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Daniel Juckes

In Moonland by Miles Allinson

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September 2021, no. 435
Daniel Juckes reviews 'In Moonland' by Miles Allinson

In an ABC interview to promote his previous novel, Fever of Animals (2015), Miles Allinson shares a brief anecdote. When Allinson was aged sixteen or seventeen, a teacher told him that everyone turns conservative eventually. Allinson recalls his repulsion at the notion of this inevitable slide towards orthodoxy. His new novel, In Moonland, feels like a rebuttal. Joe, the narrator of the first part of the book, is caught somewhere between consent and revolt: though ambitious, he feels trapped by the flickering lights of his own computer, by the suburbs, and by his run-of-the-mill job. Orbiting him is a coterie of questions relating to his new status as a father, coupled with one more profoundly unanswerable question: why did his father, Vincent, kill himself? Only some of these questions are answered across a narrative that uses four different perspectives and three different timelines, from the present back to the 1970s and into the near future.

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The closure of UWA Publishing

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Book Talk
'The closure of UWA Publishing' by Daniel Juckes

Sometimes Western Australia feels a long way from anywhere. Of course, that can be an attraction. It makes for something distinct and telling: everyone either revels in it or rebels against it, and both are productive in their own way. But now we must resist. The University of Western Australia’s recent decision to close UWA Publishing (at least in its present form) has made the gap between here and the rest of the country yawn. Western Australians need support from other literary communities across Australia if UWAP is to be reinstated.

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Call Them by Their True Names: American crises (and essays) by Rebecca Solnit

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March 2019, no. 409
Daniel Juckes reviews 'Call Them by Their True Names: American crises (and essays)' by Rebecca Solnit

On the first page of her book Hope in the Dark (2004), Rebecca Solnit quotes from Virginia Woolf’s diary: ‘The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing the future can be, I think.’ Such optimism is, Solnit acknowledges, surprising. But it’s a persistent theme in her work and it finds ...

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Things My Mother Taught Me by Claire Halliday

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June–July 2016, no. 382
Daniel Juckes reviews 'Things My Mother Taught Me' by Claire Halliday

Claire Halliday's Things My Mother Taught Me opens thus: 'History is a personal thing.' But in this book – a collection of interviews with famous Australians about ...

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Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter

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March 2016, no. 379
Daniel Juckes reviews 'Grief is the Thing with Feathers' by Max Porter

Crow is wild. His black eyes glint and his beak seems to smile. Malicious and mischievous, he sits in a living room with two boys and their father wrapped in his wings. The woman who was their mother and wife has died, leaving the family 'like Earth in that extraordinary picture of the planet surrounded by a thick belt of space junk'.

Crow is the titular bir ...

H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald

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January-February 2016, no. 378
Daniel Juckes reviews 'H is for Hawk' by Helen Macdonald

After fiddling with the bits of leather designed to curtail a newly bought goshawk, T.H. White grumbled that 'It has never been easy to learn life from books' (The Goshawk, 1963). Helen Macdonald says the same thing, twice: all the books in piles on her desk, designed to help her deal with grief, cannot 'taxonomise the process, order it, make it sensible'. ...

And You May Find Yourself by Paul Dalgarno

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December 2015, no. 377
Daniel Juckes reviews 'And You May Find Yourself' by Paul Dalgarno

Writing about masculinity is difficult. But Paul Dalgarno, a founding editor at The Conversation, accepted the challenge. In And You May Find Yourself, he expresses truths which never seem trite or indulged.

The book describes the author's relationship with his father, as well as the flaky bond he shares with his wife and sons. These anxiet ...

City of Exiles: Berlin from the Outside In by Stuart Braun

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November 2015, no. 376
Daniel Juckes reviews 'City of Exiles' by Stuart Braun

Berlin is built on sand, says Stuart Braun in City of Exiles; it is 'never far away from darkness'. It is a city of tolerance, which exerts a psychic pull for anarchists, artists, and those who become Wahlberliners: 'the people who choose to live in Berlin.'

City of Exiles' own sandy foundations make it difficult to find anything s ...