Australian fiction to pick up this month
Only the Astronauts by Ceridwen Dovey
Adrift in outer space, a motley crew of human-made objects tell their tales, making real history sweeter and stranger.
Starman, a lovelorn mannequin orbiting the Sun in his cherry-red car, pines for his creator. The first sculpture ever taken to the Moon is possessed by the spirit of Neil Armstrong. The International Space Station, awaiting deorbit and burial in a spacecraft cemetery beneath the ocean, farewells its last astronauts. A team of tamponauts sets off on a perilous mission to Mars inspired by the courage of their predecessors. The Voyager 1 space probe – carrying its precious Golden Record – is captured by Oortians near the edge of the solar system and drawn into their baroque, glimmering rituals.
By turns joyous and mournful, these object-astronauts are not high priests of the universe but something a little ... weirder.
Read our staff review here.
All the Beautiful Things You Love by Jonathan Seidler
Elly and Enzo love each other. Elly and Enzo are getting divorced. Now, everything must go.
When Enzo suddenly walks out on Elly after ten years together, she finds herself marooned in an expensive East London flat, surrounded by all their belongings. She is shell-shocked. Inconsolable. She can't bear to look at the objects that she and Enzo collected together, those innocuous items that define the key moments of every relationship. Now she's listing it all on Marketplace: the table they found in Italy. The bike he bought for her birthday. Records, luggage, a vintage velvet couch. Anything that tells a story she'd rather forget. Elly thinks that selling these items to total strangers will help her move on from Enzo and heal her devastated heart. But she's about to get a lot more than she bargained for.
Read our staff review here.
Safe Haven by Shankari Chandran
After arriving in Australia seeking asylum, Fina dedicates herself to aiding the refugees held in a detention centre at Port Camden, a remote island outpost. Appalled by the mistreatment of those in custody, Fina speaks out to the media about the poor conditions within the facility, as a result she is arrested, taken from her home in the small country town of Hastings and threatened with deportation.
When a security officer dies under suspicious circumstances, Lucky, a special investigator, arrives to uncover the truth. Her mystery is tied to Fina’s fate – and the secrets of the detention centre will divide the town and the nation.
Read our staff review here.
Ghost Cities by Siang Lu
Ghost Cities – inspired by the vacant, uninhabited megacities of China – follows multiple narratives, including one in which a young man named Xiang is fired from his job as a translator at Sydney's Chinese Consulate after it is discovered he doesn't speak a word of Chinese and has been relying entirely on Google Translate for his work.
How is his relocation to one such ghost city connected to a parallel odyssey in which an ancient Emperor creates a thousand doubles of Himself? Or where a horny mountain gains sentience? Where a chess-playing automaton hides a deadly secret? Or a tale in which every book in the known Empire is destroyed – then recreated, page by page and book by book – all in the name of love and art?
Read our staff review here.
To Sing of War by Catherine McKinnon
December 1944: In New Guinea, a young Australian nurse chances upon her first love who is there to fight the Japanese and keen to prove his worth as a man. Meanwhile, in Los Alamos, two young physicists join Robert Oppenheimer and a team of scientists in a collective dream to build a weapon that will stop all war. Far away, on the sacred island of Miyajima, a woman helps her husband's grandmother run a ryokan.
Each of these people yearns to belong, yet each fiercely protects their independence. Secrets, misunderstandings and fears burden them, shame shapes them, hope and imagination lift them up. They are caught in a moment of history, both enthralled and appalled by actions they must undertake.
Why Do Horses Run? by Cameron Stewart
Missing in every sense of the word, a man walks into the landscape and doesn't stop. In all weather and across all kinds of terrain, Ingvar walks until he can go no further, then gets up and does it again the following day, week after week, month after month. For three years he doesn't know why he keeps going, or whether he is walking towards something or away from it.
Until he comes to a remote tropical valley harbouring secrets and misfits. There a recently widowed woman, Hilda, allows Ingvar to live in a shed on her property. He hasn't spoken for three years and Hilda chats frequently with her dead husband, but somehow they tolerate each other as they both struggle with the haunting impact of their pasts and grief that won't let them go.
Read our staff review here.
The Deed by Susannah Begbie
Tom Edwards is dying, and cranky. He's made his peace with the dying part. But he'd bet his property – the whole ten thousand acres of it – that there'd be no wailing at his funeral. His kids wouldn't be able to chop down a tree, let alone build a coffin to bury him in.
Then Tom has an idea ...
Christine is furious, David ashen-faced, and Sophie distracted. Only Jenny listens carefully as Vince Barton, of Barton & Sons, reads their father's will. Either they build his coffin – in four days – or they lose their inheritance. All of it.
Bright Objects by Ruby Todd
January 1997: In the small town of Jericho, New South Wales, Sylvia Knight is losing hope that the person who killed her husband will ever face justice. Since the night of the hit-and-run, her world has been shrouded in hazy darkness – until she meets Theo St John, the discoverer of a rare comet soon to be visible above Jericho.
As the comet begins to brighten, visitors flock like pilgrims into town. Supermarkets run out of canned goods; campgrounds fill to capacity. And more and more people are drawn into the orbit of Joseph Evans, an enigmatic local who believes the comet's arrival is nothing short of a divine message. But Sylvia will soon realise that she isn't the only one haunted by the past. While everyone else is looking to the night sky for answers, her quest to uncover her husband's killer will unearth long-held secrets with far-reaching consequences.
For Everything a Time by Mark McAvaney
After thirteen years it’s time for Mac to return home to face a past he’s been running from. A past his best friend Dave has been unable to escape. It was 1990, their final year of school and with an INXS soundtrack, life was moving on. Bus stops, homework and football were giving way to pay slips and beer, to first cars and first loves. Until one night changed it all.
As the story of that evening unravels, so too do the binds that cross generations of family. The pride of fathers. The love of mothers and a sister. The love of a mate; the prejudices that run deep. Testing them, and the strong social ties that small towns have, Mac searches for honesty and for the precious words never said, while Dave fights for his story to be heard. Before it’s too late, can these once-close friends and their town still divided by tragedy find a time for peace?
Saltblood by Francesca de Tores
In a rented room outside Plymouth in 1685, a daughter is born as her half-brother is dying. Her mother makes a decision – Mary will become Mark, and Ma will continue to collect his inheritance money.
Mary's dual existence will take her to a grand house where she'll serve a French mistress; to the navy where she'll learn who to trust, and how to navigate by the stars; to the army and the battlegrounds of Flanders, following her one true friend; and finding love among the bloodshed and mud. But none of this will stop her yearning for the sea.
Drawn back to the water, Mary must reinvent herself yet again, for a woman aboard a ship is a dangerous thing. This time Mary will become something more dangerous than a woman. She will become a pirate.
