Reading Australian James Bradley’s “cli-fi” novel as large areas of Asia and Texas are flooded ramps up the disturbing effect of its incrementally apocalyptic scenarios. Bird die-offs, mass fish deaths, wildfires and storms are just the beginning as Bradley zooms into the future via a sequence of linked narratives. The “clade” of the title is the set of all the descendants of Adam Leith, a climatologist; each chapter focuses on the next generation of Adam’s family (and naturally his name has symbolic resonance), enabling Bradley’s predictions for Earth to fast-forward at Koyaanisqatsi-like speed while the human actors replay their inherited traits of awkwardness, poor communication skills and attachment issues. The structure, at once intimate and epic, works well as a means of delivering human-scale stories against the backdrop of the most human story of all: our heedless despoiling of the home planet. Almost inevitably, there is something of the blockbuster movie about this: the beleaguered family battling to stay together as the world ends. But Bradley’s deft merging of near-future predictions and cutting-edge science into a convincing setting for his family drama enables us to focus on the interactions between the characters. The apocalypse is happening, even as our messed-up lives distract us.
When 16-year-old Karuna becomes pregnant, Karuna’s mother decides to lock her daughter inside their fourteenth-story public housing flat as a means to keep her safe. Karuna, who has spent years trying to escape her mother, now finds herself with her mother as her only company.
Alice Pung: ‘The way many immigrant children were brought up, the parents give you orders for your own good ... Some readers might consider [it] emotional abuse.’ Photograph: Black Inc
‘Teenagers can deal with tough things’: Alice Pung on the complexities of race, class and motherhood
Pung’s new book One Hundred Days is set in the mind of a 16-year-old whose mother traps her in their commission flat after she falls pregnant
When Alice Pung was a teenager growing up in the suburbs of Melbourne, she had friends at school who got pregnant and vanished. “I never saw them again, and I wondered what happened to them,” the author says.
Nevenka dress, bra top and pants, Skull & Pearl bracelets, Essen shoes.CREDIT:MICHELLE TRAN
‘Babies shouldn’t eat vegetables’ and other myths author Alice Pung had to battle
Alice Pung had finished her novel One Hundred Days – about a pregnant teen whose overprotective mother locks her in their housing commission flat – when her life started to follow suit.
Alice Pung was almost 40, not 16, and pregnant with her third child, not her first, when she moved in with her parents in Melbourne during lockdown last year, accompanied by her husband Nick and their two boys, aged six and two. But as with her new novel’s adolescent narrator, Karuna, Alice found herself at times stifled by her mother’s “practical kind of love”.
It was to be the fate of this patient little girl to see much more than, at first, she understood, but also, even at first, to understand much more than any little girl, however patient, had perhaps ever understood before.
— Henry James, What Maisie Knew
I have long been interested in what children know, because I was once a child, and I did know things, and people assumed that I didn’t.
Emily Bitto and I gaze at our screens, looking at each other’s pixelated faces — very much not the same as looking into someone’s eyes — both of us occasionally sneaking glances at each other’s pixelated surroundings. I’m sitting at my dining table, kitchen in the background; Bitto is in the study of her Brunswick West home, a hot-pink Jackie Marshall tour poster stuck to the door of a vintage standalone wardrobe, reminding me of a time when musicians toured and audiences danced. Bitto’s bleached short pixie haircut is even lighter in the afternoon sun.
he hero’s journey is a narrative device as old as storytelling itself. But what does it look like now, when we are running out of days and new places on the map? For a millennial Melbourne man, Will, the protagonist of Emily Bitto’s second novel, Wild Abandon, the hero’s journey is America.
FICTION: Wild Abandon, Emily Bitto, Allen & Unwin, $32.99
Emily Bitto’s debut novel, which won the Stella Prize in 2015, was called The Strays. This new book, her second, is called Wild Abandon, an equally suggestive but more intense and violent version of the same idea. They are both books about the abandonment of order, wherein an innocent character from an ordinary family is first attracted and then infected by perceived glamour that turns out, once experienced, to be both a driver and a product of disorder and dysfunction.
In the fall of 2011, a heartbroken young man flees Australia for the USA. Landing in the excessive, uncanny-familiar glamour and plenitude of New York City, Will makes a vow to say yes to everything that comes his way. By fate or random chance, Will's journey takes him deep into the American heartland where he meets Wayne Gage, a fast-living, troubled Vietnam veteran, would-be spirit guide and collector of exotic animals. These two men in crisis form an unlikely friendship, but Will has no idea just how close to the edge Wayne truly is.
Michelle de Kretser turns the novel upside down: ‘My aim was to play with form’
The two-time Miles Franklin-winner’s new book, Scary Monsters, is in fact two books, with two front covers – and no clues as to where to start
Michael Williams Thu 14 Oct 2021 17.30 BST
About 15 minutes into our conversation, Michelle de Kretser turns the interview on its head: “We haven’t come to the question of form yet. What did you make of it?”
The two-time Miles Franklin award winner is on the verge of releasing her new book, Scary Monsters, and her apprehensiveness is palpable.
Michelle de Kretser’s new book Scary Monsters is split down the middle: one half tells a realist tale of France in the early 1980s, the other conjures a gruesome vision of Australia’s near future.
Scary Monsters by Michelle de Kretser review – duelling novellas of charged, peerless writing
With two stories and two front covers, the reader chooses where to start: in France in the past, or in a dystopian Australian future
Michelle de Kretser’s fiction does more than beckon us in; it requires us to show up. The reward is room to wonder in both senses of the word. But her new novel demands tactile participation. Scary Monsters is split sharply down the middle. One half tells a realist tale of the early 1980s, the other conjures a gruesome – and plausible – vision of Australia’s near future. Either could function as the book’s opening act, and de Kretser places the choice in our dog-earing hands.
The Life to Come - this year’s Miles Franklin winner - is a brilliant character study
Jen Webb August 26, 2018 8.00am BST
Michelle de Kretser’s The Life To Come, which has won the 2018 Miles Franklin Award, begins with an epigraph from Samuel Beckett’s Endgame:
CLOV: Do you believe in the life to come? HAMM: Mine was always that.
This tragicomic exchange sets up, brilliantly, the novel that follows. When I asked de Kretser about her selection of this quote, she replied that she is interested in the hollowness behind the lives of her characters. Each falls short of the life they might have lived; each hears the echo of a life that could have been; and that echo hollows out the life they are in fact living.
'We are not very caring’: Michelle de Kretser on Australian society
In her new novel The Life to Come, the Miles Franklin-winning author critiques Australia’s character, and the boom that made us bad
Brigid Delaney Fri 10 Nov 2017 21.30 GMT
Children of Australia’s long boom – who travel the world only to complain about lack of good coffee, who signal virtue by retweeting an asylum seeker story, who couldn’t imagine living in a house with only one bathroom, who are “really into food” – may find Michelle de Kretser’s new book an uncomfortable read.
The Life to Come is a novel in five sections that focuses, in part, on the lives of Australia’s upper middle-class progressives. We meet Celeste, an Australian now living in Paris; Ash, a Sri Lankan academic in Sydney; and Pippa, a moderately successful novelist.
Book review: The Life To Come by Michelle de Kretser
Steve Walker
26 November 2017
The Life To Come by Michelle de Kretser Allen & Unwin, $37
I have always been an admirer of Australian award-winning novelist Michelle de Kretser. Her beautifully poetic prose explores the notions of travel and identity, the nature and bounds of fiction and what it means to be Australian.
Her The Lost Dog and The Hamilton Case were rich, multilevel and exquisitely lyric. Her Questions of Travel was an engrossing and profound exploration of the interconnection between travel and isolation. All three spun their narrative threads through complex, layered characters.
Krissy Kneen is the award-winning author of fiction, poetry, and memoir, including An Uncertain Grace, Steeplechase, Triptych, The Adventures of Holly White and the Incredible Sex Machine, Wintering, Eating My Grandmother, and Affection. Her latest book is the memoir The Three Burials of Lotty Kneen. She has written and directed broadcast documentaries for SBS and ABC Television.
In the centre of a page without adornment, before the opening chapter of the book, a small paragraph might almost be overlooked: “When I was a child my family won the lotto and used the money to move to the middle of nowhere in central Queensland to make fairytale characters of papier-mâché.” It would be an outlandish set-up even for a work of fiction, let alone a memoir, but this small incredible opening is a speck compared to the extraordinary story that unfolds.
Helen Garner: ‘During these hours of peculiar solitude, in conversation with myself and no one else,I’m free.’ Photograph: Darren James
Helen Garner: I always liked my diary better than anything else I wrote
Garner has spent thousands of hours on her diary, writing every morning and night. It’s been useful for her other books – and it’s taught her she’s never alone
When I was young, I liked writing. It was the only thing I was any good at, and I wanted to do it all the time. But I knew I would never be able to write a book.
Titles featured in Guardian Australia’s best books of 2021 list
The 25 best Australian books of 2021: Helen Garner, Alice Pung, Tony Birch and more
Experimental elegies, portraits of resilience and political manifestos: 25 of the best reads of the year as picked by Guardian Australia critics and staff
I keep thinking about the formal gambit on which Scary Monsters is built: it is a book with two faces. Quite literally: it has two covers, two sets of end pages, and it forces the reader at the outset to choose where they begin. It’s a device more complex and consequential than it first seems, because there’s only one opportunity to read one section of the novel unencumbered by the other, to read innocently. And because the sections could each, in theory, stand alone, and because the ties between them are allusive and never overt, the connections and conclusions a reader might draw are up for grabs.
It’s an inventive and playful book, funny and heartbreaking, and beautifully accomplished. – Fiona Wright
There are memoirs that tell extraordinary personal stories and hold the reader’s attention because, well, the stories are extraordinary. Then there are memoirs that take it to another level, threading greater meaning through the narrative thanks to the supreme skill, grace and intellect of the writer.
In Amani Haydar’s hands, the terrible story of the murder of her mother by her father becomes so much more than that: she transforms it into a thoughtful meditation on memory, culture, patriarchy, intergenerational trauma and, ultimately, hope and renewal. This book is stunning. – Lucy Clark
In her third volume of edited journals, How to End a Story: Diaries 1995-1998, Helen Garner covers the implosion of her third marriage. Almost unbearably intimate, her forensic reports on the tensions between two writers and her slowly breaking heart have operatic intensity. After the controversy of The First Stone, with no room of her own, she struggles to write and examines herself in therapy. Yet amid misery, she finds joy and silliness, and sees Sydney with an ever-curious Melburnian eye.
The diaries throw light (and shade) on the career of a great Australian writer who can shape an archetypal drama from life’s daily mess and knows exactly how to end a story. – Susan Wyndham
Debut books of short stories can follow something of a pattern: some pyrotechnics to show range, potentially autobiographical elements, a singular perspective or worldview that separates the author from the pack. But while all of this is true of She is Haunted, this book is a true original, with skilled, delicate power and an unforgettable mix of raw humour, fantastical digressions and melancholy insight.
Reviews of debut fiction often lean on phrases like “prodigiously talented” and “bursts on to the scene”. Again, these are true of Paige Clark but don’t do her justice. This is one of the most enjoyable, memorable Australian books of this year. – Michael Williams
Dear Son: letters and reflections from First Nations fathers and sons, edited by Thomas Mayor
Hardie Grant
Torres Strait Islander author and activist Thomas Mayor introduces readers to his poignant collection of father-son letters by writing how colonial institutions have taught his people to “hate themselves”. Resounding postcolonial stereotypes – such as the caricature of the hopeless Indigenous parent perpetuated by an infamous Bill Leak cartoon five years ago – have further demonised and demoralised Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men.
Mayor’s book offers a positive counter-response in which First Nations men, writing mostly to their children (but sometimes to their fathers), lay bare the generational legacies of the “colonial stain” of self-criticism through reflections of what it means to nurture and love one another across the generations. These are heartfelt and deeply moving essays that all men can learn from. – Paul Daley
Sean Kelly’s first book initially doesn’t sound that promising: a biography of Scott Morrison, for which the subject has not granted the author access.
But for Kelly the obstacle is the way. Without Morrison, Kelly can create a narrative that is not dependent on the self that the prime minister wants to show. Instead his book probes Morrison’s absence: that is the absence of a story, of an inner life, of the ability to empathise, and ultimately of the ability to lead.
With a variety of literary references, including Joan Didion and Janet Malcolm, Kelly has crafted an intelligent, thoughtful book that ultimately doesn’t just reveal Morrison to us but shows us the “real Australia”. – Brigid Delaney
Grimmish by Michael Winkler
Self-published
No Aussie publisher was bold enough to take a chance on Michael Winkler’s debut novel, so Winkler published it himself. Thank the literary gods he did, for Grimmish arrives with its wildness untamed and excesses untamped. This “exploded nonfiction novel” begins with the true-life tale of Joe Grim, a fin de siècle boxer famed for his capacity to endure round-after-round of punishment; a human punching bag. Around Grim’s bruised and bruising life, Winkler crafts a fable of masculinity, pain, art-making and madness.
JM Coetzee has called it “the strangest book you are likely to read this year”, and he’s spot on. Grimmish has all the makings of a cult classic. It’s grotesque and gorgeous, smart and searching. And did I mention the talking goat? – Beejay Silcox
2021 has been a great year for fiction for me – particularly by Australian writers. Wild Abandon stands out as a favourite because at the peak of such an exhausting, depleting time it was an absolute delight to read something so lush and full of energy.
I’ve always loved Bitto’s writing, but her joy in experimenting with craft and character shines through on every page of this. And while there is something expansive and liberating about Will’s journey from Australia to New York to the deep heartlands of America, there is also genuine pathos, and an understanding of the endless search for connection that drives so many of us. This book is wondrous. – Bec Kavanagh
Chelsea Watego is inspired by two great contemporary philosophers, Audre Lorde and bell hooks. The result is a book that only Watego could have written, a galvanic critique of colonial complacency and institutional racism in Australia. Watego herself experienced a trial by fire in academia, when a piece she wrote for an academic journal heavily criticising a white author’s book was pulled from publication and resulted in defamation threats (the piece is reprinted here). The penultimate chapter, Fuck Hope, is essential summer reading.
Another Day in the Colony is a wonderful continuation of the critical race and feminist critiques of thinkers such as Jackie Huggins, Lilla Watson, and Aileen Moreton-Robinson. – Declan Fry
In suburban 1980s Melbourne, 16-year-old Karuna falls pregnant. Enraged, her mother confines the teenager to their commission flat, where she yearns for escape and independence. This claustrophobic, epistolary novel is beautifully nuanced in exploring the chasm between mother and daughter, especially where culture is concerned – Pung writes with empathy for both characters, even if the mother’s actions appear outwardly monstrous.
As with her other works of fiction and nonfiction, Pung’s handling of race and class is impressive, providing great insight into the complexities of both. One Hundred Days isn’t always an easy read, but it is an important and moving one. – Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen
Krissy Kneen was raised on a “strict diet of fairytales”, the frayed threads of her family history always woven into fables. The chief mythmaker was her Slovenian grandmother, Lotty: a mystical, matriarchal woman who spurned any probing inquiry into her obscured past. After Lotty’s death, Krissy is liberated to unearth the kernels of truth in her grandmother’s tales, to discover the lineage of her ancestors and where she might overlap with them – “skin to skin, blood to blood”.
This peripatetic memoir is an absorbing chronicle of that journey, with Krissy travelling with Lotty’s ashes from Australia to Slovenia to Egypt. It’s an intimate tale of identity – as well as of bodies, inherited trauma, and memory – and is its own heady cocktail of truth and lore. – Jack Callil
This brooding novel from Briohny Doyle tells the story of a young mother on the brink of breakdown, struggling to manage the needs of her neuro atypical son and hounded by the memories of sexual assault and harassment she experienced as a teenager. Doyle sets this core narrative against the backdrop of a town slowly drying up – both figuratively and literally – unable to withstand economic and climate pressures. Then, a single, horrific act rocks its people to the core.
Doyle is a master at bringing together disparate and complex themes, timelines and perspectives to deliver a taut and engaging read. – Zoya Patel
Why You Should Give a F*ck about Farming by Gabrielle Chan
Penguin Random House
Full disclosure: Gabrielle Chan is a friend and colleague, neither of which would ordinarily compel me to read a whole book about farming – but after only a few pages you’ll see why you should, indeed, give a very big concern about farming in Australia.
If you eat and you care about the environment and food supply chains, Chan’s exposition of this enormous part of Australia’s economy and culture – not to mention actual landmass – is an urgent wakeup call. Her knowledge of policy in this area is without peer; her prodigious storytelling abilities and analysis make this subject timely, relevant and readable. – Lucy Clark
Given the various traumas and societal failures that have dominated our news cycle for the better part of 2021, Bodies of Light – Jennifer Down’s vast novel of grief, institutionalisation, pain and loss – might not feel like an easy recommendation for the reader seeking escapism or respite. But if you’re feeling robust enough to give over to the forensic, immersive story of one woman’s attempts to survive tragedy over many decades, the rewards are considerable.
Bearing witness to Maggie’s abuse, to her thwarted and often heartbreaking efforts to escape her past and ultimately to overcome it may leave you wrung out, but Down is a beautiful writer and this epic novel is first and foremost about strength and resilience. – Michael Williams
Working From Home (may ở nhà) byEmma Do and Kim Lam
Self-published
No book this year moved me half as much as Emma Do and Kim Lam’s brilliant history of outwork in Australia. Written by Do and illustrated by Lam, it tells a story of Australia during the 80s and 90s, when Vietnamese migrants and refugees struggling to find regular employment became outworkers.
The result is a stunning portrait of resilience despite adversity; of small wins and larger injustices, and of little reprieves in the face of larger marginalisation. It is an intimate look at what it means to cultivate a life, a family, a home: how care is the basis upon which our existence depends, in both the smallest and largest parts of our lives. When Do observes that “everything you wear has passed through skilled hands”, the larger analogy is impossible to miss. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll mobilise for migrant labour rights. – Declan Fry
Leaping Into Waterfalls: The Enigmatic Gillian Mears by Bernadette Brennan
Allen & Unwin
Bernadette Brennan had the pleasurable challenge of mining a vast archive for her biography of Gillian Mears. No writer has documented her own life more obsessively than Mears, the dazzling Australian author who wrote, loved and lived passionately, until her death at 51 from multiple sclerosis in 2016.
Brennan brings scholarly discipline and an appreciative open mind to her subject’s nonconformist life: her turbulent relationships and complex sexuality, her debilitating illnesses and search for alternative treatments, her travels to a Venezuelan mountaintop and into the Australian bush. All was in service to literature, as Brennan shows in her sensitive reading of award-winning stories and novels, ending with the triumphant Foal’s Bread. – Susan Wyndham
Black and Blue by Veronica Gorrie
Scribe
Black and Blue is the extraordinary kind of memoir that has you laughing and then, in the next paragraph, feeling like all the wind has been taken out of you with shock. Veronica Gorrie tells her story of growing up as a Gunai/Kurnai woman in Australia, and then going on to be a police officer in Brisbane where she witnessed and was the target of personal and structural racism.
Her voice is so clear and sharp it feels at times like she is talking directly to you and she has a unique gift of threading a story with small details and sideways routes that add to the odd charm of the book. It is a story of great resilience but also of great love, in her family and also in her community. – Bridie Jabour
It says something about the past year that the books I found myself most lost in were set among the hippy idealism of the 70s: Allison Gibbs’ Repentance, Jonathan Franzen’s Crossroads (don’t @ me) and Miles Allinson’s In Moonland among them. In Moonland – Allison’s second novel – is a generational saga that begins in modern-day Melbourne, when new father Joe becomes fixated on learning about his dead father Vincent. But the most escapist bits are set in the past: vivid, dreamlike scenes spent with Vincent, who gets lured into the ashram/cult of the magnetic mystic Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (AKA Osho) in India in 1976.
It’s by no means a hopeful read, but it’s beautifully written and took me to another world, another time. Which: yes please. – Steph Harmon
Love Objects by Emily Maguire
Allen and Unwin
The two protagonists of Love Objects are both such kind-hearted but complicated characters, witty and brittle and bruised by the world, that they have stayed with me all year. Nic is cheeky, a bit offbeat, and so full of compassion that it almost hurts. Her niece Lena is feisty but riven with doubt, and entirely unprepared for who and what she encounters in the adult world.
Love Objects is about their relationship, and about family and care – but it’s also about class and how it carries across generations, as well as the choices and outcomes it makes available or closes off, despite our cultural insistence to the contrary. – Fiona Wright
The brilliant intensity of this memoir grabs you by the scruff in its opening pages and doesn’t let go. Novelist Kathryn Heyman takes the reader back to her early 20s when, fleeing a traumatic sexual assault and subsequent court case, finds work as the only female deckhand on a fishing trawler in the wild and stormy Timor Sea. It’s cinematically dramatic, yes, but also measured, as Heyman intersperses her compelling narrative of personal transformation with broader reflections on her childhood, on male violence, class, and the redemptive power of language to describe the world and her place in it.
Along the way she places stepping stones many women will recognise – from everyday insults to serious assaults – all of them rising to a sense of cold, implacable fury that builds throughout. In a lesser writer’s hands it could have been overplayed, but Heyman is meticulous with pacing and structure. – Lucy Clark
Predominantly set in Melbourne – for Tony Birch a place of struggle, grief and violence, but also community, quiet generosity, and kindness – Dark as Last Night gives the reader 16 carefully crafted short stories. Like much of Birch’s oeuvre, central to this collection is the experience of children and the ties that bind siblings. The way love and care is shown contrasts with the difficulties of resolving past hurt and present grief. But at the same time, moments of levity and youthful fun balance out the darkness in Birch’s world.
This is a serious and memorable set of stories from a master of the form. – Joseph Cummins
It was a life-threatening surfing accident that prompted tsunami scientist, Dr Kaya Wilson, to come out as transgender – but bodies don’t tell linear stories and neither does his remarkable memoir. Instead, Wilson considers the things that mark us – death, grief, rage – and what a joy it is to watch his compassionate mind at work. Reviewing Wilson’s book for Guardian Australia, Bec Kavanagh observed: “he writes with an expectation that people can do better, and provides plenty of opportunities for them to do so”. It’s this generosity – this open-hearted trust – that makes As Beautiful As Any Other so potent.
“Once the question of being alive had been answered, I had to figure out how I wanted to live,” Wilson writes. His book invites us to answer that mighty question for ourselves. – Beejay Silcox
An experimental elegy for Anwen Crawford’s late friend, collaborator and fellow activist Ned Sevil, No Document weaves together personal loss with political and artistic commentary. Through these lenses, this polyphonic book-length essay makes a compelling argument for solidarity, resistance and rebellion. Crawford’s background as a zinemaker is evident through her inventive approach here – some pages have only a single line, and some simply an empty box. Part of the experience and pleasure of reading No Document is choosing how to.
Crawford has taken risks with form, and it’s paid off – despite the book’s slim size, it’s expansive in thought and an utterly original work of creative nonfiction. – Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen
The Newcomer by Laura Elizabeth Woollett
Scribe
In her past books, Laura Elizabeth Woollett has dwelled on the actions of “bad men”. In The Newcomer, she turns her gaze from perpetrators to their victims. When a young woman is found murdered in the small community of Fairfolk Island, her mother is distraught. But the deceased wasn’t always easy to like, and her actions in her time on the island mean not many are inclined to delve into her death.
Woollet poses many questions in The Newcomer, including what makes a sympathetic female victim, how grief can consume us, and where the line is drawn between loyalty to a place versus justice for a person. – Zoya Patel
An Australian based in the UK, Ahmed is a founding figure of affect theory, as well as a highly regarded queer and critical race theorist. Complaint! is fueled by intimate experience: in 2016, Ahmed left her post at a British university over its treatment of sexual harassment. Complaint! comprises interviews with forty students, academics, and administrators variously involved with formal complaint procedures, not only around sexual harassment, but sexism, racism, and bullying. The result is a collective intervention full of humour and a sardonic intelligence, as Ahmed describes how sharing class notes is a way to recognise that “an incident, an event, a one-off, has a longer history”.
She concludes by reminding us how a single act of complaint can set off a chain reaction, leading to the creation of collectives for shared experience, shared critique and, ultimately, shared change. – Declan Fry