Some of Australia’s biggest writers published books this month. Here are the best of them

With the furore of gift-giving season right at our feet (I know you’ve seen the mince pies at the supermarket), it’s the best time of year in the book world: October.

It’s a bumper month for releases, as publishers vie to get their titles on every Christmas gift guide and Best Books of 2024 lists (I know you’re already eagerly anticipating ours, coming early December).

This year’s offerings don’t disappoint, with a particularly strong showing from Australian authors. There’s the latest from Voss prize winner Robbie Arnott, this time taking us on a perilous hunt for a puma in the bush. There’s the novel from Emily Maguire that prompted one of our reviewers to remark: “I did not think I could get so excited about ninth-century monks.” And there’s a stark reflection on being a young person in 1980s Melbourne from the Miles-Franklin-winning literary titan, Michelle de Kretser.

They’re just some of the new releases our group of critics — The Book Show’s Claire Nichols and Sarah L’Estrange, The Bookshelf’s Kate Evans, ABC Arts’ Nicola Heath and writer Declan Fry — couldn’t put down this month.

The Burrow by Melanie Cheng

Text Publishing

Rabbits don’t like being held, we learn in The Burrow. As they’re prey animals, being picked up in the wild means they aren’t long for the world. All the characters in this quietly powerful novel are vulnerable, too.

The Burrow opens as Melbourne’s extended lockdown is lifting, and a family of three welcome a pet rabbit — a mini lop — into their home. Introducing such a fragile creature into their midst is a risk for parents Amy and Jin, as they’ve already lost their baby, Ruby, and they worry about the impact on their eldest daughter, Lucie, if the pet were to perish too.

The circumstances of Ruby’s death are revealed as the story unfolds, but this loss hangs over all the interactions between the family members, isolated from each other in their private grief.

Another visitor, Amy’s mother Pauline, exerts a different kind of force on the family. Pauline was connected to the baby’s death (although not responsible) and after an accident, is forced to convalesce in Amy and Jin’s unfinished Granny flat; her presence a reminder of what’s been lost.

Loneliness and connection are twin interests of award-winning, Melbourne GP-turned-writer Melanie Cheng. Her debut collection of short stories, Australia Day, explored characters adrift and aching for meaning. Her second book, Room for a Stranger, is about a 70-year-old woman who takes in an overseas student as a boarder to feel safer in her home.

From the alternating perspectives of Amy, Jin and Lucie, we learn the different wounds each is living with.

Animals also have an important, yet undefined role in Cheng’s work (a parrot was a key figure in Room for a Stranger). The reader will determine whether the mini lop in The Burrow is a catalyst for change or a silent observer of their evolving relationships.

This novel is about ordinary people dealing with extraordinary suffering; Cheng handles them with sympathy and compassion, like you would a delicate mini lop.

— Sarah L’Estrange

Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst

Pan Macmillan

The usual shorthand for the work of poet, novelist and translator Alan Hollinghurst is to say that he chronicles gay lives in England. And he does: but we could also say that he chronicles England, and all lives, with a great sweep on the one hand and with beautiful heart-stopping sentences on the other.

Our Evenings tracks the life of Dave Win from his teenage years in the 1960s through the next 50 years of his life, deliberately leapfrogging most of the 1980s. Win has a white English mother — the extraordinary Avril, a dressmaker, whose own life and loves play a significant role in the book — and has never met his Burmese father.

He is an English boy in a small regional town, who confounds that same England as a person of colour, putting whiteness to the test as a schoolboy impersonating Jeeves, as an adult actor playing Shakespeare, as a person daring to walk down the street.

He was a clever boy, who won a scholarship to a private school, where he met his lifelong patrons. His life is haunted throughout the book by his benefactor’s son, Giles, who becomes an odious politician slashing the arts, and later a Brexiteer, ‘tearing up our future and our hopes’.

From an education that both shaped and confined him; to desire and his relationships with men; to a love of words and performance and language; to an unconventional family that nurtured him; and a whole series of set pieces that can be excruciating and funny and moving all at once, this is a book that manages to bounce through a life and play elegantly with time, revealing it in both lingering scenes and flashing moments of stillness.

Twenty years ago, Hollinghurst won the Booker Prize for his fourth novel, The Line of Beauty. My prediction? His seventh novel on the Booker shortlist, at the very least.

— Kate Evans

Theory & Practice by Michelle de Kretser

Text Publishing

The latest offering from two-time Miles Franklin winner Michelle de Kretser opens with a sleight of hand, a shaggy dog story that is revealed to be the beginnings of her stalled new novel. The refusal of de Kretser’s narrative to elaborate itself, however, provides another opportunity: an exploration of 1980s Melbourne, and the gaps between theoretical reckoning and artistic practice.

De Kretser’s unnamed 24-year-old, Sri-Lankan-born narrator has just moved to the city from Sydney, pursuing a thesis about her favourite author, Virginia Woolf. But her graduate student life is accompanied by emotional ruptures — transitions that remind her of the “morbid symptoms” Italian philosopher Gramsci speculated about taking place during periods of transformation.

Living in St Kilda, the narrator struggles with the airless cerebral antics of late-20th century academic “Theory”, which leads her to favour the “creative-destructive energies” of art, capable of sustaining her imagination when the “corset of Theory” cannot.

Reminiscent of Christos Tsiolkas’s Seven and a Half in its reflections upon formative experiences, Theory & Practice combines fictional techniques with romantic, intellectual and political memoir, in roughly that order.

Shame also haunts her memories: over the attachment to her mother, from whom she regularly receives guilt-inducing letters; of being molested by a British piano examiner in Sri Lanka in the 70s; over devoting herself to Woolf, an author who discounts the interior lives of the “mahogany-coloured wretch” — such as Ceylonese activist EW Perera — as if they were non-existent.

Father figures are also a source of occasional shame, but “Mother” looms larger. As well as her formative literary influences (Woolfmother!), there’s the figure of the Other Woman: the mysterious, haunted Olivia, with whom the narrator competes for the romantic affections of fellow postgraduate Kit (think Sabrina Carpenter’s Taste). But the hardest Mother to face, the narrator realises, is oneself.

Reflecting on youthful passions from a vantage point youth could not foresee, de Kretser’s book examines the lessons that attend age and time. Small coincidences and sounds — like the names of the people in the narrator’s circle, as well as those of the people she studies — take on strange, uncanny resonances, as though everything were imbued with a meaning that required time to reveal itself.

Theory and Practice is a novel about how, regardless of whether Mother writes back, or whether any form of historical or semi-biographical novel has a point, it remains necessary to appreciate that “it was writing the letter that mattered”.

The book’s final quarter is intensely moving, offering a startling reassessment of everything preceding it. As de Krester writes: “Many years had to pass before I’d realise that life isn’t about wishes coming true but about the slow revelation of what we really wished.”

— Declan Fry

Dusk by Robbie Arnott

Pan Macmillan

If Tim Winton is the master of writing Australian landscapes, Robbie Arnott is surely his heir apparent. In Dusk, Robbie paints a so-cold-you-can-feel-it Australian vista of ancient trees, snow drifts, craggy mountains and, most strikingly, giant white-bleached bones, standing sentinel.

It’s a haunting landscape, and the perfect setting for a monster story.

Twins Iris and Floyd — the children of escaped convicts — come to the highlands in an act of desperation. They’ve heard there’s a reward available for the capture of a wild puma, which has been terrorising the landscape. We learn that previous settlers released pumas in to the wild in the hope they would hunt herds of deer (another species introduced, in folly).

Dusk, as she has been named, is the last big cat left. She once hunted sheep but her sights have shifted to the shepherds who watch them, and the hunters that have come after her. Several men have died and graziers are desperate for the puma to be killed.

Iris and Floyd don’t have a gun, or a plan — but they have tenacity. The pair, who are in their late 30s, have lived a hard-scrabble life, ostracised by society due to their outlaw parents. The siblings complement and rely on each other, admire each other’s strengths and care for each other, but it’s not all easy. Iris, the key character in the story, loves her brother but bristles against her ties to him, quietly yearning for independence. The pair bicker and betray, and there’s a lot to love about their easy ability to fight and forgive.

I was a huge fan of Arnott’s last book, Limberlost. In Dusk, there’s another wild animal to be feared and admired, another landscape that creeps into the soul, and another unforgettable sibling pair. Robbie Arnott knows what he’s doing — and he does it so well.

— Claire Nichols

Chinese Postman by Brian Castro

Giramondo

From his home in the Adelaide Hills, Abraham “Abe” Quin — 73, childless, three-time divorcée, esteemed Jewish-Chinese author, one-time postman and professor, and now carer for three dogs — recalls the past and reflects upon the present in this, Brian Castro’s 11th novel.

Reclusive Quin strikes up a correspondence with Iryna Zarębina, a woman besieged by the war in Ukraine. Part of him wonders if Iryna might prove to be a source of life — if not love — in his twilight years. Their epistolary relationship eventually sees Quin seek to sponsor Iryna and her child to come to Australia.

Quin’s narrative voice is ironic, aggrieved, caught in a miasma of memory and uncertain withdrawal, from which Iryna’s letters call him back.

In a series of fragments, Quin regales the reader with his charmingly unsunny temperament, finding more comfort in the “exacting greyness” of grim German prose than in any committedly “sunny Australian” disposition. Since childhood, he has been isolated, a man weary with life yet equally unamused by death and its friends: the apparent end of social relevance, sexual attractiveness, enforced social isolation, and numerous other unelected privations.

The paradox, for Quin, is that he lives in hope of connection, although he has often struggled with human relations.

His narrative cycles through first, second and third person, present and past tense, sometimes within the same passage. Doing the police in different voices, he prods and probes his personal history: frozen anxieties, “time-capsule sickness”, his parents’ experiences of war and migration. He grieves everything from the loss of a pet dog to the rapid-fire communications of social media (as an author’s note for the novel sardonically puts it, “These days the internet has […] eliminated the hazards of misreading.”).

Castro’s father, “a great letter-writer” and Herzogian figure (“He wrote letters to the editors of newspapers, to lovers, to business clients, to President Jimmy Carter. Some of them replied”) appears as a partial source of inspiration for the character.

Castro’s fiction is cerebral, and Chinese Postman is no exception. Yet there is an emotional frankness here, by turns droll and fond — not exactly self-mocking but by no means immune to the possibility.

With nebbish, neurotic Abe Quin at the helm — hung up on blondes, subtly haunted by anger and scatological obsessions, weary of the perils of introspection (“Reflective glass is a dangerous thing. People, like birds, fly into it and are concussed”) — Chinese Postman is a strange, bewitching novel, full of saudade.

— Declan Fry

The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich

Hachette

Why a guardian angel would spend so much time protecting the deeply annoying character of Gary Geist is anybody’s guess — but in the hands of Native-American writer Louise Erdrich, you know you will find out.

Erdrich is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, part of the Ojibwe nation, and many characters in her 19 novels share that heritage (not Gary, by the way), as well as sharing working class lives and stories and struggles.

In The Mighty Red — named for the Red River Valley of North Dakota — Crystal and her daughter Kismet live that history, with their hands that are like ‘tough paws’, on land that is full of bones, be they from buffalo or ancestors. Crystal drives a truck, hauling sugar beets to and fro; Kismet is a clever goth teenager, and might just escape the confines of that town, were she not being wooed by Gary, whose family owns the sugar beet farm.

We care deeply about this young woman and her mother, and what might happen to them, as Erdrich builds around them an entire community — of characters and dramas; gossip and backstory; used bookshops and love stories; terrible tragedies and financial despair; even a heist story, complete with disguises and unlikely escapes.

Beneath it all, there’s the land and its stories: worked dry, drenched with chemicals, occasionally spitting out a hint of the past. Where are the insects and the birds that once swooped by at sunset? Can they be lured back? And what of those spirits and other forces that might just swoop by on beams of light, too? The ghosts and stories and trickster spirits?

There is always a touch of magic to Erdrich’s writing, lightly held, hinting at other forms of narrative, ancient ways of telling stories, wreathing around us like smoke. As always, she’s worth breathing in.

— Kate Evans

Rapture by Emily Maguire

Allen & Unwin

Rapture opens in the Frankish town of Mainz (now in Germany), in the year 821. Agnes is the daughter of a local cleric known as the English Priest, an influential man of letters whose table draws prominent men from the town and beyond, who come to debate the issues of the day.

The young Agnes — named after a saint who died a virgin martyr — likes to sit under this table, among the mud-encrusted boots, while the men hold forth.

Their talk of heaven means little to a “motherless five-year-old” whose life is simple yet satisfactory: She has plenty of food to eat, sleeps in a warm bed by the fire each night and spends her days running free through the countryside.

Unusually for the time, Agnes’s father teaches her to read, and she soon begins to chafe under the era’s repressive social mores. As a young woman, she is traumatised by the visceral experience of witnessing a birth, which neither mother nor baby survives. She sees that marriage and childbirth amount to a death sentence, and decides neither is for her.

Instead, Agnes takes a very different path. Disguised as a monk, she flees Mainz in the company of a young Benedictine, a scholarly man and a regular visitor to the English Priest’s home. Their journey takes them first to Fulda Abbey, a Benedictine stronghold, and then across Europe. All the while, the erudite Agnes — known as Brother John — struggles to balance earthly desire with the life of the mind and spirit.

While I’ll always have a soft spot for contemporary sad girl novels, there is an undeniable escapist joy in being transported to a world so different to the present. In Rapture, Emily Maguire — whose 2016 novel, An Isolated Incident, was shortlisted for the Stella Prize and the Miles Franklin — explores ideas of gender, sexuality and faith as she takes us on a fascinating journey through Europe in the Middle Ages, from the grim and austere life in a Benedictine abbey to the sumptuous papal palaces of Rome.

As a work of both research and imagination, Rapture is impossible to fault — and impossible to put down. The end will leave you gasping.

— Nicola Heath

Speak / Stop by Noémi Lefebvre (translated by Sophie Lewis)

Transit Books

Speak / Stop opens with a flurry of voices, a chorus — although a chorus of exactly how many voices is unclear: it could be one, it could be hundreds.

It’s the third novel to appear in English from French writer Noémi Lefebvre, whose Blue Self-Portrait was one of the best — and strangest — books I read in 2018.

Animated by playful wordplay and rapport, the chorus exude a kind of middlebrow familiarity with Capital-C culture: Rousseau; Brahms; Proust (although contemporary French-Malian music superstar Ayu Nakamura gets a nod, too.) They are endlessly distressed, prone to status anxieties and free-floating concerns like planetary warming, ideological confusion and bee population decline. Terrified by consumer and surveillance capitalism yet apparently resigned to them, the chorus reflects the “paranoid self-control” that middle class social advancement demands.

This initial choral section, entitled “Speak”, is followed by a postface, “Stop”, offering an authorial reflection and commentary on its predecessor. Bordered by footnotes that are often as detailed as the text they elaborate upon, two of Lefebvre’s recurring themes come to the fore here: the relationship between work and freedom, and the meaning of artistic creation.

Lefebvre’s approach is intellectual but unpretentious. Her pugnacious prose is consistently delightful. It’s beautiful to see Lefebvre bravely critique some of the realities of the publishing and cultural industries, not to mention offering a few hilarious asides along the way:

“I detested Flaubert […] his habit of speaking for women, which gave me no wish to become one; their pulpy tales of masked balls and romance were ultra-idiotic […] and nothing to do with my girlfriends in Rouen, my type who ran around on mopeds, played football in bars, and smoked unfiltered Gauloises at family gatherings.”

Using cultural criticism and fiction to further the possibilities of both, this is another rapturous work from Lefebvre, allergic to cliche and lazy thinking alike.

— Declan Fry

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