Books

Reviewed: So Close To Home, Mick Cummins, Affirm Press In playwright and social worker Mick Cummins’ debut novel, So Close to Home, we meet eighteen-year-old Aaron Peters in the throes of heroin withdrawal. An ‘incoming tide of pain’ causes him ...

Reviewed: Paradise Estate, Max Easton, Giramondo Paradise Estate, Max Easton’s second novel, is in many ways a book about disintegration. The ironically-named titular location, a Sydney sharehouse that draws together the book’s central characters, is dilapidated to a hazardous ...

Reviewed: The In-Between, Christos Tsiolkas, Allen & Unwin The In-Between is Christos Tsiolkas consciously yoking himself to Australian literature in a historical sense. It begins with an epigraph from Patrick White’s The Tree of Man, another novel by a gay ...

Reviewed: Alexis Wright, Praiseworthy, GIRAMONDO ‘Disruption’ may have been a ubiquitous corporate buzzword in recent decades, but nothing seemed to have prepared the world for the upheavals of a global pandemic. In a matter of weeks, the incessant cross-border flows ...

Reviewed: Aurora Mattia, The Fifth Wound, NIGHTBOAT BOOKS & Never Angeline North, Rainbear!!!!!!!!!, APOCALYPSE PARTY ‘Forget everything you’ve been taught. Start by dreaming.’ —May 1968 protest graffiti (and the epigraph to Rainbear!!!!!!!!!) If you read the news, you might be ...

Reviewed: Amina Cain, A Horse at Night: On Writing, DAUNT BOOKS ORIGINALS It is a modest preamble that opens A Horse at Night, Amina Cain’s first book of nonfiction. ‘Without planning it,’ she muses, ‘I wrote a diary of sorts. Lightly. A ...

Reviewed: Best of Australian Poems 2021, (eds. Ellen van Neerven & Toby Fitch) & Best of Australian Poems 2022 (eds. Jeanine Leane & Judith Beveridge), AUSTRALIAN POETRY After Black Inc.’s long-running Best Australian Poems series was discontinued in 2018, a ...

Reviewed: Sunbirds, Mirandi Riwoe, University of Queensland Press In Mirandi Riwoe’s Sunbirds, her second novel, a Javanese servant called Diah is instructed by her Dutch boss to read a novel called A Java Romance. Indonesia as we know it doesn’t ...

Reviewed: Green Dot, Madeleine Gray, Allen & Unwin Sharper observers than I have written on the problems of the quid-pro-quo blurb industry, the lack of critical culture around Australian novels, and the labour conditions that are responsible for this budding ...

Reviewed: Gunflower, Laura Jean McKay, Scribe If pressed, I would describe Laura Jean McKay’s Gunflower as a collection of stories about bodies. Divided into three sections—‘birth’, ‘life’ and ‘death’—the stories explore the way bodies, with all their needs and desires, ...

Reviewed: Prima Facie, Suzie Miller, Picador Australia Melbourne-born playwright and now novelist Suzie Miller has rightly received extraordinary praise for her one-woman play Prima Facie, which examines how courts routinely fail victims of sexual assault. With the star impact of ...

Reviewed: Me, Her, Us, Yen-Rong Wong, University of Queensland Press As a woman of colour, reading about sex, relationships and desire has often made me feel slightly uneasy. Most depictions of sexual awakening come from straight white women, whose experiences ...

Reviewed: Frank Moorhouse: A Life, Catharine Lumby, Allen & Unwin Frank Moorhouse was an Australian writer who defined a generation’s engagement with lost idealism and style. He is best remembered for his Edith trilogy, about a diplomat’s role in creating ...

Reviewed: Body Friend, Katherine Brabon, Ultimo When I was 19, I had my ankle fused. To fix it, I underwent a procedure called a subtalar fusion, which used a bone graft from my shin and two huge screws to put ...

Reviewed: The Modern, Anna Kate Blair, Scribner   The Museum of Modern Art is the glassy heart of The Modern, Anna Kate Blair’s debut novel, where Australian transplant Sophia spends the last days of her two-year fellowship checking artworks for ...