Our 10 most anticipated Australian books
There are so many exciting Australian books due to be released in the second half of 2015. Here, ten Readings staff share the Australian book that they are most looking forward to.
Alison Huber is looking forward to Salt Creek by Lucy Treloar
Last year I went on an unforgettable camping trip to the Coorong in South Australia – a place I had wanted to visit ever since I saw the windswept sand dunes in the 1976 film adaptation of Colin Thiele’s classic novel, Storm Boy, as a child. This unique landscape is also the setting for Lucy Treloar’s first novel, Salt Creek, so it really is a ‘must read’ for me now that I have my own memories to enhance the descriptions.
Set in the mid-1850s, the story is told in the voice of Hester Finch, the eldest daughter of a well-to-do English family that has found itself on the outs of Adelaide’s European society. In an attempt rebuild their fortunes, the family moves away from the growing city to farm a tract of the Coorong. With little understanding of their profound impact on the indigenous people whose land they are attempting to exploit, and the growing challenges of isolation and hardship in such an unfamiliar environment, their future is anything but assured.
Treloar’s writing has drawn quite a bit of attention in recent years, and in 2014 she was the Regional Winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, so this work promises to be a significant debut on the Australian literary scene.
Due for release in August.
Chris Gordon is looking forward to A Guide to Berlin by Gail Jones
I’m very much looking forward to reading a new novel by Gail Jones. I didn’t know her work until I was given her novel Sorry, way back. And oh, I loved it. So I read her short stories, I read her other award-winning novels and with each reading my admiration for this quiet writer became deeper. Jones is able to capture the voice of women living as well as they can right here in Australia. Her work centres on those who have been hurt, or disengaged with how we live, and through her words she gives those people a voice and recognition.
Due for release in August.
Ann Le Lievre is looking forward to My Salute to Five Bells by John Olsen
Olsen is one of my favourite Australian artists and as it happens the poetry of Kenneth Slessor takes me back to some very happy memories studying Aus Lit at uni. Olsen’s paintings are known and loved for his deep engagement with the Australian landscape. He was commissioned to paint a mural for the concert hall of the Sydney Opera House back in 1971. Kenneth Slessor’s poem ‘Five Bells’ records the death of a friend who drowned in Sydney Harbour. Olsen loved Sydney and its harbour, he knew and loved this poem and chose it to provide the inspiration and mood for his mural. My Salute to Five Bells will be a visual feast, reproducing the journals Olsen maintained during this period.
Due for release in August.
Emily Gale is looking forward to Cloudwish by Fiona Wood
I fell in love with Fiona Wood’s writing in 2010, the year of her debut – Six Impossible Things. It was such an assured beginning, no doubt in part because of Fiona’s former brilliant career as a scriptwriter for television, and I was completely sold on her careful balance of teenage angst and upbeat storyline. In 2013, the world she’d created in her first novel branched out into a bolder, more ambitious story with the release of Wildlife, in which a character from Six Impossible Things took centre stage as one of a group of Year 10s boarding for a term in the wilderness. First love, grief, malignant versus nourishing friendships, personal triumph, resilience – again, this was a book that managed to find a balance between the worst a person can feel and the freedom and possibilities of our teenage years. Wildlife was my favourite Australian YA novel of that year. I know I’m one of many who cannot wait to see what Fiona’s third book has in store for us. In what has become one of her trademarks, Cloudwish takes a character from Wildlife – Vân Uoc Phan, a scholarship student in Year 11 – and builds a new story around her.
Due for release in September.
Gerard Elson is looking forward to Fever of Animals by Miles Allinson
Can we anticipate a book we’ve already read? Susan Sontag said ‘no book is worth reading once if it is not worth reading twice, or three times’. Since I’ve just read it in proof form (some typos, unfinished cover art), it’s in this spirit that I await the official publication of Miles Allinson’s hilarious and utterly wrenching first novel – one of the few truly brilliant new books I’ve read this year.
Fever of Animals is the story of a man (also named Miles) pressing hard against the thick glassy walls of grief, and guilt. His father dead, the deepest romantic relationship of his life long since shattered, Miles has sequestered himself on Berlin’s rural outskirts, putatively to begin work on ‘something about the surrealist painter Emil Bafdescu: about his paintings, one of which hangs in a little restaurant in Melbourne, and about his disappearance, which is still a mystery’.
What unfolds is a slow-burn classic – Monkey Grip style – in waiting, with Allinson’s bewitching prose shrewdly casting light on questions of art, selfhood, love, literature, language, masculinity, responsibility, history, civilisation, travel, ambition, the uncanny, and what it is to be one of those mad animals called ‘human’ right now, here, today.
The deserving winner of the 2014 Victorian Premier’s Award for an Unpublished Manuscript, Fever of Animals is Australian fiction of an international calibre.
Due for release in September.
Elke Power is looking forward to Rush Oh! by Shirley Barrett
After hearing Shirley Barrett (Australian screenwriter and director of award-winning Love Serenade fame) speak about her first novel, Rush Oh!, I now can’t wait to read it. The intriguing title was the rallying cry of the whalers of Eden on the coast of NSW over one hundred years ago. The novel is set in 1908 and is based on the true story of the community’s unlikely relationship with a pod of Killer whales. During that period the whalers and the Killer whales hunted together and the Killer whales became a part of the community, each known by name and personality, most notably a beloved prankster called Tom.
It sounds fanciful, but isn’t that often the way with stories drawn from life? Barrett has taken this amazing historic episode of inter-species cooperation and friendship as the jumping-off point for what sounds like a dramatic and humorous story of a bad whaling season and a tight-knit village, told from the perspective of the eldest daughter of one of the whaling families.
Due for release in September.
Amy Vuleta is looking forward to The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood
I recently heard Charlotte Wood speak about her forthcoming novel. She introduced the novel by simply reading a long passage, and within moments I was hooked. The plot was intriguing and challenging, the characters fascinatingly edgy, and the narrative suspenseful. Set in a remote women’s prison in the middle of the desert, a handful of women find themselves abandoned and yet thoroughly entrapped by the harsh isolation of the prison. Wood’s story sits outside of time and fractured from any place, futuristic and dystopic, while being recognisably contemporary and Australian in its landscape and tone. I can’t wait to read it.
Due for release in October.
Stella Charls is looking forward to Ghost River by Tony Birch
Tony Birch is a regular face around Readings Carlton. I bumped into him over coffee last week, and was excited to hear that he’d just finished the acknowledgements for his new novel, Ghost River.
Birch has published three acclaimed short-story collections (Shadowboxing, Father’s Day, The Promise) and a novel (Blood), which was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Blood became a novel when Birch decided to give characters from a short story more space to develop within an extended narrative, and it looks like he might be doing the same thing in Ghost River, which shares a title with one of his short stories. (You can find the story online here.)
Birch’s interest in the role of fairy and folk tales in Australia is especially fascinating and it’s a theme that Ghost River again appears to incorporate. I love Birch’s sparse, unadorned writing style, and I’m really looking forward to getting my hands on a copy of this new book.
Due for release in October.
Bronte Coates is looking forward to The Singing Bones: Inspired by Grimms’ Fairy Tales by Shaun Tan
In The Singing Bones, Shaun Tan has created sculptures that capture the ‘essence’ of seventy-five fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm. I first heard about this book from my colleague Emily Gale, who included it in her ‘Australian young adult books to look forward to in 2015’ round-up back in January, and I’ve been looking forward to seeing this book ever since. Tan’s artwork in his books is always gorgeously strange and fantastically inventive, and judging by what I’ve seen so far, his 3D art looks set to be even more so. You can find some images from inside the book on Tan’s website here.
Due for release in October.
Nina Kenwood is looking forward to The Red Queen by Isobelle Carmody
I can’t overstate the impact Obernewtyn had on me as a teen. It was one of my all-time favourites books. Between the ages of twelve and eighteen, I read it at least once a year, along with The Farseekers, Ashling and The Keeping Place, which were all released when I was still a teen. Then it was an almost ten year wait until the fifth book, The Stone Key, appeared, then three more years waiting for The Sending in 2011. (Patience is a requirement when you’re an Isobelle Carmody fan.)
I’ve been reading this wonderful series practically all my life and the FINAL BOOK is about to be released! This is huge. The Red Queen is my last chance to spend time with Elspeth, Rushton, Dameon, Matthew, Maruman, Dragon, Gahltha and the rest. I plan to re-read the entire series before The Red Queen is released, and fully immerse myself back into Isobelle Carmody’s brilliant world once again. If you haven’t read the books, now is the perfect time to catch up, because you’ll be able to devour each book one after the other, right until the end.
