The Stella Prize 2015 shortlist has been announced. I’m always busting to see what’s included on a shortlist but this time even more so because I’ve signed up for the Stella Shortlist Book Club. You should join as well (if you’re at a loose end over the next six weeks…). Continue reading
On the back of Tsiolkas’s Barracuda and Pung’s Laurinda (both ‘fictional’) comes Rebecca Starford’s memoir, Bad Behaviour.
Starford recounts her year (at age 14) spent at a school in the bush where she lived in a house with 16 other girls. During her year, Starford experiences bullying (as both a receiver and an instigator) and uses her memoir as a means to explore how this ‘bad behaviour’ impacted her adult relationships.
“…what bothered me the most were all the gaps in the diary. So many things had been left out entirely – arguments, sadness, misbehaviour. On these pages I’d instead pasted in photographs from hikes, to make it look like something else had happened. What, I wondered, was I trying to forget?” Continue reading
‘Out past the shallows, past the sandy-bottomed bays, comes the dark water — black and cold and roaring. Rolling out an invisible path …’
When I reviewed Favel Parrett’s second book, When the Night Comes, I made mention of the fact that Parrett understands many things, including water, very deeply. Her debut novel, Past the Shallows, is about the ocean, brothers and grief, and again, it was her delicate and careful observations that wedged a firm spot in my mind and heart.
In brief, it’s the story of two young brothers, Harry and Miles, who live with their father, an abalone fisherman, on the south-east coast of Tasmania. Their mother is dead and the boys are at the mercy of their father’s dark and violent moods. Continue reading
Here’s the thing with chick-lit and lad-lit: it’s not about the ending, it’s about how the author gets you there. Because really, you pretty much know what’s going to happen within the first few chapters (there are rare exceptions to this rule – David Nicholl’s One Day comes to mind). What you want from your story is humour and an emotional conundrum or two.
Debra Oswald (of Offspring-screenwriting fame) takes you on particularly interesting journey involving organ donation, suicide attempts, a one-eyed dog, pub bands and asbestos removal in her novel, Useful.
Specifically, it tells the story of Sullivan Moss who is in equal parts a charming underachiever, unreliable, thoughtless and a spectacularly crap friend. He decides to do one ‘useful’ thing – donate a kidney to a stranger – and in the process gets a job, sobers up and makes new friends, including radio producer Natalie and her son Louis. I don’t need to tell you much more about the plot short of saying that Oswald adds a few lively twists and turns that ensures the focus is not entirely on Sullivan. Continue reading
I was pleased to open the 2015 reading account with Laurinda by Alice Pung.
Laurinda is the story of Lucy Lam, Chinese-born, but raised for the most part in Australia. Lucy’s parents speak very little English and work extremely hard for minimum (or less) wage. Lucy wins an ‘Equal Access Scholarship’ to the exclusive Laurinda College, an independent school for girls in Melbourne*. Continue reading