Books of the Year
Amanda Lohrey
My novel of the year is Italian writer Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection (Text Publishing), a slyly political novel about a cool young couple in Berlin whose good intentions are undermined by neo-liberalism’s pet child, a rootless cosmopolitanism. I once shared an office with the poet Dorothy Porter and it was an experience. Porter died in 2008 at the age of fifty-four and in Gutsy Girls (University of Queensland Press) her sister Josie McSkimming crafts an affecting portrait of the poet and the resistance of both sisters to their volatile father. Beautifully written and with some of Porter’s best poetry woven throughout the text. Joan Didion’s Notes to John (Fourth Estate) is perhaps the ultimate in literary voyeurism, a diary of Didion’s sessions with her psychiatrist, published after her death. Didion’s therapist is an intriguing character in his own right.
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What the authors of these three wildly different books share is a gift for creating through language a kind of intimacy of presence, as though they were in the room with you. Emily Wilson’s much-awaited translation of The Iliad (W.W. Norton & Company) is a gorgeous, hefty hardback with substantial authorial commentary that manages to be both scholarly and engaging. The poem is translated into effortless-looking blank verse that reads like music. The Running Grave (Sphere) by Robert Galbraith (aka J.K. Rowling), the seventh novel in the Cormoran Strike crime series and one of the best so far, features Rowling’s gift for the creation of memorable characters and a cracking plot about a toxic religious cult. Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional (Allen & Unwin, reviewed in this issue of ABR) lingers in the reader’s mind, with the haunting grammar of its title, the restrained artistry of its structure, and the elusive way that it explores modes of memory, grief, and regret.
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This week’s episode of the ABR podcast is devoted to the Books of the Year. With ABR Editor Peter Rose, critic and writer Beejay Silcox and historian Frank Bongiorno discuss the books that stirred them most in 2022. This follows a Books of the Year feature in the December issue of ABR, with contributions from thirty-six writers and critics. Listen to Peter Rose, Beejay Silcox and Frank Bongiorno discuss the best books of 2022.
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A look back at 2022's literary highlights.
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A look back at the literary highlights of the year, as nominated by a selection of ABR contributors.
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In today's episode, Peter Rose talks to writers Beejay Silcox and Billy Griffiths about what they’ve been reading during this tumultuous year. They also speculate about some highlights of 2021. For those looking for a more extensive listing of this year's finest works, our Books of the Year features more than 30 different ABR critics nominating their favourite releases.
... (read more)After years of anticipation, I was thrilled to finally read Jaya Savige’s dazzling third volume, Change Machine (UQP, reviewed in ABR, October 2020): an intoxicatingly inventive and erudite collection rife with anagrams, puns, and mondegreens that ricochets from Westminster to Los Angeles to Marrakesh, remixing multicultural linguistic detritus into forms of the poet’s own invention. Yet for all the book’s global sweep, it’s the quiet poems about fatherhood that stay with me, especially Savige’s immensely moving elegy for a premature son, ‘Tristan’s Ascension’, with its devastating simplicity: ‘Oh, son. You stepped off one stop too soon. / Your mother has flown // all the way to Titan / to look for you.’ I also loved Prithvi Varatharajan’s Entries (Cordite), an introspective and deeply intelligent collection of mostly prose poems whose overriding note is one of ambivalence: a welcome antidote to the sea of certitude we seem to swim in these days.
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Read the books of the year as selected by ABR's leading writers and critics.
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To celebrate the best books of 2018, Australian Book Review invited nearly forty contributors to nominate their favourite titles. Contributors include Michelle de Kretser
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