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Fiction

The Life to Come by Michelle de Kretser

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October 2017, no. 395
Beejay Silcox reviews 'The Life to Come' by Michelle de Kretser

Humans are narrative creatures. We tell stories to make sense of ourselves, but our stories – be they historical, political, fictional, or personal – shape us as much as we shape them. In the service of narrative expediency, we often sacrifice nuance. We turn chance to prophecy, and accidents into choices. We justify and excuse ourselves. We anoint heroes and vi ...

The Hopr Fault by Tracy Farr

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September 2017, no. 394
Sonia Nair reviews 'The Hope Fault' by Tracy Farr

The minutiae and messiness of family life as it comes together and unravels time and time again are delicately rendered in Tracy Farr’s second novel, The Hope Fault. The unrelenting rain that forms the lugubrious backdrop for much of the novel conjures up the same rich, atmospheric setting of the late Georgia Blain’s

Blindness and Rage: A Phantasmagoria: A novel in thirty-four cantos by Brian Castro

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September 2017, no. 394
Patrick Holland reviews 'Blindness and Rage: A Phantasmagoria: A novel in thirty-four cantos' by Brian Castro

Lucien Gracq, the hero of Brian Castro’s verse novel Blindness and Rage, wishes to be a writer, though he has written only love letters to women, which achieved tragicomic results, or none at all. When Gracq retires from his job as a town planner in Adelaide, it seems he will have the time and freedom to write the epic he has dreamed of, but he is diagnos ...

Australia Day by Melanie Cheng

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September 2017, no. 394
Johanna Leggatt reviews 'Australia Day' by Melanie Cheng

The characters in Melanie Cheng’s collection of short stories are all outsiders or misfits in some way. Some feel conspicuously out of place, such as the Lebanese immigrant Maha, in ‘Toy Town’, who is struggling with suburban Australian life, or the Chinese medical student Stanley, who is visiting the family farm of a friend in the titular story. Stanley freez ...

The Gulf by Anna Spargo-Ryan

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September 2017, no. 394
Josephine Taylor reviews 'The Gulf' by Anna Spargo-Ryan

Shortly after her son, Luke, was murdered by his father, Rosie Batty spoke of the non-discriminatory nature of family violence: ‘No matter how nice your house is, how intelligent you are. It can happen to anyone, and everyone.’ If Batty’s is an example of the less easily imagined site of domestic violence, Anna Spargo-Ryan’s second novel, The Gulf, ...

The Town by Shaun Prescott

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September 2017, no. 394
Shannon Burns reviews 'The Town' by Shaun Prescott

Shaun Prescott’s début novel shares obvious conceptual territory with the fiction of Franz Kafka and Gerald Murnane, both of whom are mentioned in its promotional material ...

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A New England Affair by Steven Carroll

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September 2017, no. 394
Patrick Allington reviews 'A New England Affair' by Steven Carroll

In his fiction, Steven Carroll stretches and slows time. He combines this with deliberate over-explaining and repetition, the echoing of memories and ideas, coincidence, and theatricality. A distinctive rhythm results: when reading his work, I often find myself nodding in time to the words. Occasionally – and it happens now and again in his new novel, A New En ...

Pulse Points by Jennifer Down

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September 2017, no. 394
Susan Midalia reviews 'Pulse Points' by Jennifer Down

Barbara Kingsolver, praising the skill required to write a memorable short story, described the form as entailing ‘the successful execution of large truths delivered in tight spaces’. Her description certainly applies to Jennifer Down’s wonderful début collection, Pulse Points. Using the typical strategies of suggestion, ambiguity, and inconclusivene ...

So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighbourhood by Patrick Modiano, translated by Euan Cameron

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September 2017, no. 394
Phoebe Weston-Evans reviews 'So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighbourhood' by Patrick Modiano, translated by Euan Cameron

Patrick Modiano’s most recent novel, published just before he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2014, is his twenty-sixth to date, though one of a great number to arrive almost all at once in the English-speaking world. In the post-Nobel flurry to translate Modiano into English, the past two years have marked a shift in the author’s status from practically unknown ...

Common People by Tony Birch

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September 2017, no. 394
Fiona Wright reviews 'Common People' by Tony Birch

The characters who populate Tony Birch’s Common People are striking not so much because they are the ordinary people, the commonplace or everyday people that the title would suggest – they are, mostly, people living in or with extremity and trauma – but because the thing that unites them in these stories are discoveries of small moments of common huma ...

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