In Michelle de Kretser’s Theory and Practice—probably her magnum opus, and my favourite Australian novel of 2024—Virginia Woolf looms large. Not only is the novel’s protagonist writing a dissertation on Woolf, de Kretser deploys Woolf’s original plan for The Years by creating an assemblage of fiction, non-fiction and memoir. Woolf is also implicated in one of the book’s key themes: the difficulty of creating an identity independent of one’s formative influences. For our narrator, breaking free from the ‘Woolfmother’ is necessitated by Woolf’s racism and classism, while in the case of her actual mother the process of liberation is much more quotidian. All this, and the title, may make the novel sound slightly portentous but it is in fact compulsively readable and at times extremely funny. The photo of de Kretser’s young self on the cover might encourage one to think the novel is a thinly-veiled memoir, but the extent to which it truly is autobiographical doesn’t matter. What enraptured me about the ‘campus novel’ aspects of the book is that they have all the verisimilitude of memoir—immersive, rather than true.
The same can be said for Brian Castro’s Chinese Postman. In playfully loquacious prose, the novel tells the story of Abraham Quin, an erstwhile postman, professor and writer now in his seventies and living a secluded life in the Adelaide Hills: ‘grave-robbing; scene-stealing; masking; causing grief; mischief-making. He’s through with all that novel-writing…’ The only thing keeping Quin anchored is his correspondence with Iryna, who provides updates from Ukraine on the progress of the Russian invasion. Are we supposed to associate Quin with his creator? The fact that Castro shifts between first and third person and that we eventually learn Quin’s father’s surname is Castro might give us pause for thought.
Regardless, Castro also quotes Nadine Gordimer as saying that a serious person should try to write posthumously, which I was reminded of again while reading Charmian Clift’s The End of the Morning, published for the first time in 2024 thanks to her biographer Nadia Wheatley. The quality of her prose is remarkable—a vivid encapsulation of childhood which cuts out right as Clift’s alter-ego Cressida starts to wish to speed through adolescence: ‘childhood became a straining to it out of the way as quickly as possible, to fling off the dragging years of dependence and get on with the big adventure’. The novel never gets there. One cannot help but feel that Clift’s tragic death in 1969 robbed Australian literature of what would have been one of its masterpieces. There is also a question of justice to consider: as Wheatley explains, Clift’s husband, George Johnston, co-opted Clift’s literary alter-ego for his own novels. More than half a century later, we are indebted to Wheatley for helping Clift reclaim Cressida for herself.
Also tragically published posthumously, Georgia Blain’s We All Lived in Bondi Then is a story collection that deals with the end of things: dementia, death, break-ups, environmental collapse. Perhaps the knowledge of her death affected me as a reader but the book’s throughline is hard to ignore. If Castro exhibits a Joycean linguistic exuberance, then Blain has a Hemingway-esque restraint. Her prose is crisp but not clinically so and the stories have a quiet wisdom.
Another story collection I found striking is Ouyang Yu’s The White Cockatoo Flowers. Better known for his poetry, this is his first collection in English. ‘I confess I don’t write short stories,’ one of his narrators says. ‘I don’t even read them.’ Thankfully, Ouyang does. If there is a common thread running through the stories, it is that the narrators all exhibit the frustrated sense of being an outsider, by turns sympathetic, caustic, angry, chauvinist. The stories are sometimes shocking—particularly in the way women are treated by the male characters—and sometimes extremely funny. The stories revel in, then rebel against the impotence of the written word to change the material circumstances of their characters. On one writer’s attempt to distance himself from his ethnicity, the narrator sympathises but concludes ‘I cannot really agree with him overall as I think he’s got a big problem with himself: to put it bluntly, he shows all the symptoms of a loser’. There are certain traps one cannot escape—but Ouyang shows us that a close examination of the traps can be more than worthwhile.
—Ned Hirst
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There’s a particular sense of vertigo one feels when returning to a site they haven’t revisited in years, the dizziness caused by reconciling the version of the place that exists in your mind and its current, material reality. I witness it most strongly whenever my family visits China: when my father is taken aback by Guangzhou’s new buildings, new gizmos and new attitudes, and when I am forced do a spatial edit in perspective, having last been in these half-familiar rooms when I was several inches shorter. Our branching bloodlines originated in this land and when we’re away from it, it continues to exist in our imaginations; this presence is a living and powerful one, but it is also a fiction. A simulation, cobbled together from old memories, cultural habits and the various ideas propagated about China (both by itself and its competitors). Writers are tasked with pinning down meaning, our expression limited by words, and, in this way, those in the diaspora tend to essentialise, even when we acknowledge our dislocation. These are the symbols, markers and descriptive quantities that can capture what it means to be Chinese, what China really is—even though its ancient tumultuous history and its rapid economic booms makes it a uniquely slippery subject.
Fittingly, my favourite Australian novel of 2024, Siang Lu’s Ghost Cities, is a joyride that relishes in both the futility and joys of representation. One of Lu’s epigraphs sources a quote from John Milton’s Paradise Lost, where Milton invokes two names for the Chinese capital of Beijing (‘Cambalu’ and ‘Paquin’) and writes of them as if they are separate geographical entities. This idea of two distinct Chinas underpins Lu’s satirical fantasia, which is split into dual timelines. The first tracks the tyrannical rule of a fictional emperor, whose old-school narcissism and paranoia encompasses every terror from book burning to executing every chicken in the kingdom. The second follows a Chinese-Australian translator, who, after being exposed as not being able to speak a word of Chinese , is cast in an (also tyrannical) Chinese director’s Truman Show-esque project to transform one of China’s many ghost cities into a 24/7 movie set. It’s a structurally acrobatic work, buoyed by Lu’s tongue-in-cheek humour, which shows us that everything we’re reading is craft, artifice. Both histories represented here are drawn completely from Lu’s mind, but they are constructed from familiar ideas: the China of the past is mythic, with mysterious catacombs and sentient (horny) mountains, while the ghost city setting of the present is an ultra-modern surveillance state where its inhabitants are atomised by distrust. But Lu keeps both timelines fundamentally uncanny: his labyrinthine narrative is rife with constant replicas. An ancient artisan creates a garden where every photo-realistic fruit is secretly made of stone, the emperor hires thousands of doubles of himself as a means of protection, and the movie set that has the ‘same patterns and shapes as any other urban sprawl’ but is divested of a real city’s lived-in history, with every bus driver, chef and office worker being a hired actor.
This complex gambit never feels like a cold and cerebral exercise; Lu’s prose may be arch, but his characters are sincere in their hopes and desires. It’s deeply satisfying to witness the two Chinas continue to echo one another before gradually collapsing altogether, united by the characters’ growing feelings of dissent within their oppressive conditions. In one of the most moving passages, the Imperial Consort attempts to preserve history by replacing, by hand, every book her emperor burned. Despite her attempts at veracity, every sentence becomes inflected with the ‘longings of her heart’ and she eventually begins transcribing the ‘works of authors who had never been, and were yet to be’. It’s an act that speaks to the thematic richness of Lu’s hallucinatory novel and also to the generative power of artmaking itself—in representing a time and a place, we are ultimately propagating another replica, another story, and yet what remains authentic is the heartfelt human emotions infused in the act. Like the characters of the ‘film set within a city within a film set’, we may be aware what we’re witnessing is an artifice, but it doesn’t prevent a sense of resonance and connection, of the brief moments when we forget what we’re experiencing is a creation of the mind. It’s the great magic trick of storytelling, which Lu accomplishes with ambition and a rollicking sense of fun.
—Claire Cao
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2024 was the first full year of my adult life where I wasn’t a bookseller. This meant that besides reading for reviews, I was much more in charge of what I wanted to read than I had been in a long time, but even then I was drawn to what I felt I should be reading to keep up with new releases. My best Australian books for 2024 are all books that compelled me to read quickly and urgently, but with no overarching theme, besides perhaps an interest in social issues.
A Language of Limbs by Dylin Hardcastle undid me right from the beginning. Containing a fierce conviction in haunting and intimate prose, the novel follows two teenage girls—in alternative chapters as ‘limb one’ and ‘limb two’: one beaten and made homeless when her parents find her with another girl, the other leading a life of repression. Hardcastle’s characters love and grieve through the AIDS pandemic (with a forceful reminder that it was a pandemic), the first Mardi Gras in 1978 through to the 2020s. At times I wished Hardcastle had committed to writing these two women as the same person, but this didn’t detract from the heartbreaking and fiery story. Hardcastle has an astute way of writing characters embroiled in self-deception, the reader knowing their unspeakable truths, weaved around meticulous research of Australian queer history that is truly embodied as if we are living in it. A Language of Limbs dignifies all queer lives—whether free or repressed—and seeks to find new language with which to document the joy, the resistance, the anger, the sorrow and the burdens of this identity and all its historical trappings. I wanted to hand this book to everyone and say, slow down for a moment and read this.
A children’s classic in the making, Wurrtoo: The Wombat Who Fell in Love with the Sky by Tylissa Elisara and illustrated by Dylan Finney, is a book that challenged me to reconsider my perspectives on diversity in the kidlit space. Similar to Winnie the Pooh and the Moomins, Wurrtoo is a charming tale suitable for reading aloud, with comforting and conversational narration, relatable and whimsical characters, and the occasional full-page illustration of characters in mild peril. What seems at first an adventure story as Wurrtoo sets out to marry the sky quickly becomes much larger as Wurrtoo learns about Country, friendship, community and climate change (and by extension a little bit about colonisation). His world expands, and so did mine. While the story is set on Karta Pintingga (Kangaroo Island) and influenced by Elisara’s Narungga, Kaurna and Adnyamathanha heritage, the stories within are de-identified so as to avoid desecrating sacred Lore. Elisara has crafted a warm-hearted invitation to explore Country and to expand the canon of Australian children’s literature to redefine both the ‘classics’ of children’s books and to challenge assumptions of how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander stories can be published for children.
I didn’t read as much poetry as I normally do in 2024, but I was captured by Hasib Hourani’s debut rock flight, a book-length poem of Palestinian resistance. Verse novels aside, I’m not sure if I’ve ever read a book-length poem before: the form that Hourani takes here experiments with telling the story of his family, of Palestine, of occupation and genocide and of rage and resistance through refrains across a whole work. Images of rubble, migratory birds, dates and suffocation are weaved throughout to convey displacement, isolation and unbelonging (‘we cannot live like this’). As a non-Arabic speaker, Jumaana Abdu’s review enlightened me to deeper parts of Hourani’s text, where the restraint that Hourani employs—not just in English but in Arabic—to further his resistance is underscored by the way he intentionally confines language. This effect enhances the portrayal of oppression and violence that Hourani seeks to document, to yell the truth of and to throw rocks back at. rock flight is a highly considered and researched work of poetry, and for me it drew global and generational connections, and again reminded me of the power of poetry—not just language as a whole but poetry specifically and deliberately—to resist and refuse, and to contend with the unspeakable by redefining.
—Clare Millar
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It’s no accident my three favourite Australian books in 2024 are by women of colour. Or perhaps, in a way, it is—I didn’t especially seek them out, so it’s testament to the burgeoning inclusivity of a traditionally whitewashed, colonial publishing scene that writers from minoritised backgrounds are increasingly finding much-deserved platforms and plaudits for their work. Incidentally, it’s also the work I’m most excited by and interested in.
I’ve been an ardent fan of Yumna Kassab since reading her debut story collection The House of Youssef. In her fourth novel Politica, she scales new and impressive heights in her poetic experimentation with literary forms to assert the selfhood of a collective people facing annihilation and blatant dehumanisation. Just like in The House of Youssef and a lot of Kassab’s work since, Politica is structured as a series of vignettes demarcated into several sections. There are haunting echoes, deep resonances and common preoccupations across these minute, interconnected narratives, but what makes Politica feel especially urgent is in how it parallels the violence and destruction in Gaza and the West Bank. Politica may be set in an unnamed location in the Middle East, but one can’t think of anything but the unfolding genocide and the long history of violent occupation in Palestine when reading Kassab’s narratives centred on leaders of resistance movements, victims of widespread dispossession and displacement, and the incomprehensibility of violence distilled into stories of endurance, defiance and love. It’s a stunning literary triumph and a timely approximation of our present day, but also the decades and centuries that have led to this moment.
Like Kassab, Jumaana Abdu is concerned with questions of disempowerment, statelessness and trauma, but her gothic mystery takes place closer to home in a rural Australian setting. Abdu’s novel, Translations is an astonishingly accomplished work by one of the most exciting debut novelists I’ve had the pleasure of reading in recent times. The story of mother-daughter duo Aliyah and Sakina moving to a ruinous farm in Shepherd’s Mill to start life anew is a captivating enough premise, but what makes Translations unputdownable is its beauty on a simple sentence level, though its prose is anything but simple. Equally impressive is Abdu’s ability to weave interconnected threads of First Nations dispossession, settler colonialism, family violence and self-debasement in late-stage capitalism into a compelling, tense and revelatory story.
There’s grief in The Burrow too, but it occurs on a more personal, domestic stage as the aftershocks of an unspeakable tragedy reverberate through a family of three: Amy, Jin and their child Lucie. Puncturing this stupor and inadvertently heralding a new way of being are fresh entrants to the household: Amy’s mother and a rabbit, the latter purchased in a wishful haze of optimism. A lean but by no means slight novel, The Burrow is about, to borrow author Melanie Cheng’s words, ‘the push and pull of human beings orbiting one another like tiny planets’.
Reading for work thankfully forced me to read outside my usual wheelhouse of contemporary literary fiction, and in this there were a few standouts. Rapture by Emily Maguire is a beguiling work of historical fiction that reimagines the life of the first female Pope, who reigned in disguise unbeknownst to those around her for two years in the Middle Ages. It’s a great companion read with Shelley Parker-Chan’s 2021 historical fantasy novel She Who Became the Sun, a reimagining of the rise of the Ming Dynasty’s founding emperor from peasant girl to monk to ruler. Finally, The Thinning by Inga Simpson belongs to a now familiar genre of dystopian speculative fiction—it’s a cracking read with superb world-building and a dash of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.
—Sonia Nair
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