Australian fiction to pick up this month
Juice by Tim Winton
Two fugitives, a man and a child, drive all night across a stony desert. As dawn breaks, they roll into an abandoned mine site. From the vehicle they survey a forsaken place – middens of twisted iron, rusty wire, piles of sun-baked trash. They’re exhausted, traumatised, desperate now. But as a refuge, this is the most promising place they’ve seen. The child peers at the field of desolation. The man thinks to himself, this could work.
Problem is, they’re not alone.
So begins a searing, propulsive journey through a life whose central challenge is not simply a matter of survival, but of how to maintain human decency as everyone around you falls ever further into barbarism.
Read our staff review here.
Dusk by Robbie Arnott
In the distant highlands, a puma named Dusk is killing shepherds. Down in the lowlands, twins Iris and Floyd are out of work, money and friends. When they hear that a bounty has been placed on Dusk, they reluctantly decide to join the hunt.
As they journey up into this wild, haunted country, they discover there's far more to the land and people of the highlands than they imagined. And as they close in on their prey, they're forced to reckon with conflicts both ancient and deeply personal.
Read our staff review here.
The Burrow by Melanie Cheng
Amy, Jin and Lucie are leading isolated lives in their partially renovated, inner city home. They are not happy, but they are also terrified of change. When they buy a pet rabbit for Lucie, and then Amy's mother, Pauline, comes to stay, the family is forced to confront long-buried secrets. Will opening their hearts to the rabbit help them to heal or only invite further tragedy?
The Burrow tells an unforgettable story about grief and hope. With her characteristic compassion and eye for detail, Melanie Cheng reveals the lives of others – even of a small rabbit.
Read our staff review here, as well as our author Q&A.
Things Will Calm Down Soon by Zoë Foster Blake
Hair stylist Kit Cooper is at the top of her game. She does the shows in Milan and Paris, tends to pop stars and celebrities, and has styled enough campaigns and magazine covers to last a lifetime. But Kit is ambitious. Restless. She can’t help asking: what’s next?
One day, frustrated she can’t find the perfect product for a look, she wonders – could she make it herself? Welcome to the hectic world of beauty and business where juggling family dramas, workplace near-catastrophes and relationship crises is the norm.
Chinese Postman by Brian Castro
Abraham Quin is a thrice-divorced migrant in his mid-70s; a one-time postman and professor, he’s now a writer living alone in the Adelaide Hills. He reflects on his life with what he calls ‘the mannered and meditative inaction of age’, offering up memories and anxieties, obsessions and opinions, his thoughts on solitude, writing, friendship and time. He becomes increasingly engaged in an epistolary correspondence with Iryna Zarebina, a woman seeking refuge from the war in Ukraine. Their exchange opens him to others, and to a new appreciation of language and nature.
Wing by Nikki Gemmell
Students from an elite girls' school go on a camping trip into the Australian bush. Four of them – a girl gang, a group of best friends dubbed 'The Cins' by the teachers – become separated from the main group. A male teacher volunteers to look for them. None of the five come back.
A major search immediately gets underway. Days crawl past, agonisingly, with no sign of the girls or their teacher. The principal of the school, godmother to one of the missing students, is desperately trying to hold the parents, the school community – and herself – together. She needs to find out what happened before the police do. Finally, separated and traumatised, the four girls re-appear. But the male teacher does not. And The Cins aren't talking.
Read our staff review here.
All the Bees in the Hollows by Lauren Keegan
Marytè is a devoted beekeeper. She lives by the old rules: work with fellow beekeepers, be a good Christian and a good harvest will follow. These rules help her cope with her grief when she inherits her husband's tree hollows. But as harsh conditions and tax increases threaten the harvest, Marytè begins to question her faith, her community and her own sanity. There is little help to be had from her eldest daughter. Austėja is no worker bee. She takes risks, speaks her mind and dreams of escaping their isolated community. As her mother works, she finds refuge in the ancient forest and the old beliefs instilled in her by her defiant grandmother.
When Austėja discovers the mutilated body of the Hollow Watcher and uncovers a honeycomb of lies and betrayal, she is intent on finding the truth and protecting her family. Will mother and daughter overcome their differences, learn the truth behind the murder and complete the honey harvest?
Read our staff review here.
A Song to Drown Rivers by Ann Liang
Xishi's beauty is seen as a blessing to the villagers of Yue – where the best fate for a girl is to marry well and support her family. When Xishi draws the attention of Fanli, the famous young military advisor, he presents her with a rare opportunity: to use her beauty as a weapon; one that could topple the rival neighbouring kingdom of Wu, improve the lives of her people, and avenge her sister's murder. All she has to do is infiltrate the enemy palace as a spy, seduce their immoral king, and weaken them from within. But the higher Xishi climbs in the Wu court, the farther she and Fanli have to fall. And if she is unmasked as a traitor, she will bring both kingdoms down.
Read our staff review here.
A Cold Season by Matthew Hooper
Set betweem the wars, A Cold Season follows the story of fourteen-year-old Beth. Beth's brother Sam and her father Owens have gone missing in a freak winter storm. In a small house in the foothills of Mount Kosciusko, Beth is stuck with her mother and her other brother, Little Sasha. They are waiting and longing for Sam and Owens to return. In what threatens to become an emotional and physical pressure cooker tensions flare, and to make matters worse Mama is seeing the local bad man, Wallace.
Matthew Hooper's debut expresses how people deal differently with absence and hope. It is a story of finding agency in a world where people, and particularly the young, are often powerless. As Beth plays with language to reclaim her spirit and family, A Cold Season emerges as unforgettable a novel that captures rural poverty and human capacity with true soul.
Rapture by Emily Maguire
The motherless child of an English priest living in ninth-century Mainz, Agnes is a wild and brilliant girl with a deep, visceral love of God. At eighteen, to avoid a future as a wife or nun, Agnes enlists the help of a lovesick Benedictine monk to disguise herself as a man and devote her life to the study she is denied as a woman.
So begins the life of John the Englishman: a matchless scholar and scribe of the revered Fulda monastery, then a charismatic heretic in an Athens commune and, by her middle years, a celebrated teacher in Rome. There, Agnes (as John) dazzles the Church hierarchy with her knowledge and wisdom and finds herself at the heart of political intrigue in a city where gossip is a powerful-and deadly-currency. And when the only person who knows her identity arrives in Rome, she will risk everything to once again feel what it is to be known-and loved.
Read our staff review here.
The Deal by Alex Miller
It's 1975, and at the threshold of his writing career Andy McPherson is navigating how to be fully present both for his partner, Jo, and their young daughter.
When forced to take a part-time teaching job, Andy meets Lang Tzu, a charismatic and intriguing man. Andy is drawn deeper into a dangerous relationship when Lang asks him to prove his friendship by brokering a risky deal for a much-desired piece of art. Andy finally consents despite Jo's opposition. In the process, Andy is in fact negotiating his own deal with himself as an artist and is compelled to face up to the conflict between his conception of art as a creative gift and the realities of the art market.
Read our staff review here.
The Belburd by Nardi Simpson
Ginny Dilboong is a young poet, fierce and deadly. She's making sense of the world and her place in it, grappling with love, family and the spaces in which to create her art. Like powerful women before her, Ginny hugs the edges of waterways, and though she is a daughter of Country, the place that shapes her is not hers. Determined and brave, Ginny seeks to protect the truth of others while learning her own. The question is how?
And, all the while, others are watching. Some old, some new. They are the sound of the belburd as it echoes through the world; the sound of cars and trucks and trains. They are in trees and paper and the shape of ideas. They are the builder and the built. Everything, even Ginny, is because of them.
Read our staff review here.
