Books of the Year
Jennifer Maiden's The Fox Petition: New Poems (Giramondo) conjures foxes 'whose eyes were ghosts with pity' and foxes of language that transform the world's headlines
... (read more)Books of the Year is always one our most popular features. Find out what our 41 contributors liked most this year – and why.
... (read more)Books of the Year is always one our most popular features of the year. Find out what 30 senior contributors liked most this year – and why.
... (read more)Dennis Altman
It is always tempting to use this opportunity to draw attention to books that may have been somewhat neglected, and looking back over 2012 three books stand out: Russell Banks’s Lost Memory of Skin (Ecco), Kim Westwood’s The Courier’s New Bicycle (Harper Voyager), and ...
Bec Kavanagh
Winner of the 2010 Text Prize, Jane Higgins’s The Bridge (Text) is amazing dystopian fiction that taps into the mistrust of our government and the complex tug of emotions that comes with adolescence. Cath Crowley’s Graffiti Moon (Macmillan) is a raw and energetic coming-of-age book that has won its fair share of awards this year, and r ...
Patrick Allington
The year, for me, has been dominated by wonky donkeys and dancing kangaroos. As for books for adults, I read more fiction than non-fiction – and, with accidental parochialism, more Australian than international novels. Frank Moorhouse’s Cold Light (Vintage, see the November 2011 ABR review [11/11]), especially its majestic ending, ...
Patrick Allington
While I have been rather underwhelmed by much of the non-fiction I’ve read in 2010, it’s been a terrific fiction year. Although published in 2009, I can’t go past Marie Munkara’s début book, Every Secret Thing (University of Queensland Press, reviewed 4/10, ABR), connected stories set on an island mission. Munkara writes bril ...
Maya Linden
Amid the proliferation of fiction inspired by supernatural themes, it is refreshing to find several débuts concerned with the more mundane – yet perhaps more pertinent – quests of adolescence. Tohby Riddle’s The Lucky Ones (Penguin) explores a period of change in the life of Tom, an aspiring artist, as he negotiates the purgatory between high school and adulthood. Told in a conversational voice, punctuated with poetic observation, it is a meditation on ‘the faint sadness that seems to underpin all things wonderful’.
... (read more)Patrick Allington
Of 2009’s emerging Australian novelists (such a silly term: emerging from what?) Craig Silvey’s second novel, Jasper Jones (Allen & Unwin), stands out. A dark and funny morality tale set in a 1960s Western Australian mining town, it ruminates on death, secrets, racism, dodgy parenting and adolescence. For anybody who once dreamed of sporting greatness, the cricket match is pure joy.
... (read more)William Kostakis
Jackie French explores the impact of World War I on both the home- and battlefronts in her extensively researched and earnestly written A Rose for the ANZAC Boys (Harper-Collins), which finds three young girls ditching the irrelevant deportment classes of an English boarding school to start a canteen in France for wounded soldiers. Barry Jonsberg’s Ironbark (Allen & Unwin), an uplifting read about facing inner demons and family, sees a sixteen-year-old city boy with Intermittent Explosive Disorder sentenced to a place worse than prison: his grandfather’s shack in rural Tasmania. On the ‘make-things-go-boom’ action side of the young adult spectrum, Jack Heath’s Money Run (Pan Macmillan), with its perfect mix of humour, suspense and attention to character, proves Heath’s expertise defies his age.
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