April Highlights
Earlier this year I penned a ‘Most-Anticipated Books of 2014’ column, and – as is always the way – I soon came to regret my sins of omission, more recently becoming aware of other forthcoming works that belonged on my radar. One such is the new novel from John A. Scott, who, literally the day after submitting my column, wandered into our Carlton shop to tell me that his long-awaited new novel was finished and set to appear in April. It’s been well over ten years since the marvelous The Architect, and precisely 20 since What I have Written, which was also made into a feature film. N, the new book, would appear to be his most significant work yet – fellow author David Brooks has written: ‘It’s a masterpiece, as clear and as simple as that.’
Other new fiction from Victorian authors this month includes Tree Palace, the second novel from Craig Sherborne, who won the Best Writing Award in the Melbourne Prize for Literature in 2012; a debut from Silvia Kwon entitled The Return, set in rural Victoria in the 1960s; and associate editor of Overland, Rjurik Davidson, publishes his sci-fi debut, Unwrapped Sky.
On the international stage there’s a diverse range of offerings. Close to my heart is the marvelous Karl Ove Knausgaard with Boyhood Island, the third volume of his enormous but essential anti-novel series, My Struggle. I’ve calculated that I’ve now read 1305 pages of this Norwegian, with no doubt an equal number to come in the remaining three volumes. But really, I never want these books to end. The much-loved Sebastian Barry also returns with The Temporary Gentleman; Emma Donoghue perhaps wins the award for oddest synopsis of the month with Frog Music: ‘a true story of a murdered nineteenth-century cross-dressing frog catcher’ (but, our reviewer assures us, there’s so much more!); and Timur Vermes, from Germany, has Look Who’s Back, a wonderful tale that imagines Adolf Hitler transposed into the contemporary world: might he just fit in rather too well?
Sometimes books are published that seem to capture the zeitgeist, and the key non-fiction title this month certainly achieves this – albeit as a record of just how low, in a humanitarian sense, our country has fallen through its refugee policies. Mark Isaacs’s The Undesirables is a brave, eyewitness account of life at the Australian detention facility on Nauru, where he worked with the Salvation Army. What he witnessed there is offered in the spirit of a documentary record, but the lessons couldn’t be plainer.
