Vogel-winning author explores a very different place and time, the two novels share some common terrain. Both unfold in remote locations where conditions of survival are harsh; both explore themes of loneliness, will, desire and the impact of colonisation.

In October 1997 Canberra engineer Joe Cinque died following a lethal administration of heroin and Rohypnol. Two women were charged with his murder: his girlfriend, Anu Singh, and her friend Madhavi Rao. Singh was convicted of manslaughter over the death and sentenced to ten years’ jail (of which she served four); Rao was cleared of all charges.

The story of the children Conaci and Dirimera, who were spirited away to Europe by a Benedictine missionary, Rosendo Salvado, in the mid-nineteenth century to be trained as Australia’s first indigenous monks, is arguably the first, forgotten chapter of Australia’s Stolen Generations. It is the subject of Anouk Ride’s The Grand Experiment, a compelling though problematic book, where a number of the author’s charges can also be levelled at her.

A startling début novel by Melbourne-based author Caroline Hamilton, Consumed is a truly macabre story that will disturb and alienate some of its readers. The (at times patchy) prose revels in its gratuitous descriptions of the preparation of food, especially meat, but this may be a deliberate choice in the face of sanitised offerings available at your local supermarket.

A History of The Great War alludes to an encyclopedic work that appeared in the wake of World War I. Bound in red leather and embossed with gold, it exemplified officially sanctioned history. Peter McConnell’s recommissioning of the title is more than mere irony: it throws down a challenge to our acceptance of conventional history. His central character is a latter-day Penelope, a decent, ordinary woman who nonetheless possesses many of the noble attributes often evinced by the Anzacs: endurance, resourcefulness, patriotism and courage.

One of the intriguing things about Breath, Tim Winton’s first novel in seven years, is that it has a number of affinities with his very first book, An Open Swimmer (1982). Both are coming-of-age novels that attempt to capture some of the confusion and melancholy of youth ...

In the essay ‘Pay Attention to the World’, written shortly before her death in 2004, Susan Sontag argues that fiction is ‘one of the resources we have for helping us to make sense of our lives … [it] educates the heart and the feelings and teaches us how to be in the world’. While Sontag’s insight recognises the power of literature in general, the qualities she identifies are particularly significant in young adult fiction. Genius Squad and At Seventeen are two examples of the ‘rite of passage’ novel, where adolescent characters’ quests for self-discovery illuminate parallel themes in the lives of teenage readers.

For many Australians, the Burke and Wills odyssey is a sketchy episode in our history. For Kevin Rabalais, a recent immigrant to this country from New Orleans, the fragments of the story were obviously an intriguing premise for a novel. His first novel, The Landscape of Desire, retraces this expedition and the later one led by Howitt that set out to find the missing explorers. The strange thing is that the author does not approach his work as historical fiction, but as literary fiction.