Winter is here, possibly the best time of year for reading and talking about books. Early next month, I’ll be doing just that in Geelong at an ‘Author Encounter’ with Sarah Hopkins, talking about her latest novel, The Subjects, an eerie depiction of the over-criminalisation and overmedicalisation of young people in the juvenile justice system. I started reading The Subjects last night and already I’m hooked. This free event will be held on Wednesday 3 July, 6.30-7.30pm, Geelong Library & Heritage Centre. Book here.
As the season of literary festivals continues across Victoria and beyond, I’ll be appearing at the Warm Winter Words Festival in Apollo Bay on Sunday 28 July. I’m delivering a workshop on Crime Writing from 10.00AM-12.00PM. This is a workshop I really enjoy teaching, which covers the history and conventions of crime fiction, the rules of the genre (and how to break them), and the essential elements of premise, character, plot and pace. Early and emerging writers, as well as established writers turning to crime as a new genre, are all welcome. There’s a Facebook event with details here and tickets are available here.
On Sunday afternoon, I’ll be appearing as part of Warm Winter Words with Anna Snoekstra, Bram Presser and Mark Brandi, celebrating 30 years of Writers Victoria in the process. I’m delighted to be sharing the floor with three writers whose work I admire so much. Event details here and tickets here.
Queenscliffe Literary Festival
Woodend Winter Arts Festival
The guys at the gym laughed when I told them we don’t do footy tipping in my workplace: we do competitive reading. The competition involves my colleagues at 
Clare Wright’s You Daughters of Freedom clocks in at 560 pages but reads with the pace of a thriller. The book captures a time when a newly Federated Australia took pride in championing progressive politics, not only leading the way on delivering political rights to (white) women, but taking the success of our suffrage campaign overseas. The story is told through through the eyes of five movers and shakers — Vida Goldstein, Nellie Martel, Dora Montefiore, Muriel Matters, and Dora Meeson Coates — whom I hope will become household names, thanks to Wright’s outstanding research and story telling. I had the great pleasure of being in conversation with Clare about You Daughters of Freedom at the Word for Word Festival in Geelong in November and could’ve talked with her all day about this book.
Elizabeth Harrower’s novel The Watch Tower was first published the year I was born, and re-released in 2012 as part of the Text Classics series — which I believe qualifies it as both forgotten (albeit temporarily) and a classic. Set in Sydney in the 1940s, The Watch Tower is a terrifying study of power and control, rendered in exquisite prose. The Watch Tower was Michelle de Kretser’s choice for a book club session at this year’s Melbourne Writers Festival, which I was fortunate enough to host. Elizabeth Harrower’s own advice to anyone who’s even thinking of being a writer is to ‘read endlessly and read great books forever’. I’m grateful to Michelle, herself a writer of great books, for drawing my attention to this great book.
I didn’t read any books that became movies as such in 2018, but if I was to wager on which of the books I read might become a movie, I reckon Irish-born, Western Australian author Dervla McTiernan’s gripping debut crime novel, The Rúin, would be a strong contender. In 1993, rookie cop Cormac Reilly is sent to a house in Galway, where he finds two neglected children, their mother dead in her bed from a drug overdose. Twenty years later, having forged a successful career in Dublin, Reilly returns to Galway, where another death forces him to revisit the case that still haunts him. I could see Colin Farrell or Cillian Murphy in the lead role, with maybe Saoirse Ronan as Aisling Conroy…
Just over half the books I read this year were published in 2018, or are slated for publication in 2019 — a perk of my job. The 2018 release I’m highlighting on this bingo square is The Fireflies of Autumn and Other Tales of San Ginese by Italian-born Australian writer Moreno Giovannoni. Giovannoni won the inaugural Deborah Cass Prize for Migrant Writing, and his winning entry forms part of this fresh, unsentimental though lyrical and often funny collection of stories. This was a book I savoured, reluctant to finish and thus be forced to wrest myself away from San Ginese and its beguiling, sometimes baffling occupants. The Fireflies of Autumn also has one of my favourite cover designs of 2018.
After leaving this square blank 
Jamie Marina Lau was 21 when her novel Pink Mountain on Locust Island, was published this year — not that it shows in her prose. The story centres on Monk, a teen living in Chinatown with her washed-up painter father, and their uneasy relationship with an interloper called Santa Coy. I felt the same way about the book as reviewer 
Another square I left blank last year is this year claimed by The Birdwatcher by William McInnes, which features a curlew called Picnic, who likes being read to, especially from Ian Fleming’s novel Goldfinger. One of the main human characters, Clare, notes that, ‘As an audience, Picnic has been pretty good, tilting her head this way and that, only occasionally needing a bit of biscuit.’ I came across this absolutely charming novel in the course of preparing to interview Will for the MWF session, ‘Birds & Bees’ alongside Helen Jukes. I subsequently sent The Birdwatcher to my mum, who was going through a rough health patch, and she confirmed my instinct that this is a great read for hard times.
For the second consecutive year, I’m allocating this square to a work by Ryan O’Neill: this time to The Drover’s Wives, O’Neill’s 2018 release, which features 99 riffs on the Henry Lawson classic Australian short story, ‘The Drover’s Wife’. Before I’d even read this book, I gave it to a friend for his birthday, and we laughed till we cried just skimming through the table of contents. Reading the stories, I laughed even more. Among my personal favourites: ‘The Drover’s Wife’ as ‘A Year 8 English Essay’ (No. 4), as ‘Editorial Comments’ (No. 17), and as ‘An Amazon Book Review’ (No. 42), the latter written in all caps and opening with the line ‘DON’T READ THIS BOOK. NO, REALLY. DON’T!’ By contrast, my advice is READ THIS BOOK. NO, REALLY. DO!
Yet again, I wonder how ‘a book by a female author’ can even be a bingo reading category, given 35 out of the 45 books I read this year were written by women. I’m allocating this square to a work by Noongar author Claire G Coleman, Terra Nullius. I met Claire at the start of the year at the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, where Terra Nullius was highly commended. In the novel, Claire uses speculative fiction to devastating effect to illustrate that what settler Australians think of as dystopian, Indigenous Australians experience as reality. A timely and powerful book.
Toni Jordan’s new novel, The Fragments, is a literary thriller — one of my favourite sub-genres — set between Brisbane in 1986 and New York in 1938-39. In Brisbane, Caddie Walker is obsessed with author Inga Karlson who, after publishing a sensational debut novel, perished in a warehouse fire in New York in 1939 in mysterious circumstances, together with all known copies of her second novel. In New York, we follow Inga through the eyes of Rachel, whose relationship with Inga transforms her life. The story is an exquisite evocation of time and place, and a reflection on the power of books and stories. ‘Books are time travel and space travel and mood-altering drugs,’ writes Jordan. ‘They are mind-melds and telepathy and past-life regression.’ A truly gorgeous read.
Anyone who knows me well knows that I’m a huge fan of Jock Serong’s writing. His latest novel, released in September, is Preservation is a historical thriller based on a real-life shipwreck in 1797 off what was then Van Dieman’s Land. Seventeen men — British merchant seamen and Bengali lascars — set out from the wreck to travel to Sydney. Months later, three survivors are picked up just south of the colonial town. Serong fills the gaps in the historical account with a tense, sometimes menacing narrative, told from the point of view of different characters, including one of the lascars and the wife of a lieutenant in Sydney assigned to investigate. Particularly powerful is his imaginative evocation of south coast Aboriginal nations prior to settlement. Highly recommended.
Of the four short story collections I read this year, I’m highlighting Julie Koh’s stunning collection, Portable Curiosities. Koh’s creative choices are mind-bending — if you’ve ever wondered how the narrative voice of a pair of perfect breasts might sound, look no further — her prose lyrical, often breathtaking. I had the pleasure of meeting Julie briefly at the Newcastle Writers Festival in April, where she spoke on a panel, together with Ryan O’Neill and Jane Rawson, called ‘Outside the Square: Is experimentation in Australian literature dead?’ Judging by both the size of the audience in Newcastle and the strength of Koh’s collection, the answer to that question is a resounding ‘no’.
I’m allocating my free square this year to the anthology, Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia, edited by the luminous Anita Heiss, with whom I had the great pleasure of sharing a panel at the Word for Word Festival in Geelong. Growing Up Aboriginal is, to borrow a current affairs cliché, a book no Australian can afford to miss. The collection of personal essays shines a light on the breadth and depth of the Aboriginal experience in Australia, not to mention the significant talents of our First Nations people. Not all contributors are writers, but all are storytellers, and their stories are enlightening, often moving and sometimes enraging.
Fourteen of the 36 works of fiction I read in 2019 were set outside Australia, including The Wish Child by New Zealand author Catherine Chidgey. The Wish Child tells the story of two children: Sieglinde, who comes from a middle-class family in Berlin, her father working as a censor for the Third Reich, and Erich, who lives in rural Germany with his mother, whose stories collide as Germany comes apart. Part of the novel’s power comes from recounting the Nazi propaganda through the children’s eyes. But the real suckerpunch is the revelation of the narrator at the end of the story. When I interviewed Catherine Chidgey at Adelaide Writers Week in March, she mentioned that The Wish Child had not been reviewed in Australia, a shame as it deserves way more attention than it has received here.
I read nine works of non-fiction this year, most in preparation for writers’ festivals, including Skin in the Game: The Pleasure and Pain of Telling True Stories by Sonya Voumard, whom I interviewed on a panel at the Word for Word Festival. Voumard’s collection melds personal essays with political commentary to great effect, documenting both her life as a journalist and demise of print journalism. Particularly intriguing are Voumard’s encounters with Helen Garner, whom she interviewed for a university essay in 1980, incurring Garner’s wrath in the process — an experience she revisited with Garner 31 years later. This process renewed Voumard’s appreciation of her interview subjects, aware that interviewing is ‘often intimate, provocative and invasive’.
I’m not sure if this category refers to a debut novel by an author whose work you already admire, or the first book you’ve read by an author who is destined become a ‘favourite’. I’m taking it as a combination of both. Jane Rawson is a person I’ve admired for some time, having seen her interviewed at festivals, listened to her on radio, followed on Twitter, but never got around to reading. This year, I finally got to her debut novel, the wonderfully titled A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists, winner of the SPN award for the Most Underrated Book of 2014. On the strength of this darkly humorous, deeply unsettling story, I feel Jane is destined to become a favourite author.
I’ve mostly ceased reviewing on this blog, due to time constraints, combined with the sensitivities of trying to reflect critically on works when you also head up the peak body for writers in the state. However, I’m still on the mailing list for a number of publishing houses, giving me access to information on books I might not otherwise hear about. One example that came through from the publicists at Hachette is Robert Mackin’s Dragon & Kangaroo: Australia and China’s shared history from the goldfields to the present day. This important study does not make for easy reading, dealing as it does with historical atrocities and successive waves of racism directed at the Chinese in Australia. But like all good histories, it is both engaging and enlightening.
At the Small Press Network conference in November, Bianca Whiteley from Nielsen BookScan reported that Christian White’s debut, The Nowhere Child (Affirm Press), was not only the highest selling adult fiction title for a small Australian publisher in 2018, but the highest selling book by small publishers overall. So I bumped it up my TBR pile. Nearly 30 years after two-year-old Sammy Went disappears from her home in small town Kentucky, Sammy’s brother approaches Melbourne-based Kim Leamy, convinced she is his missing sister and giving her enough grounds to travel to the USA to investigate. Growing darker as it closes in on the serpent handling religious cult of which Sammy’s family was a part, the plot kept me guessing, while delivering a satisfying twist at the end. I can see what all the fuss is about.
It was in Dragon & Kangaroo where I read about William Edward ‘Billy’ Sing, an Australian-born Eurasian of Chinese and British parentage who was the most celebrated ANZAC sniper of World War I. Chinese-Australian writer Ouyang Yu’s Billy Sing (Transit Lounge) consciously resists any notion of the ANZAC legend, however, in favour of what 
I’d been meaning to read Emily Bitto’s award-winning debut novel The Strays since it won the 
Usually, I fill this square with a book recommended by my mother, but this year, it’s one recommended by my daughter. Both of us are long-standing fans of Gabrielle Wang’s books for young readers (Ghost in My Suitcase, In the Garden of Empress Cassia, and the Our Australian Girl: Meet Pearlie series being among our favourites), and though my daughter and I rarely read the same books now that I no longer read aloud to her, she urged me to read Little Paradise, too. Inspired by a true story (the front cover features a photograph of Wang’s mother), Little Paradise is set in Melbourne and Shanghai during the 1940s. Shedding light on the civil war in China, it is at its heart a beautiful love story. Highly recommended by me and Miss (Then) Twelve.
I feel like I already covered this with Little Paradise, so I’m going to mention a book with some blue on the cover. In addition to Michelle de Kretser’s book club at Melbourne Writers Festival, I also put up my hand to host a session with Sarah Krasnostein — mostly because it meant I would prioritise reading Kranostein’s multi-award-winning book The Trauma Cleaner about the life of Sandra Pankhurst. This was reward enough. But Sarah’s choice of book for discussion, Elizabeth Strout’s By Name is Lucy Barton, also blew me away. I read it from cover to cover in one sitting, then read it again a few weeks later. My Name is Lucy Barton is a poignant story that sheds light on how poverty shapes lives, while Strout’s prose demonstrate the power of simple language used to full effect.
