Australian fiction to pick up this month
Firelight: Stories by John Morrissey
An imprisoned man with strange visions writes letters to his sister.
A controversial business tycoon leaves his daughter a mysterious inheritance.
A child is haunted by a green man with a message about the origins of their planet.
In this striking collection of stories, the award-winning John Morrissey investigates colonialism and identity without ever losing sight of his characters' humanity. Brilliantly imagined and masterfully observed, Firelight marks the debut of a writer we will be reading for decades to come.
Thaw by Dennis Glover
In 1912, five British explorers struggle across the freezing Antarctic landscape, through howling winds and plummeting temperatures, seeking the safety of their camp.
Today, as the world's ice sheets begin to melt and surrender their secrets, renowned glacial archaeologist Missy Simpson works to discover the true cause of the explorers' deaths – a subject that has intrigued researchers for more than a century.
Her colleague, Cambridge professor Jim Hunter, is working on his own scientific mysteries – and is willing to risk everything to solve them.
In hallowed halls of learning and on the icy polar plateau, these risk-takers must grapple with the unfathomable power of the natural world and the dramatically changing weather – while navigating their own complicated relationships.
Perfect-ish by Jessica Seaborn
Available 15 August
Prue is about to turn thirty and feels like everyone else is living their best life. Her friends are posting online about their amazing relationships, exciting travel plans and newborn babies. Prue, on the other hand, has been dumped by her fiance, she's dropped out of uni, and her job counselling lonely people only makes her feel more alone.
With the help of her best friend, Delia, Prue sets three goals to turn her life around before her milestone birthday – ditch the job, move out of her brother's house, and find love. But when Delia's perfect marriage begins to crack, and a secret threatens to shatter their friendship, Prue realises there's a difference between seeming to have a perfect life and finding your own perfect-ish life. And maybe being far from picture perfect is perfectly okay.
Strangers at the Port by Lauren Aimee Curtis
Available 8 August
Giulia is ten. She lives on the greenest island in a volcanic archipelago. She has never left. Her best friend, beside her older sister, Giovanna, is a donkey. She ties ribbons around his head and thinks she will marry him when the time comes.
The sisters' days on the island are shaped by ritual, community, superstition and isolation. It is a place that feels stuck in time: verdant, plentiful, peaceful. Until the men arrive. And a foreign yacht anchors at the port. And the vines begin to fail. And everything changes.
From the author of Dolores, Strangers at the Port is an exquisite, enchanted, atmospheric novel about myth and memory, suspicion and dislocation, emigrants and explorers.
But the Girl by Jessica Zhan Mei Yu
Girl is spending the spring at an artist's residency in Scotland. Far from her home in Australia and her tight-knit Malaysian family, she is meant to be writing a postcolonial novel and working on a PhD on the poetry of Sylvia Plath. But she can't stop thinking about her upbringing and the stories of her parents and grandmother who raised her. How can she reconcile their dreams for her with her lived reality? Did Sylvia Plath have this problem? What even is a 'postcolonial novel'? And what if the story of becoming yourself is not about carving out a new identity but learning to understand the people who shaped you?
A novel about belonging, alienation, and the exquisite pleasure and pain of girlhood.
West Girls by Laura Elizabeth Woollett
Luna Lewis is white. But her friends aren’t, nor are her brothers, nor her one-time Princess of Indonesia–finalist stepmother. After transforming from pudgy preteen to ‘exotic’ beauty, Luna reinvents herself as ‘Luna Lu’ and takes her ticket out of the most isolated city on earth. However, as her international modelling career approaches its expiry date, Luna must grapple with what she’s sacrificed — and who she’s become — in her mission to conquer the world.
Featuring an intersecting cast of glamour-hungry public schoolgirls, WAGs, mining heiresses, backpacker-barmaids, and cosmetic nurses, West Girls examines beauty, race, class divisions, and social mobility in Australia’s richest state.
God Forgets About the Poor by Peter Polites
I will tell you why you should draft my story. Because migrant stories are broken. Some parts in a village where we washed our clothing with soot. Some parts in big cities working in factories. How we starved for food in Greece and starved for Greece in Australia.
You don't know the first thing about me. A son can never see his mother as a woman. You will only see me in relation to you. I have had a thousand lives before you were even a thought. Hospitalised as a child for an entire year. Living as an adult without family in Athens when the colonels took control.
Start when I was born. Describe the village and how beautiful it was. On the side of a mountain but in the middle of a forest. If we walked to a certain point on the edge, we could look over the valley and see rain clouds coming. Sometimes we would see a cat on a roof, we read that as a warning of a storm. When we looked down, we saw the dirt, which was just as rich as the sky. My island, your island, our island. Sometimes I think God forgot about us because we were poor.
The Sitter by Angela O'Keeffe
Paris, 2020. A writer is confined to her hotel room during the early days of the pandemic, struggling to finish a novel about Hortense Cezanne, wife and sometime muse of the famous painter. Dead for more than a century, Hortense has been reawakened by this creative endeavour, and now shadows the writer through the locked-down city. But Hortense, always subject to the gaze of others, is increasingly intrigued by the woman before her. Who is she and what event hides in her past?
Heartbreaking and perfectly formed, The Sitter explores the tension between artist and subject, and between the stories told about us and the stories we choose to tell.
Serengotti by Eugen Bacon
In the one tumultuous day, Ch'anzu loses hir job and finds wife Scarlet in bed with a stranger. As life unexpectedly spirals out of control, Ch'anzu turns to hir charismatic Aunt Mae for comfort and wisdom, and makes the bold move to work on a project in Serengotti, a migrant African outpost in rural Australia.
In a novel haunted by the strangeness and yearnings of a displaced community – both beautiful and fractured – Ch'anzu is forced to confront hir many demons. Back in the city, brother Tex has gone missing. In Serengotti violence and infidelity simmer.
This is a love letter to the strong women who bind families together despite everything. It's also a remembrance of the many who haven't or couldn't survive the dislocations and tragedies of their turbulent pasts.
The Vitals by Tracy Sorensen
Deep inside Tracy's body live the organs of the peritoneal cavity.
Ute, a wandering womb. Rage, an existential spleen. Gaster, a gleeful gorger. Liv, a workaholic liver.
But there is also Baby, an ever-growing tumour.
Together, the organs must fight for homeostasis ... and Tracy's survival.
The Vitals is Tracy Sorensen's cancer memoir transformed by imagination into something far richer and stranger. Narrated by her internal organs, it will make you infinitely more aware of the peculiar world inside your body and discover all the hidden parts that make you human.
