Australian fiction to pick up this month
Thanks for Having Me by Emma Darragh
Mary Anne is painfully aware that she's not a good wife and not a good mother, and is slowly realising that she no longer wants to play either of those roles. One morning, she walks out of the family home in Wollongong, leaving her husband and teenage daughters behind. Wounded by her mother's abandonment, adolescent Vivian searches for meaning everywhere: true crime, boys' bedrooms, Dolly magazine, a six-pack of beer. But when Vivian grows up and finds herself unhappily married and miserable in motherhood, she too sees no choice but to start over. Her daughter Evie is left reeling, and wonders what she could have done to make her mother stay.
Emma Darragh's unflinching, tender and darkly funny debut explores what we give to our families and what we take from them – whether we mean to or not.
'This novel is full of complex and interesting women ... It’s a wonderful, thought-provoking read.' – Annie Condon, Readings bookseller
Read our full review here
Tidelines by Sarah Sasson
It's Sydney in the early 2000s, and Grub is spending the summer with her universally adored older brother, Elijah, and his magnetic but troubled best friend, Zed. Their days are filled with surfing, swimming and hanging out; life couldn't be better.
But years later, Elijah disappears and Grub's family unravels. At first, Grub blames Zed: he was the one who derailed Elijah from a bright future in the arts. But as Grub looks back at those dreamy summer days, the sanctuary of her certainty crumbles. Was Zed really responsible for her brother's disappearance? Was anyone?
Tidelines is a tender coming-of-age novel about growing up in the face of unimaginable loss. It examines the stories we subconsciously write for ourselves, and what remains later, when we have the courage to tear them apart.
'Sasson has created complex and empathetic characters. Family expectations, intergenerational trauma, and marital difficulties are tied into the narrative cleverly.' – Annie Condon, Readings bookseller
Read our full review here
One Another by Gail Jones
At Cambridge University, in the summer of 1992, Australian student Helen is completing her thesis on Joseph Conrad. But she is distracted by a charming and dangerous lover, Justin, and by a ghost manuscript, her anti-thesis, which she has left on a train. Haunted by this loss and others, by Justin's destructive tendencies and by details of Conrad's life, Helen is unmoored. And then the drama of the lost manuscript sets in motion a series of events-with possibly fatal consequences.
In her masterly new novel, Gail Jones traverses the borders between art and life, between life and death, in a journey through literary history and emotional landscapes. Elegantly written, deftly crafted, One Another covers new territories of grief, memory and narrative.
'Capture[s] everything that it is to be human: the fragility, the sorrow, and the quest to be appreciated, known, understood ... breathtaking.' – Chris Gordon, Readings' community engagement and programming manager
Read our full review here
Appreciation by Liam Pieper
Oli Darling is a queer artist from the country – it says so right at the top of every press release. His art has brought him fame, money, fashionable substance abuse issues and only a little imposter syndrome. But then he goes on live TV and says the one thing that can get a rich white guy cancelled.
With his reputation in tatters, nobody is buying Oli's schtick or his art. That's a problem for all the people who've invested millions in him. Powerful, dangerous people. To save his own skin, Oli will need to restore his public image. Together with a ghostwriter, he must do the most undignified thing imaginable: he will have to write a memoir.
So begins a journey through the underbelly of modern celebrity that sees Oli confront the consequences of his own ruthless mythmaking – lies he's told others, lies he's told himself. Perhaps he was right to feel like an imposter. And maybe the only way out is to take a good hard look at himself.
'Below the constant deceits and dramas, and the witty cynicism, is a clear love of creative endeavours and the people who are drawn to them. Appreciation is a deftly written satire littered with pithy truths.' – Elke Power, editor of the Readings Monthly
Read our full review here
Lead Us Not by Abbey Lay
Millie is in her final year at a Catholic girls' school, subdued by the conformity of her life and her parents' quiet pain. But when her schoolmate Olive moves in next door, it marks the beginning of an intoxicating friendship that changes everything. In all the ways Millie feels unsure and half-formed, Olive, an aspiring actor from a devoutly Catholic family, seems at ease with her place in the world.
On the precipice of freedom, the two young women seize nights out and a school retreat as opportunities to further their own increasingly uncertain ends. Olive urges Millie on in her sexual encounters, but Millie is only becoming more consumed by Olive. That makes it all the more excruciating when Olive cuts off all contact. Millie cannot understand what's changed between them. Has she missed something?
'Incredibly immersive ... Lay crafts an insular, intoxicating narrative that will keep you absorbed until the very last page.' – Ruby Grinter, Readings bookseller
Read our full review here
Cool Water by Myfanwy Jones
Frank Herbert's family has gathered at Tinaroo Dam for his daughter Lily's wedding – the first time he's been back since the death of his father, Joe, a year earlier. Like Frank, the dam is at an all-time low and as the water recedes, objects begin to emerge – abstract and disquieting.
Joe's father Victor – Frank's grandfather – was the butcher of Tinaroo during the dam's construction, but Joe refused to speak of him. Joe was not a talker, but he could roar. And he could smash things. What sorrow was his fury, and this place, concealing? And can Frank find a way into a future of his own making?
Moving between the weekend of the wedding and the explosive year in the 1950s that would shape the Herbert men's destiny, Cool Water is an unforgettable novel about fathers and sons, what it means to be a good man, and the damage that can ripple through generations.
'Explores, with compassion and empathy, how [family violence] can happen, repeatedly, for years on end.' – Kate McIntosh, Readings bookseller
Read our full review here
My Brilliant Sister by Amy Brown
Stella Miles Franklin's autobiographical novel My Brilliant Career launched one of the most famous names in Australian letters. Funny, bold, often biting about its characters, the novel and its young author had a lot in common. Miles went on to live a large, fiercely independent and bohemian life. Not so her beloved sister Linda. Quiet, contained, conventional, Linda was an inversion of Stella. A family peacemaker who married the man Stella would not, bore a son and died of pneumonia at 25.
In this reflective, witty and revealing debut, Amy Brown rescues Linda, setting her in counterpoint with Stella, and with the lives of two contemporary women: Ida, a writer whose writing life is on hold as she teaches and raises her young daughter; and Stella, a singer-songwriter who has sacrificed everything for a career, now forcibly put on hold.
'A love letter not just to Linda and Stella Franklin, but to women everywhere who find themselves caught by expectation, desire, or just the complicated position that is womanhood in the modern age.' – Ruby Grinter, Readings bookseller
Read our full review here
We All Lived in Bondi Then by Georgia Blain
From the author of the multi-award-winning bestseller Between a Wolf and a Dog, a powerful collection of previously unpublished stories.
A sister is haunted by the consequences of a simple mistake. A daughter searches for certainty as her mother's memory degrades. An encounter at a house party changes the course of a life.
In We All Lived in Bondi Then, beloved Australian author Georgia Blain returns to her resonant themes of relationships and family, illness and health, love and death. Composed in Blain's final years, these nine stories grapple with large questions on a human scale, brimming with her trademark acuity, nuance, and warmth.
'Blain could see what we hold in our hearts, and still surprises us with her incredible insight and compassion.' – Aurelia Orr, Readings bookseller
Read our full review here
Always Will Be by Mykaela Saunders
Epic in scope, and with a diverse cast of characters, this forward-thinking collection is the ground-breaking winner of the 2022 David Unaipon Award. Inventive and thought-provoking it refuses cynicism and despair, and instead offers entertaining stories that celebrate Goori ways of being, knowing, doing – and becoming.
Each of the stories in Always Will Be is set in its own future version of the Tweed. In one, a group of girls plot their escape from a home they have no memory of entering. In another, two men make a final visit to the country they love as they contemplate a new life in a faraway place. Saunders imagines different scenarios for how the local Goori community might reassert sovereignty – reclaiming country, exerting full self-determination, or incorporating non-Indigenous people into the social fabric.
Chloe by Katrina Kell
Taking the reader from Victoria's wild shipwreck coast to the artists' studios of revolutionary Paris and the bloody battlefields of Flanders, this sweeping novel reimagines the volatile history of the beautiful and enigmatic young woman immortalised in one of Australia's most iconic paintings. Created in Paris in 1875, Chloe, Jules Lefebvre's depiction of a naked water nymph, was brought to Melbourne's Young & Jackson Hotel in 1909, where it has hung ever since.
In this passionate, luminous retelling, Katrina Kell seeks to unlock the riddle behind the girl on the canvas, known to history only as Marie. In doing so, she weaves the compelling story of an incandescent spirit – a woman with the strength to defy the boundaries of class and convention in order to survive, and an enduring power to influence the lives of others across time and distance.
