By Cameron Woodhead and Fiona Capp
FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
If You Go
Alice Robinson, Affirm Press, $34.99
Forty-year-old Esther wakes from cryogenic stasis 100 years in the future. Alice Robinson’s third novel, If You Go, takes the Sleeping Beauty trope and rewires it into a feminist speculative thriller. As Esther pieces her memories together and grapples with the world into which she has emerged, the novel becomes a merciless interrogation of motherhood and the stickiness of the maternal role and identity.
Esther recalls her own parents’ marital discord, and how her life totally changed with the arrival of her children, Clare and Wolfie. She regrets not preparing them to face the future, but they must be dead now, surely?
Esther must discover who she is without them, find out why she was put into stasis, and learn more about Grace, the mysterious mother figure responsible for guiding her out of it. It’s searching autofiction, draped in an unsettling literary dystopia.
Briefly Very Beautiful
Roz Dineen, Bloomsbury, $32.99
The world’s on fire in Roz Dineen’s Briefly Very Beautiful, another dystopia that focuses on motherhood. It begins with Cass trying to coax a child to sleep, even as she knows she might have to flee to safety in a “terror run” at any moment.
Global problems today have got worse in this future alt-London, known as “The City”; with Cass’ doctor husband working abroad, raising children there becomes untenable. When climate activists target a playground, Cass flees with the kids – first to her mother-in-law’s home in the countryside, then to a commune behind a wall in the north.
This is disaster fiction with the shape and texture of family drama, and the urgency and suspense of an action novel. Cass’ story of survival sees maternal instinct in overdrive as social crisis deepens, and norms are abandoned in the face of apocalypse.
Together We Fall Apart
Sophie Matthiesson, Pantera, $32.99
There’s the family you’re born with and the family you choose. In Sophie Matthiesson’s Together We Fall Apart, tensions arise between their competing needs.
Clare lives in London with her partner Miriam and their son Rupert. She studied arts/law in Melbourne in the early 2000s, and now works for a judge on child-protection cases. Taking leave, she flies back to Australia to support her family back home through a crisis. Her father is terribly ill, and her brother’s long-term drug addiction has reached new depths.
Another strand of the narrative follows Clare’s youth, lending perspective to the emotional complications of the present. Clare does want to help her family, but is she using their problems as a pretext for running away from her own? It’s a promising debut novel, blending vivid stories from Melbourne’s queer scene in the 2000s with an unflinching look at the impact of addiction on families.
The End and Everything Before It
Finegan Kruckemeyer, Text, $32.99
The wit and wisdom of prolific playwright Finegan Kruckemeyer are familiar to me from my role as theatre critic for The Age. The End and Everything Before It is his debut novel and elaborates on a style he has pursued to acclaim in his writing for the stage.
Kruckemeyer is one of life’s optimists, though if you’re allergic to toxic positivity, rest assured his vision remains anchored in a profoundly tragicomic philosophy of life.
Emma bears a death curse: her mother and brother felled by tragedy, she takes to the sea, determined to avoid people. After years of isolation, she encounters an enigmatic island with a motley cast of characters from across the centuries. Time blurs in this place, and stories entwine unexpectedly as people come and go. Has the cursed seafarer sailed to a staging post in the afterlife? Stories of death, love and grief collide in this book, and readers with a taste for life-affirming magical realism should enjoy it.
NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
In Hot Water
Paul E. Hardisty, Affirm, $34.99
You would think, with the Great Barrier Reef dying in front of our eyes, that there would be a consensus about the seriousness of the situation.
But when Paul Hardisty became the CEO of the Australian Institute of Marine Science in 2017 and found himself on the front line in the war against climate science, it became plain that evidence meant nothing to those for whom the reef was merely a venue for political stunts and point scoring. As he tells of his own experience in the hot seat facing Senate committees and receiving death threats, Hardisty reflects on the history of human interactions with the reef and how disaster can be averted if we have the courage to act.
This mix of memoir and historical survey captures with immediacy and urgency the cast of characters caught up in an ecological drama of global significance that implicates us all.
The Shortest History of Japan
Lesley Downer, Black Inc., $27.99
The story begins with the Jomon, Japan’s original hunter-gatherers, and the influx of Korean rice farmers from whom most modern Japanese are descended.
While this compact history is structured around the internal workings of power – from the early shamans, emperors and Buddhist priests to samurai, shogun military rulers and the arrival of democracy – it is shadowed by Japan’s struggle to resist colonisation, whether by the Mongols or the West. Inseparable from the power play is the evolution of Japan’s distinctive aesthetics, relationship with nature, and appreciation of the transience of existence.
This overview sketches the often-turbulent political and social environment out of which, like the proverbial lotus flowering in the mud, Japan’s unique culture and sensibility bloomed in all its manifestations, from Zen, haiku and the tea ceremony to kabuki, anime and manga.
Proud and Lonely
Leigh Edmonds, Nostrilia Press, $39.99
As in so many areas of Australian life, the tyranny of distance played a defining role in shaping the rise of science fiction fandom in this country.
Whereas American fans of the early to mid-20th century could go to their local drugstore to find the latest sci-fi, Australian fans had to scour secondhand bookshops or track down small groups of enthusiasts and locally produced fanzines.
The first of a two-part history, Proud and Lonely examines the halting emergence, in the late 1930s, of this sub-culture of close-knit teenagers up against a commonly held disdain for science fiction as “escapist”. One of the founders of the Melbourne science fiction group was Race Mathews, who went on to become a federal and state Labor politician. They were “dreamers”, says Edmonds, who found in this fiction “new ways of looking at human problems” and the wonders of the universe.
Growing Up Torres Strait Islander in Australia
Ed., Samantha Faulkner, Black Inc., $32.99
Of the fragrances that remind her of her childhood on Thursday Island in the Torres Strait, Samantha Faulkner particularly recalls the smell of coral. “Could it be,” she muses, “the truffle of the sea?” For Lenora Thaker, it is the nutty scent of coconut oil her mother rubbed into her skin and which was regarded as a young footballer’s “secret weapon”. “Make you fly down that field and no one can catch you,” the grandmas would say.
As a Torres Strait Islander in Darwin, Thomas Mayo was the only boy at school who had leftover turtle steak sandwiches for lunch. Eddie Mabo was taught to count by his infant teacher with shells that they collected on the beach. The profound influence of the sea and the natural world, the joys and struggles of living in two worlds and the importance of family are recurring motifs in these evocative stories of being a Torres Strait Islander.
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