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Posted by: Lisa Hill | February 11, 2026

The Gowkaran Tree in the Middle of Our Kitchen (2025), by Shokoofeh Azar, translation anonymous

One day in the future, our bloody dance will continue in the free and joyous laughter of our children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, even when we are forgotten. (p.513)

It is hard to read these final lines of Shokoofeh Azar’s magnificent new novel The Gowkaran Tree in the Middle of Our Kitchen, right now when it appears that the theocratic regime has crushed the protests that began in December 2025, with a death toll of at least 3000 according to official sources, and somewhere between 6000 and 25000 according to reports that are unverifiable due to the internet blackout imposed by the regime. America, which promised help to the protestors, is instead now ‘in talks’ which appear to be more about Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Freedom for the Iranian people seems a long way away at the moment, and my heart goes out to the diaspora who do not even know the fate of their loved ones.

And this week Nobel Peace Prize winner Narges Mohammadi who campaigns for women’s rights, has been sentenced to six more years in prison. It is hard not to feel despair about the intransigence of this evil regime.

And yet, I finished reading The Gowarkan Tree in the Middle of Our Kitchen with hope in my heart.

Shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, Shokoofeh’s novel sets the scene for these events. It’s an historical novel, but not as you know it. Fabulous events (somewhat like those in Rushdie or Marquez) occur alongside the story of a large and dynamic family, who live in a large mansion in the provinces from the waning years of the Shah to the Iranian Revolution (1979) and the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988). The spirits (and the machinations) of people long dead are the voices of the silenced, and they are there in the novel to show that they will not be forgotten.

The family’s mission is to keep alive ancient Iranian culture, traditions and artefacts despite the encroaching imposition of Islam, which in fundamentalist Iran and elsewhere tolerates no other religions. As Zoroastrians, believers in an ancient monotheistic religion, they are the guardians of the sacred fire, and it is their ethical responsibility to protect books and artefacts from seizure by the Revolutionary Guards. You know of this religion’s prophet if you recognise Richard Strauss’s tone poem, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Op 30,(1896).

Detail from Raphael’s The School of Athens, 1511

After I’d read the book, I found that clicking on this link at the BBC enriched my understanding of some aspects of the novel such as the significance of birds in burial traditions and the power of the Ball of Light, given by the matriarch Khanom Joon to Shokoofeh when she sets out on her perilous journey to find her brother Mehrab, missing in the war. Aunty Malek, who is only sane when she sees the need, gives her a centuries old jade stone, and I learned about pre-Islamic jade and its power to ward off the evil-eye and ensure victory for its wearer here. Not that it matters, this is the kind of novel where strange things happen and don’t immediately make sense. Shokoofeh uses magic realism, mythic texts and ancient Iranian lore to develop her theme of celebrating the culture and artistic beauty of Iran and the necessity to confront the imposition of authoritarian power. There are some explanatory footnotes but the wise reader leaves Google alone and just reads on.

(It is helpful, however, to jot down the names of the characters as they emerge, to form a family tree.)

Trees, BTW, are significant in the novel, and not just the Gowkaran tree that emerges in the middle of the kitchen. It is a symbol of permanence, rooted in the country’s soil and nurtured by an indefatigable family. Its diverse fruits and birds represent luxuriant life, and opportunity. (One of the siblings climbs its branches to a future that no one can see.)

#Digression: Oh. Oh no! I had almost finished this review yesterday, and all that was needed was to prune it a bit because it was too long, but I did not want WordPress to do it for me and chew up more than half of it! I suspect that the changes they have made to access the Classic editor, means that it no longer automatically saves changes to a draft, which could be accessed using the Revisions feature. So a momentary loss of power because of a thunderstorm means that hours of work can disappear. Forever.

#DeepBreath. #FirstWorldProblem. #Moving on…

Narrators come and go as the years pass, but the voice that emerges is a strong female voice. Even when she is just a teenager mulling over the mysteries of love, her voice is confident, determined, and impressive. She has a mind of her own and some very forceful opinions, and while others struggle with the dilemma between resistance and capitulation, she has no hesitation in rejecting injustice. At school, she refuses to obey the command to reject a girl of the Baha’i faith despite the principal’s firm order that nobody was to shake Monireh’s hand, play with her, or talk to her, because she was unclean. And like Monireh, when she’s had enough, she leaves.

For some time I had been experiencing an emotion that was novel to me. The ten-day nervous madness had abated but had given way to something more deadly: disgust. Disgust for school. Disgust for my classmates. Disgust for the streets. Disgust for Behnam.* Disgust for the television, the radio, the newspapers. (p.192)

*Behnam is the young man she fancies, but like many who were opposed to the corruption of the Shah, he supported the revolution. He believed it would lead to a better, fairer and socialist society. What he was not expecting was that a pro-Western secular monarchy would be replaced by an anti-Western theocracy dedicated to the destruction of Israel and determined to enforce Shi’ite political ascendancy and Sharia Law. Shokoofeh helps Behnam to smuggle dissenters across the border to the USSR, but she doesn’t agree with his political opinions, and not just because her parents as ‘capitalists’ would lose everything they have. It’s because of her family’s role as guardians of Iran’s ancient history and culture.

Restrictions under the Islamic regime pile up. Even as a young woman she chafes under the intolerance towards all other religions including Zoroastrianism. As I showed in a Sensational Snippet last week, the dress code is unbearable. ‘Divine justice’ means mass public executions, and there are book burnings to stamp out any autonomous thought. What she hates most of all is the ugliness of it all: the grey buildings devoid of colour and imagination; the women shrouded in black chadors, never allowed on the streets except in the company of a male relative; the men screeching ‘Death to America’ and ‘Death to Israel’ and old men in beards justifying their isolation from the rest of the world. She wants colour and light and music and beauty, and she decided that she will focus only on that.

I would walk in the forest and repeat to myself, ‘I am only eighteen. I am only eighteen and I want to live happy and free. That’s it. I shouldn’t have to feel guilty without reason. I should not let the laws of the Sharia that are served up to me and us all day and night on radio and TV penetrate my body and soul and thought. My body depends on me. I organise my own thoughts.’

<snip>

I must not surrender to the uglinesses and narrow-minded laws and bad news. I promised myself that I would not allow fear and sorrow and despair — in short, the common culture of those days — to penetrate me. All of a sudden I would shout in a loud voice, ‘My duty is to be joyful.’ (p.204)

But for Azedah, Uncle Bijan’s only daughter, it is also a duty to bear witness. And when in later years she becomes a journalist, she sends copies of a cassette tape to exiles in Europe as evidence of the crimes carried out by this regime, in the hope that one day an international court would condemn them. [Indeed. That would be something to see…]

However, the time comes when staying at home celebrating beauty has to come to an end. Brother Mehrab went off to fight in the Iran-Iraq War, and in Book 2, when he is missing, she goes to find him. There are some very confronting scenes in this second part of the novel, but they should not come as a shock when we know how violent the regime is, and how laws that oppress women do nothing to protect them from hypocritical male assault and state-sanctioned violence. Any woman alone is fair game, and though the author imagines a fellowship of women offering comfort and a punitive role for the Ball of Light, these scenes are hard to read.

Still, there are also scenes of great beauty and it is fascinating to learn about Iran’s ancient achievements. Eblis, a character from ancient lore, is like a sort of fairy godmother, who prays to the earth and food and wine appear. She conjures up a time before the Arabic colonisation of Persia, when the ancient Iranians invented scripts for all sorts of different purposes — one that was exclusively for recording the sounds of nature, animals, birds, rain and streams; another that was for correspondence between kings, one for science and philosophy and another for religious texts.

I thought of how, despite all these lost sources of pride, being Iranian was still a great reason to feel proud. As usual she read my mind, and said something I have never forgotten. ‘All the same, bear in mind: you are Iranian with what you build, not with what you have lost.’ (p.289).

I loved The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree, and I love The Gowkaran Tree in the Middle of Our Kitchen even more. Yes, it’s long, and it’s complicated, and it’s demanding, but it is magnificent.

Author: Shokoofeh Azar
Title: The Gowkaran Tree in the Middle of Our Kitchen
Translation from the Farsi: anonymous, for security reasons
Publisher: Europa Editions, 2025
Cover design: Ginevra Rapisardi
Cover image: detail of a painting by Shokoofeh Azar
ISBN: 9781787706040, pbk., 513 pages
Source: Kingston Library

I read books from Indie publishers all the time but I read this book at this time for
Kaggsy’s #ReadIndies Reading Independent Publishers Month.

Europa Editions are an indie publishing company based in New York.

Image credits:

The School of Athens by Raphael, 1511: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_School_of_Athens#/media/File:%22The_School_of_Athens%22_by_Raffaello_Sanzio_da_Urbino.jpg

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Posted in 21st century, ANZHistFic, Aust 2025, AUSTRALIAN AUTHORS, Australian authors, AZAR Shokoofeh, BOOK REVIEWS, C21st by Aust women, Doorstoppers (450 pages+), FICTION — AUSTRALIAN, Historical Fiction, Iran (settings), Iranian authors, LOTEs within Australia, Magic realism, Read in 2026, Resistance, Set overseas, Translations, Victorian authors, WIT (Women in Translation) | Tags: #ReadIndies, BOOK REVIEWS, Shokoofeh Azar, The Gowkaran Tree in the Middle of Our Kitchen, Translations, Women in Translation

Posted by: Lisa Hill | February 8, 2026

Escape from Communist Hungary (2013) by Zsuzsanna Bozzay

It’s Hungarian Lit Month, hosted by Stu from Winston’s Dad and although I’ve read a few books from Hungary, I didn’t have anything on the TBR. So I explored the lists at Goodreads, and found Escape from Communist Hungary (2013) by Zsuzsanna Bozzay and (after a lot of mucking about with the download), I was able to acquire a copy using the Kindle Unlimited subscription that I intend to ditch the day before the trial expires. It really is a dead loss, because the range is so limited, and the majority of them are self-published.

Anyway…

Escape from Communist Hungary is a self-published memoir by a refugee who managed to escape with her mother Mimi during the failed 1956 Hungarian Revolution. The Cold War politics of this revolution is known to many Australians because it took place shortly before the 1956 Melbourne Olympics. Although the Melbourne Olympics were marketed as ‘the friendly Olympics’, it became infamous for the ‘Blood in the Water’ water-polo semi-final between the Soviets and Hungary. To the approval of the crowd, Hungary defeated the USSR 4-0 in what was a brutal match, and there literally was blood in the water when one of the Soviets punched one of the Hungarians in the final minutes of the game.

With some similarities to the recent uprising against an oppressive government in Iran, the Hungarian Revolution had been crushed by Soviet tanks and troops and thousands were killed. Among the quarter of a million Hungarians who fled the country were Zsuzsanna Bozzay and her mother.

The memoir begins with a brief recapitulation of Hungary’s postwar history when it became part of the Soviet buffer zone, as agreed at the Yalta Conference by Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin. Bozzay refers to this as Hungary once again [being] punished for being on the wrong side of the war, without acknowledging that being ‘on the wrong side’, in WW2, meant being complicit in one of those most evil regimes in history.

Wikipedia’s page about Hungary during WW2 explains that Hungary entered the war as an Axis Power in 1941, and fought on the eastern front for two years. In 1943 when it became obvious that the Germans were losing the war, Hungary attempted to forge a secret peace deal with the Allies, but when Germany learned about this in 1944, they occupied Hungary, and installed a puppet government. Later in the book, Bozzay makes a scanty reference to this abortive peace deal with the Allies in the context of her friendship with an aristocratic family who had connections with one of the negotiators.

Although the title suggests a book about the evils of communism in Hungary and why one would want to escape it, some historical context would have made this a better book. For example, to put food shortages in context, and to clarify what is meant by ‘life returning to normal’ it would have been helpful if the memoir noted that while postwar reconstruction was funded in Western Europe by the Marshall Plan, Hungary (however unwillingly) was part of the eastern bloc and therefore not eligible. According to Wikipedia:

The Soviet Union had been as badly affected as any other part of the world by the war. The Soviets imposed large reparations payments on the Axis allies that were in its sphere of influence. Austria, Finland, Hungary, Romania, and especially East Germany were forced to pay vast sums and ship large amounts of supplies to the Soviet Union. Those reparation payments meant the Soviet Union itself received about the same as 16 European countries received in total from Marshall Plan aid.

Born in 1941, Bozzay would of course have been only a child at the time, preoccupied by school and ballet lessons and so on, but as an adult writing this memoir in 2013 after completing a Creative Writing course at the Open University, she might be expected to provide some explanatory details for a 21st century English-speaking audience who probably know little about Hungary’s war and its postwar period. It’s not readers who should have to do the research!

The war left Hungary devastated, destroying over 60% of the economy and causing significant loss of life. In addition to the over 600,000 Hungarian Jews killed, as many as 280,000 other Hungarians were raped, murdered and executed or deported for slave labour. After German occupation, Hungary participated in the Holocaust, deporting nearly 440,000 Jews, mainly to Auschwitz; nearly all of them were murdered. The Horthy government’s complicity in the Holocaust remains a point of controversy and contention. (See Wikipedia’s Hungary/history page.)

Bozzay’s mother Mimi had Jewish relations who perished in the Holocaust except for her brother Feri who survived in time to be liberated from a concentration camp by the Soviets, though Bozzay doesn’t name which one it was, and seems to have little to say about her mother’s trauma.

Anyway, moving on…

The memoir details the oppression of the Soviets, determined to replace a postwar coalition government with communists in power.

It took two years to achieve their aim by starting a reign of terror; deporting, imprisoning and executing leaders of the opposition as well as ordinary people. My father’s brother was imprisoned for political activities with the Smallholders Party and held in the headquarters of the secret police, the AVO on Andrássy út 60, which is now the Terror House, a museum and memorial for the victims of communism who were tortured and died there. My mother had a cousin who was a high ranking communist official there and she persuaded him to release her brother-in-law. Later this cousin committed suicide when he realised that communism was not what he thought it was.

People had to be careful of what they said in public places in case they were accused of being anti-communist and thrown into prison. We were frightened if there was a knock at the door, especially late at night in case it was the secret police. If we happened to be listening to the BBC we not only switched off the radio, but we also changed to a different station, because listening to western radio was punishable and could result in a prison sentence. But we knew that the only reliable source of news came from the BBC World Service. People could be imprisoned for no apparent reason, maybe because someone with a grudge against them accused them of being ‘enemies of the people’ and that was enough for the secret police to call and take them away. (p. 7)

Her parents’ first attempt to escape was in 1949.

The only way to get out of Hungary was to walk through the border illegally which was very dangerous, especially crossing into Austria in the west where the border was well guarded. But apparently it was easier to cross from Czechoslovakia into Austria. The border between Hungary and Czechoslovakia was not especially well guarded in the east, close to the Ukrainian border, as most people did not think of crossing there from one communist country into another. (p.8)

Their plans included a failed attempt to send treasured possessions to England with friends, and this sequence reveals one of the dilemmas faced by refugees. Apart from the problem of leaving financial assets behind, most people have property that has sentimental value too, and Bozzay’s tells us that her parents were in dispute about this. Her mother thought that possessions can be replaced but her father felt differently about pieces of furniture that were family heirlooms.

I had to grit my teeth when reading the casual way in which Bozzay recounts moving into a furnished flat that once belonged to a friend called Serényi Aranka, a Jewish lady, who left for London before the war. No mention of the reasons why she might have left: no mention of the Horthy government’s pre-war oppressive laws that excluded Jews from almost all aspects of everyday life. Some of these are briefly mentioned later in passing in the backstory about her mother, but there should have been an explanation in this part of the book where it is relevant.

Bozzay seems to lionise her mother as the hero of this family history, and she accepts what she has been told at face value. She states that Mimi would have liked to emigrate to Israel but was frustrated by the requirement to be able to speak Hebrew. This is not obviously not correct because it would have denied Holocaust survivors from migrating, even if they could read it as a sacred language. There was then and still is a Right of Return for all Jews in the diaspora, regardless of language proficiency in Hebrew.

Whatever, that plan was abandoned for reasons Bozzay hints at, i.e. her parents’ differences about wanting to leave Hungary:

It takes a very special kind of person to leave all their possessions behind and move to a new country but she was not frightened by the prospect. It took all her powers of persuasion to convince my father of her plan. He was a staunch Hungarian, with very deep roots in Hungarian culture, had no talent for languages and found it hard to imagine living anywhere else, but eventually she had her way as she always did. (p. 13).

The chapter about the first escape attempt when Bozzay was eight details the plan for her parents to leave separately, the journey through Czechoslovakia, their capture near the border with Austria, and — reading between the lines — the somewhat naïve trust in a people smuggler. Her mother was imprisoned only for a couple of months because she had a convincing story about wanting to leave her husband after a row, but in the interim Bozzay was placed in an orphanage until her father could collect her, and there she caught polio.

From here, the narrative becomes more of a family history, obviously drawn from her mother’s memories, and some of it is repetitive. The chronology breaks to provide the back story of Bozzay’s grandparents, and her paternal grandmother’s opposition to her son marrying a Jew. It covers her mother’s brief sojourn in Paris in more nostalgic depth than it needed to be, and then Mimi’s dutiful return to Budapest to look after her ailing parents. It goes on to cover her parents’ marriage and some happy childhood memories of her father, but it also includes her childhood memories of the battle for Budapest and the vicious behaviour of their Russian liberators. Any euphoria about the end of the war was short-lived.

The narrative then switches back to Bozzay’s experience as a victim of polio, and her mother’s remarkable efforts to help with her rehabilitation, supplemented by a physiotherapist who had trained in the USA under Sister Kenny.

Bozzay was fifteen when the Hungarian Revolution broke out, and her vivid memories of it are the best part of this memoir. But optimism evaporated as the tanks rolled in and once again it was Bozzay’s mother who had the foresight to take advantage of the chaos to flee. Again leaving her father behind, they managed to cross the border into Austria and to seek asylum at the British Embassy.

In England they were taken in by Mimi’s brother Raoul and his wife, and despite communication difficulties because Bozzay had refused to learn English at school, she soon became friends with her cousins. The usual adjustment problems were exacerbated by the Hungarians’ complete ignorance about British life and the privations suffered during the war. But her mother’s multilingualism meant that she soon found good work and (having fudged her birth year on official documents) was able to keep working until she was 75.

Meanwhile Bozzay herself went to a convent where she received a very good education and went on to make a success of her life. She gained a degree in Chemistry at London University where she met her husband Michael Snarey and went on to have a career in teaching while raising their family, followed by a second career in chiropody.

All through this book, which privileges Bozzay’s mother’s point-of-view, I kept wondering what had happened to Bozzay’s father because I knew from other sources that the Soviets severely punished the relations of those who left illegally. Though late in the book we learn that after six years he was eventually given permission to be reunited with his wife and daughter, and that despite not knowing English he was able to get a job, there is nothing about his experiences during the separation or his feelings about his new life in Britain.

I’ve been hard on this book because I was disappointed by the inadequate editing, the failure to consider its audience, and its over-reliance on a selective family history at the expense of the expectations I had from its title.

Author: Zsuzsanna Bozzay
Title: Escape from Communist Hungary
Publisher: Self-published
ASIN: B07NCBRZQS
Purchased for the Kindle from Amazon.

You can find out more about Zsuzsanna Bozzay from her profile at the Open University here.

18 Comments

Posted in 21st century, BOOK REVIEWS, eBooks, Memoir, NONFICTION, Purchased, Read in 2026, War, armed conflict & its aftermath | Tags: BOOK REVIEWS, Escape from Communist Hungary, Hungarian Lit Month, Zsuzsanna Bozzay

Posted by: Lisa Hill | February 7, 2026

Six Degrees of Separation, from Flashlight…

It doesn’t often happen but for once I have read the starter book for #6Degrees, hosted by Kate at Books are My Favourite and Best. Flashlight, by Susan Choi was nominated for the Booker and I reviewed it here. Flashlight features a father who disappears in mysterious circumstances, so I could start the #6degrees chain with any one of countless books featuring lost family members, though few would have an explanation as strange as in Choi’s novel. However…

Sometimes this trope can be inverted to explore other aspects of modern life, as Gail Jones did in The Name of the Sister, (2025) where a person not known to be missing is found. As I wrote in my review…

The Unknown Woman given the placeholder name of ‘Jane Doe‘, is found in the Outback, not lost. Hers is an appearance, not a disappearance. But she is a mystery because she cannot speak. She can’t be identified, and authorities don’t know what trauma lies behind her emergence onto the road, where Terry Williams (known as Tezza to his mates), almost ran her down. Angie, the freelance journalist, is interested in approaching the story from a different angle. She wants to explore the stories of people who ring Crime Stoppers, people who are convinced that ‘Jane’ is a long-lost loved one.

Philip Salom ventured into this territory with his novel The Fifth Season (2020). Jack is a writer who has rented a getaway so that he can work on his book, but he’s not keen on the fussy décor put in place by his host Sarah.

Jack’s project is a book about ‘found people’: the So merton Man, the Gippsland Man, the Isdal Woman, the Piano Man, Cornelia Rau. All people who are found dead or amnesiac — their identities unknown by accident or design. But in one of a series of eerie correspondences, Sarah is an activist in search of missing people, and her life is consumed by the absence of her sister. She paints massive portraits of Alice in public spaces, along with portraits of other people who are missing, in order to raise awareness of the Missing Persons Advocacy Network (MPAN).

As Salom points out in his novel, not everyone who is missing wants to be found, which reminds me of Why Do Horses Run? (2024) by Cameron Stewart. Ingvar in this novel is so overwhelmed by grief after the death of his daughter that he walks out of his own life and tramps like a modern-day swaggie for three years in the solitude of the Australian bush. He refuses all engagement with other people, including refusing permission for a kindly policeman to tell his wife that he is, at least, alive.

I was troubled by Why Do Horses Run? because I felt for the missing character in the novel: the wife, bereft of her child and then of a husband who might have consoled her in her grief. Alicia Mackenzie’s A Million Aunties (2020) offers a different way of transcending profound personal pain. Her characters are a ‘found’ family, people not related in any way, but who share a loving relationship. This is a novel that asserts that all kinds of grief can be assuaged by the love and affection of others. Successive chapters are narrated by different characters, each of whom has a story to tell. A story of damage and endurance, and a journey towards healing.

Alicia Mackenzie is a Jamaican author and that reminded me of Siena Brown’s Master of My Fate (2019). Born in Jamaica, and raised in Canada, Siena Brown is a multi-talented creative who came to Sydney to graduate from the Australian Film Television and Radio School, and wrote her first novel after discovering the story of William Buchanan. Shortlisted for the 2020 ARA Historical Novel Prize, the novel tells the story of a Jamaican slave who is transported to Australia during the colonial period. It’s a very good example of an historical novel being used to bring ‘hidden history’ to light, and it was IMHO unlucky not to win the ARA Prize.

And that brings me to another example of what I call ‘hidden history’, this time the unforgettable story of Chinongwa (2008, Australian edition 2023), by Lucy Mushita. Mushita, from Zimbabwe, is another creative, who made her way to Australia to gain her Master’s in Creative Writing and reissued her debut novel Chinongwa here. It is a powerful reminder that sentimentalising traditional lifestyles risks obscuring the very real harm done to girls and women in patriarchal societies in Africa and elsewhere.

Next month (March 7, 2026), we start with Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. I know my first link already: books I loved as a teenager but #yawn am underwhelmed by the melodrama as an adult!

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Posted in #6Degrees | Tags: #6Degrees

Posted by: Lisa Hill | February 6, 2026

The Last Living Cannibal (2025), by Airana Ngarewa

Well, Airana Ngarewa’s The Last Living Cannibal certainly has an attention-getting title. Longlisted for the 2026 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, it’s Ngarewa’s third work of fiction. The brief bio at the back of the book tells me that his first novel The Bone Tree (2023) was a bestseller in NZ but I abandoned it in frustration, and his short story collection Patea Boys (2024) is uniquely designed to be read one way in English and the other in te Reo Māori.

So I may as well say at the outset that The Last Living Cannibal is full of Māori words and dialogue and there isn’t a glossary. Most of the time, a reader like me who doesn’t know Māori can make sense of it from the author’s subsequent paraphrasing in English, but sometimes it’s a case of press on without understanding words that are perhaps common knowledge in NZ but not elsewhere. Just something to bear in mind.

Anyway, this is the book description:

Muru is not revenge. Muru is about balance. You put your hands on one of theirs and they had every right to take from you and yours whatever they meant to take, short of a life.

Aotearoa in the 1940s, and the Māori men of Taranaki have refused to join the Māori battalion because of the severity of their land confiscations. Koko is the oldest man in the village, a legend within his community – he’s lived through the land wars, Parihaka, imprisonment in Dunedin, and they whisper of him as the Last Living Cannibal. Koko dotes on his grandson Blackie, who has lived with him ever since Blackie’s mum left in troubling circumstances years earlier.

But the ghosts of the past are bound to come calling, and when they do, they come with muru in mind.

Richly set in Taranaki during the 1940s, The Last Living Cannibal is the epitome of a classic Aotearoa novel, from one of this generation’s most promising writers.

The story is mostly narrated by Koko, who at 90, is the oldest man in the community, and he takes pride in the warrior culture of his people. (Mercifully, there is not much about his epithet, but what there was, was nauseating.) By the 1940s, the days of warfare between tribes and against the British are over, but resentment still festers, so much so that unlike 16,000 other Māori who served with distinction, these Taranaki Māori refuse to fight in WW2.

When Koko’s grandson Blackie gets into trouble at school, Koko’s ire is roused and he rides to confront the teacher on an irascible horse called North. He dies on the return journey when the horse throws him, and from then on the story is (mostly) narrated by his ghost, which remains unsettled until the elaborate funeral rites are completed.

Māori communities have strict protocols for entering their spaces, and when these are violated by an armed tribe that turns up uninvited, it’s not to pay respect to the dead but to exact muru, a concept not listed at NZ History but I found an explanation at Wikipedia. It was a form of restorative justice, recognised by the courts for thefts and assaults in colonial times until 1893, when bicultural applications of the law were abolished. Ngarewa hints at what has caused this dispute but the reason is not revealed until much later in the novel, after there have been various tense confrontations, a show fight between two of the men, a shared meal, and then a return to the meeting house to talk it through (and reveal the backstory). Meanwhile, however, the matriarch Nanny Foreshore has been orchestrating events with two of the younger boys, which results in a devastating attack by three angry bulls released from their paddock.

As the reader learns from the narrative of Koko’s dead wife ‘Duchess’, women play an important role in community decision-making, and Ngarewa’s depiction of older women having power, agency and respect is interesting to see.

As a window onto aspects of Māori culture, The Last Living Cannibal has its interesting moments and Koko’s voice is thoughtful, engaging and sometimes droll, but some sequences like the blow-by-blow fight and the bulls let loose are stretched out with far too much padding.

But my reservations about this novel are more than that: I don’t admire ‘warrior culture’ and its justifications for violence which I’ve come across in other Maori literature, notably in Witi Ihimaera’s The Matriarch. So the concluding reconciliation seemed more like an idealisation of muru than a likely outcome. Ngarewa is not an author that I might want to read again.

The Last Living Cannibal was also reviewed by Jordan at MaoriLitBlog.

Author: Airana Ngarewa
Title: The Last Living Cannibal
Publisher: Moa Press (an imprint of Hachette), 2025
Cover design by Megan van Staden
ISBN: 9781869718312, pbk., 292 pages
Source: Kingston Library

4 Comments

Posted in 21st century, BOOK REVIEWS, FICTION — NEW ZEALAND, First Nations - NZ, Historical Fiction, Maori authors, Maori fiction, Moa (Hachette), NEW ZEALAND (settings), New Zealand authors, NGAREWA Airana, NZ 2025, Older women in fiction, Read in 2026 | Tags: 2026 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards Longlist, Airana Ngarewa, BOOK REVIEWS, The Last Living Cannibal

Posted by: Lisa Hill | February 3, 2026

Bird Deity (2026), by John Morrissey

I am too fond of reading at whim to participate much in challenges, but John Morrissey’s debut novel Bird Deity is a serendipitous addition both to Kaggsy’s Reading Independent Publishers Month, and also to the #SpeecyFicChal hosted at Book’d Out. It qualifies for two of Bec’s categories: it’s published in 2026 and it’s a speculative novella of less than 250 pages. But it’s more than just speculative fiction…

Contemporary authors keen to revisit history via a less familiar perspective on the past while sidestepping historical or cultural baggage are using two forms of genre fiction to explore it: historical fiction and speculative fiction, often blending the two.

For example, African authors of historical fiction who’ve written what I’ve labelled ‘hidden history’ include Fred Khumalo who introduced me to this hybrid genre with his article about how contemporary historical fiction is being written in South Africa as an activist’s tool and with attitude and a breathless literary intensity; a fire in its belly. I read his novel Dancing the Death Drill (2017) which uses the sinking of a ship carrying Black South African soldiers during WW1 to explore other issues. Amongst others that I’ve categorised as ‘hidden history’, I’ve also read:

Eyes in the Night, an Untold Zulu Story (2016), by Nomavenda Mathiane, telling the story of war and dispossession from the perspective, not of the British victors nor the defeated Zulu warriors, but from a woman’s point of view;
She Would Be King (2018), by Wayétu Moore; blending historical fact with magic realism to trace the emergence of modern Liberia on the West African coast;
The Shadow King (2019), by Maaza Mengiste, revealing the role of women soldiers in the Ethiopian war against Mussolini’s Italy in 1935; and
The Detective Emmanuel Cooper series by Malla Nunn, set in Apartheid South Africa.

First Nations Australian authors have used historical fiction in this way too:

Every Secret Thing (2009) by Marie Munkara, a sharp satire set in Mission Era Arnhemland
Barbed Wire and Cherry Blossoms (2017) by Anita Heiss, bringing together an escaped Japanese POW and local Aborigines during WW2;
That Deadman Dance (2010), by Kim Scott, exploring what might have been if First Contact had been different.

I don’t read much speculative fiction and what I have read is mostly dystopian climate-change fiction, but some Australian authors that I’ve categorised as ‘genre-benders‘ have used speculative fiction to cast a different light on history:

On a Barbarous Coast (2020), by Craig Cormick and Harold Ludwick, a reimagining of the Captain Cook landing;
Songwoman (2018), by Ilka Tampke, exploring the impacts of Roman colonisation of Britain; and
Terra Nullius (2017), by Claire G Coleman, telling a colonisation story of from the perspective of the settlers and the people they dispossess in an utterly unexpected way.

John Morrissey’s Bird Deity is another example of speculative fiction being used to shed light on the impacts of colonialism.

This is the book description:

David is a scout. For ten years he has plundered the ruins of an alien civilisation about which he knows nothing. Now his contract is ending, and he’s ready to go home, a wealthy, successful man.

Except that everything seems to be slipping out of his control. His mentor Tom vanished on a recent expedition. David doesn’t know what has happened to him. And, as he waits for the ship that will take him away, he begins to question the choices he has made.

That’s when he is visited by a researcher, a specialist in non-human societies. She has travelled far to learn about this strange world and wants to hire David as her guide. One more expedition, one more trip to the rainswept wasteland of the plateau—and he can go home at last, rich beyond his dreams.

But he comes to realise that he may yet lose everything, as he is drawn inexorably towards an encounter with the terrifying soul of this world. John Morrissey’s Bird Deity is a novel like no other. At once disconcerting and eerily familiar, it’s a cosmic horror story about power, theft, love, loss, and destiny.

Morrissey’s achievement in rendering the exploitation of an indigenous society is to show that the taking of ‘artefacts’ is not just the removal of objects. The parasapes are not just physically hurt by the removal of bracelets and other jewellery, they are spiritually injured. What’s more, the scouts ‘harvesting’ these items have no understanding of their significance. They do not understand the complexity of the civilisation they have plundered. Through fleeting narrations by these parasapes and mystical sequences that are deliberately unexplained, the reader grasps an entirely different perspective from the dominant narrative about the project to civilise the Other:

The creature lies at the rear of the cage, in an odour of urine and straw, stupefied by heat and overfeeding, with half its body in shadow and half in sunlight. It looks out at us with dull, sleeping eyes — not, one would think, the eyes of a predator. And certainly we can stop feeding the creature whenever we please, we can refuse to refill the trough it drinks from, we can let it lie in shit until it becomes sick and weak and dies that way. If we do not want to wait we can impale it from all directions with spears pushed between the bars of the cage. Or we can shoot it full of arrows. It should be completely defenceless against us!

Except it isn’t really our prisoner. It’s only lying there in the cage out of sloth, and because it finds the situation convenient. I realise that I have just a short time in which to civilise the creature and make it harmless.

I unlock the cage, causing the rest of the crowd to flee in terror. The creature gets to its feet and I lead it by hand across the empty market. As we walk I explain the history of our city, how it was founded in ancient times by a great magician, our forefather, who invented the arts of design and metallurgy. The creature pants along beside me, not listening. It doesn’t like exerting itself.

While I talk, a cool wind begins to blow, gently lifting the awnings over the deserted stalls. Dark blots of rain appear here and there across the market square. The creature wrinkles its nose in appreciation. It doesn’t know anything about weather and its causes. (p.133)

Although complex characterisation isn’t usually a feature of speculative fiction or SF, Morrissey has developed David, the scout, as a flawed character with personal issues so that the novel doesn’t just focus on his limited perspective about this planet where he has lived for ten years. Bird Deity shows his values being tested as well.

John Morrissey is a Melbourne writer of Kalkadoon descent. His collection of short stories, Firelight (2023) won an Aurealis Award and a Queensland Literary Award.

Author: John Morrissey
Title: Bird Deity
Publisher: Text Publishing, 2026
Cover design by W H Chong
ISBN: 9781922790781, pbk., 203 pages
Review copy courtesy of Text Publishing

I read books from Indie publishers all the time but I read this book at this time for
Kaggsy’s #ReadIndies Reading Independent Publishers Month.
Text Publishing is an indie publisher based in Melbourne.

and also for the #SpeccyFicChal 2026 Speccy Fiction challenge hosted by Book’d Out,

8 Comments

Posted in Aboriginal & Torres Straits Islander Fiction, Aust 2026, AUSTRALIAN AUTHORS, Australian authors, Australian Authors—First Nations, BOOK REVIEWS, C21st by Aust men, Colonialism & Postcolonialsm, Dystopia & Imagined Worlds, First Nations, First Nations - Australian, MORRISSEY John, Novellas & short novels (100-200 pp), Read in 2026, Speculative/ SF/ Fantasy, Text Publishing, Victorian authors | Tags: #ReadIndies, #SpeccyFicChal, Bird Deity, BOOK REVIEWS, John Morrissey

Posted by: Lisa Hill | February 2, 2026

2025 Aurealis Awards Shortlists

I’m not a great reader of SF or fantasy, but I have actually read a novel on the 2025 Aurealis Awards Shortlists!

The winners will be celebrated at the 2025 Aurealis Awards ceremony as part of GenreCon in Brisbane, taking place on Saturday February 21, 2026 at the Thomas Dixon Centre.

BEST SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL

Letters to Our Robot Son, Cadance Bell (Ultimo Press)

Arborescence, Rhett Davis (Hachette Australia), see my review

Volatile Memory, Seth Haddon (Pan Macmillan Australia)

Dark Sands, J S Harman (self-published)

Wastelands, Samira Lloyd (Arianhrod Press)

All We Have, Tony Shillitoe (Millswood Books)

BEST FANTASY NOVEL

House of the Rain King, Will Greatwich (self-published)

Honeyeater, Kathleen Jennings (Pan Macmillan Australia)

Greenteeth, Molly O’Neill (Little, Brown)

Slashed Beauties, A Rushby (HarperCollins Publishers)

Grave Empire, Richard Swan (Little, Brown)

Upon a Starlit Tide, Kell Woods (HarperCollins Publishers)

BEST HORROR NOVEL

Orpheus Nine, Chris Flynn (Hachette Australia)

The Farm, Jessica Mansour-Nahra (Hachette Australia)

This Stays Between Us, Margot McGovern (Penguin Random House Australia)

Slashed Beauties, A Rushby (HarperCollins Publishers)

Nightmare Reef, Deborah Sheldon (Severed Press)

The Crimson Road, A G Slatter (Titan Books)

BEST YOUNG ADULT NOVEL

Blood Moon Bride, Demet Divaroren (Allen & Unwin)

Lady’s Knight, Amie Kaufman & Megan Spooner (Allen & Unwin)

Dark Sun Rising, A A Kinsela (Plainspeak Publishing)

The Serpent Called Mercy, Roanne Lau (New Dawn)

This Stays Between Us, Margot McGovern (Penguin Random House Australia)

Unhallowed Halls, Lili Wilkinson (Allen & Unwin)

BEST COLLECTION

The Leper’s Garden and Other Contagions, Jeff Clulow (Third Eye Press)

Playing Nice Was Getting Me Nowhere, Alex Cothren (Pink Shorts Press)

Songs of Shadow, Words of Woe, Matthew R Davis (JournalStone)

This Dark Architect and Other Grim Tales, Pamela Jeffs (Four Ink Press)

Drowning in the Dark and Other Stories, Matt Tighe (IFWG)

BEST ANTHOLOGY

Never Say Die, Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild (Ed.) (Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild Publishing)

AUSTRAL 2025, Matt Richardson, Michaela Teschendorff & Ciar Fhearchair (Eds.) (Meridian Australis)

Fission #5: An Anthology of Stories from the British Science Fiction Association, Gene Rowe & Eugen Bacon (Eds.) (BSFA)

Midnight Echo Issue 20, Marty Young (Ed.) (AHWA)

BEST HORROR NOVELLA

The Nga’phandileh Whisperer: A Sauútiverse Novella, by Eugen Bacon whose novel Serengotti I reviewed here (Stars and Sabers)

Sideshow Souls, J J Carpenter (self-published)

Parasitic Omens, Jessica A McMinn (self-published)

Willow Close, Helena O’Connor (IFWG)

“Walpurgis”, Ron Schroer (Strange Legacy 2025: Creature Feature, Thorncroft Legacy)

The Cold House, A G Slatter (Titan Books)

BEST FANTASY NOVELLA

Hol(l)o(w)metabolism, Lee Cope (Whimsy and Metaphor Enterprises)

Cinder House, Freya Marske (Pan Macmillan)

Parasitic Omens, Jessica A McMinn (self-published)

Trickster Tales, Leanbh Pearson (Brigid’s Gate Press)

“Crown Tourney”, Tansy Rayner Roberts (Crown Tourney: Ten Tales of Deadly Damsels, Cursed Castles and Edged Weapons, self-published)

BEST SCIENCE FICTION NOVELLA

Quiet Like Fire, Cameron Cooper (Stories Rule Press)

“Photo in the Chip”, Callum Lewis (Andromeda Spaceways Magazine #98)

“The Hidden God”, T R Napper (Asimov’s Science Fiction March/April 2025)

Homecoming, Thomas K Slee (Refraction Publishing)

All My Guns are Trans and Gay and They’re Ruining My F—— Life, Corey Jae White & Maddison Stoff (Patreon)

For more information and to see the shortlists for children’s fiction and short stories, click here.

6 Comments

Posted in Aurealis Awards | Tags: 2025 Aurealis Awards Shortlists

Posted by: Lisa Hill | January 30, 2026

Sensational Snippets: The Gowkaran Tree in the Middle of Our Kitchen, by Shokoofeh Azar, translation anonymous

As I write today, the world waits to see what will happen in Iran, sponsor of international terrorism and supplier of arms to terrorist organisations like Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis of Yemen and more. As always with the Middle East, things are complicated. But despite the regime’s media blackout, it is becoming clear that thousands of protestors have died in the uprising to topple the theocracy that has governed since the Islamic Revolution in 1978. There is footage of women, bare-headed in defiance of the Modesty Police enforcing Sharia Law. The courage of these women has been emerging for a while, see this article about research into schoolgirls turning away from compulsory hijab, but also see this video report from Al Jazeera about the death in custody of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini arrested by the Modesty Police… and the aftermath.

My heart goes out to Iranians around the world who fear for the safety of their loved ones at this time.

As it happens, I am reading Shokoofeh Azar’s new novel The Gowkaran Tree in the Middle of Our Kitchen. It would be insultingly reductive to call it a family saga, but it’s a long, utterly compelling story that covers five decades about an Iranian woman called Shokoofeh and her extended family. (No, it’s not a memoir). Shokoofeh tells us what it was like to go to school after the Revolution. Devastated after the arrest and disappearance of her friend Fereshteh — whose brother Fariborz was shot during the Revolution and all they have of him is a pistachio shell that was in his pocket — she forces herself to get up and dressed. She writes about her body as if it were no longer a part of her…

…once again the maqnaeh wrapped under the chin…once again the black socks…until once again it donned the black chador and goes to school. A school where Fereshteh no longer was. My body got ready to once more head to school, where every Saturday the principal and the supervisor, after half an hour of slogans and ‘Allah is Greatest’ and blessing upon the Prophet and his family, and insulting America and Britain and the USSR and Israel, stood at the head of the morning line-up and with the patience of Job measured the turn-ups of the trousers of every one of us 250 female pupils to make sure they weren’t tighter than 35cm, to make sure that the back of our long manteaus did not stick to our behinds, that they didn’t have slits, that our hair wasn’t spilling out of the corners or sides of our maqnaehs, and that the bulge created by our tying back our hair could not be seen from up the maqnaeh. Every morning grim-faced sycophantic girls volunteered to inspect the bags of all 250 pupils for books other than textbooks, for music cassettes, romantic novels, mirrors and hairbrushes. Woe betide the pupil who brought lipstick or perfume with her. If she wasn’t expelled, she would at least have to spend two weeks at home and her parents would have to sign a Moral Commitment Sheet. If a love letter were found in a girl’s bag, then they would hand over her file to her, with no recourse. Expulsion, Finished. But worse than all this was if they found pamphlets or cassettes of speeches from political parties. This was something that could easily lead to any pupil ending up in jail or being executed. (p.188-9)

Schoolgirls being executed…

The dress code, barbaric though it be, is only symbolic of the way the regime oppresses girls and women. Later on in the novel, the contempt in which women are held if they do not abide by laws which require them to travel only if accompanied by a male relative, is depicted in a savage scene in Part Two, subtitled ‘The Ordeal of Liberty’, where Shokoofeh goes to search for her brother, missing in the war against Iraq.

The astonishing aspect of this book is that it’s irresistible reading. It is full of light and colour, love and optimism. There is even a reimagining of the mystic spirit Eblis who refuses to bow down to authority and, like Cinderella’s fairy godmother, conjures up help when Shokoofeh needs it.

This is the book description:

From International Booker Prize and National Book Award finalist Shokoofeh Azar, comes a stylistically audacious and emotionally powerful novel about one large, complicated family and a love affair lasting decades.

Spanning fifty years in the history of modern Iran, this lush, layered story embraces politics and family, revolution and reconstruction, loss and love as it recounts the colorful destinies of twelve children who get lost one long-ago night inside a mysterious palace.

Azar’s first novel, The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree (Europa Editions, 2020, see my review), was shortlisted for the Stella Prize for Fiction and the International Booker Prize; it was longlisted for the PEN America Award and the National Book Award for Translated Literature.

In Azar’s new novel, each lost child’s story unfolds against the backdrop of immense cultural and political transformation; lovers must survive war, revolution, and rigid social strictures to keep their love alive; family bonds are tested, especially those indissoluble connections between the living and the dead. The Gowkaran Tree in the Middle of Our Kitchen is also the moving story of one family’s efforts to preserve the richness of Iranian culture in the face of Islamic hegemony following the 1979 revolution.

#TransparencyStatement: The Iranian journalist Shokoofeh Azar escaped persecution and came to Australia as a refugee, and I interviewed her at the 2018 Williamstown Literary Festival after the publication of The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree. Apart from liking her as a lovely person, I admire her courage, her resilience, and her determination to continue writing despite English not being her mother tongue.

Today, BTW, there is news that the EU has designated the Iranian Revolutionary guard a terrorist organisation, stating that ‘Any regime that kills thousands of its own people is working toward its own demise‘. Australia, Canada and the US have already done the same but not the UK.

Author: Shokoofeh Azar
Title: The Gowkaran Tree in the Middle of Our Kitchen
Translated from the Farsi, by a translator who has remained anonymous for security reasons
Publisher: Europa Editions, 2025
ISBN: 9781787706040, pbk., 513 pages
Source: Kingston Library

10 Comments

Posted in QUOTATIONS, Sensational Snippets | Tags: Sensational Snippets, Shokoofeh Azar, The Gowkaran Tree in the Middle of Our Kitchen

Posted by: Lisa Hill | January 29, 2026

2026 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards Longlist

2026 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards Longlist has been announced, so now begins the quest to track them down on our side of the ditch! I’ve been able to reserve three at my library so far…

Many thanks to publicist Penny Hartill who sent the information in blog-friendly format! What follows is copied shamelessly from the Press Release.

*represents debut authors

Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction

1985 by Dominic Hoey (Penguin, Penguin Random House)

All Her Lives by Ingrid Horrocks (Te Herenga Waka University Press)

Before the Winter Ends by Khadro Mohamed (Tender Press)

Empathy by Bryan Walpert (Mākaro Press)

Hoods Landing by Laura Vincent (Ngāti Māhanga, Ngāpuhi) (Āporo Press)

How to Paint a Nude by Sam Mahon (Ugly Hill Press)

Star Gazers by Duncan Sarkies (Te Herenga Waka University Press)

The Book of Guilt by Catherine Chidgey (Te Herenga Waka University Press), see my review

The Last Living Cannibal by Airana Ngarewa (Ngāti Ruanui, Ngā Rauru, Ngāruahine) (Moa Press), see my review

Wonderland by Tracy Farr (The Cuba Press)

Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry

Black Sugarcane by Nafanua Purcell Kersel (Satupa‘itea, Faleālupo, Aleipata, Tuaefu) (Te Herenga Waka University Press)*

Clay Eaters by Gregory Kan (Auckland University Press)

E kō, nō hea koe by Matariki Bennett (Ngāti Pikiao, Ngāti Whakaue, Ngāti Hinerangi) (Dead Bird Books)*

Giving Birth to my Father by Tusiata Avia (Te Herenga Waka University Press)

If We Knew How to We Would by Emma Barnes (Auckland University Press)

Joss: A History by Grace Yee (Giramondo Publishing)

No Good by Sophie van Waardenberg (Auckland University Press)*

Sick Power Trip by Erik Kennedy (Te Herenga Waka University Press)

Standing on my Shadow by Serie Barford (Anahera Press)

Terrier, Worrier: A Poem in Five Parts by Anna Jackson (Auckland University Press)

BookHub Award for Illustrated Non-Fiction

Atlas of the New Zealand Wars: Volume One 1834-1864, Early Engagements to the Second Taranaki War by Derek Leask (Auckland University Press)*

Books of Mana: 180 Māori-Authored Books of Significance edited by Jacinta Ruru (Raukawa, Ngāti Ranginui), Angela Walhalla (Kāi Tahu) and Jeanette Wikaira (Ngāti Pukenga, Ngāti Tamaterā, Ngāpuhi) (Otago University Press)

Garrison World: Redcoat Soldiers in New Zealand and Across the British Empire by Charlotte Macdonald (Bridget Williams Books)

Groundwork: The Art and Writing of Emily Cumming Harris by Michele Leggott and Catherine Field-Dodgson (Rongowhakaata, Ngāi Tāmanuhiri, Te Aitanga a Mahaki) (Te Papa Press)

He Puāwai: A Natural History of New Zealand Flowers by Philip Garnock-Jones (Auckland University Press)*

Mark Adams: A Survey – He Kohinga Whakaahua by Sarah Farrar (Massey University Press and Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki)

Mr Ward’s Map: Victorian Wellington Street by Street by Elizabeth Cox (Massey University Press)

Takoto ai te Marino: Selected Works 2018-2025 by Raukura Turei (Ngā Rauru Kītahi, Taranaki, Ngāti Pāoa, Ngāi Tai ki Tāmaki), Greta van der Star, Vanessa Green and Katie Kerr (Raukura Turei)*

The Collector: Thomas Cheeseman and the Making of the Auckland Museum by Andrew McKay and Richard Wolfe (Massey University Press)

Whenua edited by Felicity Milburn, Chloe Cull (Ngāi Tahu, Ngāi te Ruahikihiki) and Melanie Oliver (Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū)

General Non-Fiction Award

50 Years of the Waitangi Tribunal: Whakamana i te Tiriti edited by Carwyn Jones (Ngāti Kahungunu, Te Aitanga-a-Māhaki) and Maria Bargh (Te Arawa, Ngāti Awa) (Huia Publishers)

A Different Kind of Power by Jacinda Ardern (Penguin, Penguin Random House)*

An Uncommon Land: From an Ancestral Past of Enclosure Towards a Regenerative Future by Catherine Knight (Totara Press)

Everything But the Medicine: A Doctor’s Tale by Lucy O’Hagan (Massey University Press)*

Hardship and Hope: Stories of Resistance in the Fight Against Poverty in Aotearoa by Rebecca Macfie (Bridget Williams Books)

Northbound: Four Seasons of Solitude on Te Araroa by Naomi Arnold (HarperCollins Aotearoa New Zealand)

Polkinghorne: Inside the Trial of the Century by Steve Braunias (Allen & Unwin)

Ruth Dallas: A Writer’s Life by Diana Morrow (Otago University Press)

The Covid Response: A Scientist’s Account of New Zealand’s Pandemic and What Comes Next by Shaun Hendy (Bridget Williams Books)

The Hollows Boys: A Story of Three Brothers & the Fiordland Deer Recovery Era by Peta Carey (Potton & Burton)

The Middle of Nowhere: Stories of Working on the Manapōuri Hydro Project by Rosemary Baird (Canterbury University Press)*

The Welcome of Strangers: A History of Southern Māori by Atholl Anderson (Bridget Williams Books and Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu)

This Compulsion in Us by Tina Makereti (Te Ātiawa, Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Ngāti Rangatahi-Matakore, Pākehā) (Te Herenga Waka University Press)

Tony Fomison: Life of the Artist by Mark Forman (Auckland University Press)

This year the General Non-Fiction judges have longlisted 14 titles, a discretionary allowance that reflects the number of entries and range of genres in this category.

The 2026 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards shortlist of 16 titles (four books in each category) will be announced on 4 March 2026. The finalists, winners and the four Mātātuhi Foundation Best First Book Award recipients will be celebrated on 13 May 2026 at a public ceremony held as part of the Auckland Writers Festival Waituhi o Tāmaki.

The winner of the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction will receive $65,000 and each of the other main category winners will receive $12,000. Each of The Mātātuhi Foundation Best First Book winners (for fiction, poetry, general non-fiction and illustrated non-fiction) will be awarded $3000.

The Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction is judged by novelist, short story writer and reviewer Craig Cliff (convenor); novelist, poet and Arts Foundation Te Tumi Toi Laureate Alison Wong; and bookseller, writer and reviewer Melissa Oliver (Ngāti Porou).

Judging the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry are poet, musician and multi-disciplinary artist Daren Kamali (convenor); poet, writer, performer and editor Jordan Hamel; and writer, musician and translator Claudia Jardine.

The General Non-Fiction Award judges are journalist, author and reviewer Philip Matthews (convenor); academic and writer Georgina Stewart (Ngāpuhi-nui-tonu, Pare Hauraki); and screen director, producer, and author Dan Salmon.

The BookHub Award for Illustrated Non-Fiction is judged by art historian and curator Lauren Gutsell (convenor); photographer, moving-image artist, writer and academic Natalie Robertson (Ngāti Porou, Clann Dhonnchaidh); and non-fiction writer and former magazine editor Rebekah White.

The Ockham New Zealand Book Awards are supported by Ockham Residential, Creative New Zealand, the late Jann Medlicott and the Acorn Foundation, Mary and Peter Biggs CNZM, BookHub, The Mātātuhi Foundation and the Auckland Writers Festival Waituhi o Tāmaki.

4 Comments

Posted in Ockham New Zealand Literary Awards | Tags: 2026 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards Longlist

Posted by: Lisa Hill | January 28, 2026

Death of an Ordinary Man (2025) by Sarah Perry

Sarah Perry’s Death of an Ordinary Man came to my attention because it’s been longlisted for the £10,000 Gordon Burn Prize, a prize which…

…recognises exceptional writing which has an unconventional perspective, style or subject matter and often defies easy categorisation. It celebrates literary outliers and daring and experimental work that often speaks to broader societal issues.

In my haste to reserve most of the longlist at the library, I did so with only the titles to guide me, and Sarah Perry’s name was one of only two that I recognised. And I did wonder why it was on the longlist, because I wasn’t very impressed by Melmoth.

#TruthBeTold So when it came in at the library this week I was not really expecting much. I was not expecting to pick it up ‘to read just a few pages’ but become utterly absorbed and continue reading right through the night.

How did this happen? The book description tells us how the story ends so it wasn’t narrative tension that held me spellbound…

Sarah Perry’s father-in-law David died in the autumn of 2022, only nine days after a cancer diagnosis. Until then he’d been a healthy and happy man: he loved stamp collecting, fish and chips, comic novels, his local church, and the Antiques Roadshow. He was in some ways a very ordinary man, but as he began to die, it became clear how extraordinary he was.

Sarah and her husband Robert nursed David themselves at home, eventually with the help of carers and visiting nurses. They bathed and cleaned and dressed him, comforted him in pain, sat with him through waking and sleeping, talked to him, sang to him, prayed with him. Day by day and hour by hour, they witnessed what happens to the body and spirit as death approaches and finally arrives.

In 191 pages, the memoir traces through Sarah’s perspective, the first moment when they realise something is badly wrong with David, who has always been robust. They walk the fine line between respect for David’s decision-making and their own anxiety about seeking medical tests. Despite the evidence of her own eyes, Sarah wavers between hope and certainty before the diagnosis, and together the family deals with that awful moment when the futility of treatment becomes clear.

Even so, they are shocked when barely a day elapses before Sarah and Robert recognise that David cannot be left alone in his home overnight. She doubts her own ability to be the practical help that David needs and emotional support for her husband Robert who is losing his father. She doesn’t know how to negotiate the rapid onset of David’s care needs with respect for his dignity, but she surprises herself. She teeters between rage about promised NHS help that takes too long to come and overwhelming gratitude when they arrive. As events move so rapidly to their conclusion, the reader does not lose sight of David as a person, which is how it should be.

As it says on the back cover:

Death of an Ordinary Man is an unforgettable account of this universal aspect of life. This is not a book about grief: it is a book about dying, and it is a book about family, and care and love.

I did wonder about the palliative system in the UK when the family of a man in (entirely predictable) agonising pain is given a script for morphine, to be dispensed at a pharmacy late at night. Sarah doesn’t drive. I know, I know, morphine is a serious drug and it needs to be dispensed with extreme caution, but why can’t a palliative care service bring it with them when they already know that it’s needed?? A man in agony shouldn’t have to wait for however long it takes to go and get it and return. That’s just not humane. Is this how it is in Australia?

This is the Gordon Burn Prize longlist. I’ve read more than I expected to before the announcement of the shortlist in January, because as of this date, (Jan 28th) there’s no news of the shortlist on their website.

Update 29/1/126 With thanks to Laura, I have now highlighted the shortlist in bold.

TonyInterruptor, Nicola Barker (Granta), see my review
Deviants, Santanu Bhattacharya (Fig Tree)
We Pretty Pieces of Flesh, Colwill Brown (Chatto & Windus), abandoned, see my brief thoughts at Goodreads.
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, Omar El Akkad (Canongate)
The Benefactors, Wendy Erskine (Sceptre), see my review
Helm, Sarah Hall (Faber & Faber)
This Part Is Silent: A Life Between Cultures, SJ Kim (&Other Stories)
Thank You for Calling the Lesbian Line, Elizabeth Lovatt (Dialogue Books)
Death of an Ordinary Man, Sarah Perry (Jonathan Cape)
Endling, Maria Reva (Virago)
A Room Above a Shop, Anthony Shapland (Granta), see my review
Night of the Living Rez, Morgan Talty (&Other Stories), see my review

22 Comments

Posted in 21st century, BOOK REVIEWS, English authors, Memoir, NONFICTION, Perry Sarah, Read in 2026 | Tags: BOOK REVIEWS, Death of an Ordinary Man, Gordon Burn Prize, Sarah Perry

Posted by: Lisa Hill | January 27, 2026

Yellow Again, a poem by Hanna Yerushalmi

A fortnight ago, in my post about the hypocrisy of authors who sabotaged the Adelaide Festival, I noted that those authors posturing about ‘freedom of speech’ …

… had declined to offer any words of consolation to the victims of the Bondi atrocity. They are our wordsmiths and poets, but where are the words of empathy and kindness for a community reeling in shock and horror, and to assuage the grief of the rest of us whose ideals about Australia as a place of safety and refuge lie shattered on the sands at Bondi?

Our wordsmiths were also silent about the atrocity that took place in Israel on October 7th, killing 1219 people, including 810 civilians of whom 38 were children and 71 foreign nationals.

Commemoration of children taken hostage by Hamas, Hostage Square, Tel Aviv (Source: Wikipedia)

Those authors are selective in their concerns: they have also had nothing to say about current genocides listed at Holodomor National Awareness in Sudan and South Sudan, Iraq, Central African Republic, Syria, Yemen, Myanmar, and China.

Did they have anything to say, to represent us all, on the National Day of Mourning?

They have failed us.

Today, on the day when the remains of Ran Gvili, held hostage by Hamas to use as a bargaining chip since the atrocity on October 7th 2023, were finally located and brought home to his grieving family, the Israel poet Hanna Yerushalmi has shared her poem ‘Yellow Again’ on Facebook. It refers to the yellow ribbons and T-shirts worn in support of the families whose loved ones were held hostage, and the yellow ribbons and streamers that featured in Hostage Square where families campaigned throughout the 843 day ordeal it has been to bring all the hostages, dead and alive, home.

Published with the permission of Hanna Yerushalmi

Image credit: Commemoration of hostage children, by Israel Preker Pikiwiki Israel, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=141890712

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Posted in ARTICLES & OPINION, Israeli authors, Poetry

Posted by: Lisa Hill | January 27, 2026

The Rudashevski Diary (1941-1943), by Yitskhok Rudashevski, translated by Solon Beinfeld

Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) is commemorated each year on the 27th January, because that is the day of the liberation of the Nazi extermination and concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1945. As it says on the HMD website:

Holocaust Memorial Day is the day for everyone to remember the ~~millions of people~~ [LH edit*: six million Jews] murdered in the Holocaust, under Nazi Persecution, and [LH edit: the people killed] in the genocides which followed in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur.

*This introduction is taken from the HMD website, but I have edited it to make clear that the Holocaust refers specifically to the murder of six million Jews.

This year’s theme is ‘Bridging Generations’:

The theme for Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) 2026, ‘Bridging Generations’, is a call-to-action. A reminder that the responsibility of remembrance doesn’t end with the survivors – it lives on through their children, their grandchildren and through all of us. This theme encourages us all to engage actively with the past – to listen, to learn and to carry those lessons forward. By doing so, we build a bridge between memory and action, between history and hope for the future. [LH: underlining mine].

Each year I commemorate this day by reading Jewish testimony from the Holocaust, but the testimony of Yitskhok Rudashevski — like the powerful testimony about life in hiding of Anne Frank (1929-1945) — is also from a teenager who did not survive. Yitskhok Rudashevski was thirteen years old when he was transferred to the Vilna Ghetto in Lithuania, and he kept a diary. This is from the back cover of this Jewish Quarterly edition:

‘Today I turned fifteen and live very much for tomorrow. I do not feel two ways about it. I see before me sun and sun and sun…’

For nearly two years he used a small notebook to chronicle his hope, his despair and his experience of daily ghetto life. His diary was later discovered in an attic that was the final hiding place for him and his parents.

This remarkable translation from Yiddish by Solon Beinfeld reveals a teenager whose love of culture, history and knowledge defied the cruelty that surrounded him. Displaying empathy and intellect far beyond his years, Yitskhok confronts the terrible moral choices required for survival in the ghetto.

His diary, expertly introduced by Samuel D Kassow, is both a crucial historical document and a deeply poignant portrait of one lost soul among millions.

The first part of the diary reads more like a memoir, as if Yitskhok has realised the importance of bearing witness. Although he writes with the immediacy of the present tense, he makes occasional comments that show that he is looking back at the very recent past from the present day. For example, in the diary entry dated October 1941, when writing about the search for firewood in the first days of the ghetto, he records that:

We break up doors and floors and carry off the wood. One person tries to snatch from another. People fight over a piece of wood. People become petty, egoistic, and even cruel to one another. Soon we see the first Jewish policemen. They are supposed to maintain order in the ghetto. In time, they become a caste that helps the oppressors do their work. Over time, many things were done by the Gestapo with the help of the Jewish police. They help grab their brother by the throat; they help trip up their brother. (p.40, underlining mine)

I think it was Tolstoy who said that in war, the commanders plotting strategy don’t know what’s really happening on the ground, and those on the battlefield can’t see the big picture or its strategic importance, only their own part in it, so both disparage the other. This is true of Yitskhok’s perspective. Over and again, he mourns the helplessness of his community, without understanding that his life in the ghetto was made more tolerable by the choice of some not to be helpless but to engage in collaboration. Nor did he realise that the most prominent collaborator hoped to save lives and the Jewish culture of Vilna.

#Digression: As my review or Rose Zwi’s Last Walk in Naryshkin Park (1997) shows, Wikipedia is not the source to use to find out if they succeeded in that hope.

In the Introduction, Samuel D Kassow explains the invidious position of Jacob Gens, the controversial Jewish boss of the ghetto, [who] did what he could to buy time, save as many Jews as possible and please the Germans.

Unlike most Jews in Vilna, he spoke fluent Lithuanian. A former officer in the Lithuanian army and husband of a Lithuanian woman, Gens made effective use of his contacts with the local Lithuanian collaborators to help the ghetto. He set up workshops, organised schools for the surviving children and smuggled food into the ghetto. Although Jews in the Vilna Ghetto were often hungry, there was little of the mass starvation that decimated the ghettos in Warsaw and Lódz. (p.12)

No one could envy Gens’ position or the fraught game that he was trying to play. In his 19 October 1942 diary entry, Yitskhok blasted him and the Jewish police who participated in a selection of more than 400 old and sick Jews whom the Germans soon murdered in the Oszmiana Ghetto. Yitskhok wrote, ‘The whole ghetto is in an uproar because of this departure. How great is our misfortune, how great is our shame, our humiliation. Jews are helping the Germans in their organised, horrifying extermination.’

Yitskhok did not know the back story. Shortly before, the Germans had asked Gens to send Jewish police to carry out a selection in Kiemieliszki. Gens refused and the Germans slaughtered the entire ghetto. Next they asked Gens to send police to Oszmiana for the same job. This time he said yes: he hoped to save the many by sacrificing the few. The Vilna police, liberally supplied with alcohol, chose 406 old and sick Jews who had no hope of surviving anyway. When the police returned from Oszmiana, Gens, visibly drunk, called a meeting of the ghetto elite to explain himself.

I, Gens, lead Jews to their death. I, Gens, rescue Jews from death. I, Gens, destroy hideouts, and I, Gens try to procure more work passes and jobs. My main concern is Jewish lives, not Jewish honour. When they ask me to hand over a thousand Jews, yes, I hand them over. If I don’t, the Germans will come into the ghetto, take many thousands and leave the ghetto in a shambles… You are the people of art and literature. You people can give the filth in the ghetto a wide berth. And when you leave the ghetto someday, you’ll have clean hands and a pure conscience. But if I, Gens, will somehow survive, my hands will be soiled with dripping blood. (p.13-4)

The Germans shot him in the end anyway, but the role of Jewish collaborators like Jacob Gens remains controversial to this day.

The system of certificates indicating skilled worker protection status, is introduced. Again we see that Yitskhok is writing not in the immediate present but recalling the very recent past.

In our ghetto things are very troubled. The white certificates are replaced by yellow ones, very few of which are issued. Thus was born the yellow certificate, the bloody illusion which was such a tragedy for the Jews of Vilna. The days are filled with anticipation — days before a storm. People, helpless creatures, stagger around the little streets like animals that sense a storm. Everyone looks for a place to conceal himself, to save his life. They register themselves as relatives of those who have a yellow certificate. Fate has suddenly split the people of the ghetto into two parts. One part possesses the yellow certificate. They believe in the power of this piece of paper. It gives you the right to life. The other half — lost, helpless people who sense their downfall and do not know where to turn.

We do not have a yellow certificate. My parents, like hundreds of others, are running around feverishly. Something horrible is hanging in the air. (p.42)

The ‘something horrible’ is that when the skilled workers and their registered families have been allowed out of the ghetto for the day, the Germans liquidate the remaining people. People escape this fate by hiding in malines (cellars and attics, boarded up), Yitskhok’s family crushed in among them for six stifling hours. But when his mother gets hold of one of these coveted certificates, and they too line up for a reprieve from the inevitable, Yitskhok’s grandmother — like other old people — is not allowed to come with them, and they never see her again.

It’s heart-wrenching to see this boy’s optimism about the Red Army fighting back, and his delight in the school that starts up and fills his days with something fulfilling to do. This is what he wrote on 1st December 1942:

Today in school we had an assignment in class on the topic of ‘Images in Poverty’. I wrote extensively. I brought Reyzen’s stories up to date, related them to us and ended by saying that the ghetto is the final stage of generations of poverty. We will be the ones who will come out of the ghetto and throw off the poverty that for generations has oppressed the Jewish people. (p. 111)

And on 11th December after a club activity:

We were so happy, so happy. Song after song echoed. It is already twelve o’clock. We are as if intoxicated by the joy of youth. No one wants to go home. Songs are bawled out that simply do not want to stop. Late at night we disperse. Today we have proved we are young, young forever. ‘Behind walls, but nevertheless young, young forever.’ is our slogan with which we ‘march towards the sun’. Today we have shown that even the three little streets we can maintain our youthful fervour. We have shown that it will not be a broken youth that will emerge from the ghetto. From the ghetto will emerge a strong, hardened and spirited youth. (p. 117)

But Sarah Voloshin, his first cousin who rescued the diary when she escaped the last liquidation and was able to return to the family’s maline to find a family photo album, said afterwards that

… those final days had left Yitskhok depressed and resigned. He told her that he was ready to join his grandmother, whom the Germans had murdered in 1941. He missed her greatly, and made no effort to flee. (p.4)

Yitskhok was murdered in the Ponary massacre during the liquidation of the Vilna ghetto that took place in September–October 1943.

Today the Auschwitz Memorial Bluesky thread commemorates the brief life of Esther Polak (1937-1942) who was murdered when she was just five. Their post reads:

A Dutch Jewish girl, Esther Polak, was born in Amsterdam. She arrived at Auschwitz in a transport of 1010 Jews deported from Westerbork on 28 July 1942. She was murdered in a gas chamber after selection.

The Holocaust did not happen because Hitler was an evil man and everybody did what he said because they were afraid. It happened because there was antisemitism that stretched back into centuries, and was normalised by ordinary people who came to accept and participate in discrimination, violence and injustice against others. Click here to see the Anti-defamation League’s ‘pyramid of hate’ which shows how in our own time, biased attitudes and acts of bias, form a foundation for systemic discrimination, bias-motivated violence and genocide, which is the act or intent to deliberately and systematically annihilate an entire people.

Author: Yitskhok Rudashevski (1927-1943)
Title: The Rudashevski Diary (1941-1943), Jewish Quarterly November 2024
Introduction by Samuel D Kassow
Translated from the Yiddish by Solon Beinfeld
Publisher: Morry Schwarz, 2024, first published in English translation in 1973
ISBN: 9781760644376, pbk., 154 pages
Source: Subscription

Image credit: the portrait of Yitskhok on the front cover is cropped from a family portrait with his grandmother and cousins, which you can see at Wikipedia: By Unknown author – http://www.yadvashem.org/IMAGE_TYPE/7840.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34005631

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Posted in BOOK REVIEWS, Diary/Journal, Holocaust, Life Stories, Memoir, NONFICTION, Read in 2026, Translations | Tags: BOOK REVIEWS, Holocaust Memorial Day, Jewish Quarterly, The Rudashevski Diary (1941-1943), Yitskhok Rudashevski

Posted by: Lisa Hill | January 26, 2026

The Spoon and the Sea (2025), by Rachel Caplin

Shortlisted for the now defunct Vogel Award, The Spoon and the Sea is Rachel Caplin’s debut novel. This is the book description:

Ashi has always lived between the Arab island of Zanzibar where he was raised by his father, and the Jewish heritage of his British mother, Rose, who left when he was a child. Now, as Rose slips into the haze of dementia, she and Ashi begin an emotional journey to trace the fragments of a life lived apart.

From the leafy streets of Golders Green to the battle-scarred streets of British Mandate Palestine, through the spice markets of Zanzibar and into the soul of Jerusalem, The Spoon and the Sea is a sweeping, intimate novel about the fragile threads that bind us across generations, time and distance.

Inspired by true events and named a finalist for The Vogel Literary Award, this novel explores the ache of separation, the power of storytelling, and the possibility of healing before time runs out.

The book is structured cleverly to enable the retelling of missing parts of the mother-son relationship. As Rosa, Ashi’s British-born Jewish mother is slipping into the fog of dementia, Ashi finds that trading memories from particular years triggers her memories. Caplin handles the segues from past times and places into the present seamlessly.

Doors in my mother’s mind closed and opened without warning, and it was incumbent upon me to accept that.

We moved back out of the gazebo, leaving her untouched bowl of tinned fruit for the excitable flies. The coffee would surely be cold already. The sun glided behind a puffy cloud with outstretched arms. I willed the warmth to come back for her.

Slowly, the cloud passed, and my mother’s skin glowed again. “Now tell me, how did you meet that woman of yours?” she said. “I love a good love story.” (p. 92)

In this way Ashi learns her story of falling in love at university — with a Muslim from Zanzibar. He discovers the impact of her decision to follow her heart — how his parents held hands over the wide valley of religion —and how it disappointed Rose’s family who had expected her to be the first person from the Jewish community in Golders Green to graduate from Oxford. She shares how easily her love for university life led her to neglect her family ties and to question the values of her community.

Rose became enamoured by how different the place was from Golders Green, a community known for uniformity and adherence to tradition. It could be inviting to those who belonged, but it often treated ‘change’ and ‘different’ as rotten words. Newnham College was hardly a diverse place, but Rose expanded her horizons here, making the acquaintance of young women from outside the fold.

After one month, Rose saw her new self as part of the Newnham landscape.

The leaves, already starting to turn red, would soon burst into full auburn plumage. The winter snowfall would then turn the grounds into a white fairy-tale. She loved the old rituals, the formal hall dinners where they dressed up and toasted in Latin, the boat races against Oxford, the way students treated the library like a temple. (p.18)

In return, Ashi tells her about aspects of his own life. He shares how the life that began in a life of privilege in Zanzibar with a non-observant Muslim father was fractured into a life of not belonging anywhere.

She shares how her life in Zanzibar led to her abandoning Ashi when he was still a boy. She tells about her frustration at not being allowed to work because it would bring shame on the Chief Qadi [judge]. Where was the man who’d always encouraged her dreams of becoming a journalist at Oxford?

As the Sultan’s most trusted and senior vizier, Faisal afforded a bounty of domestic staff to care for their every need. The Al-Majid family had six full-time domestic staff. The gardening, cooking, cleaning and driving were responsibilities appointed to a loyal team who dutifully pruned, boiled, and dusted around the clock. One staff member was devoted entirely to the service of Faisal, and another entirely to the service of Rose.

For all the kind intentions, Rose’s wings had been well and truly clipped. (pp. 99-100)

In 1947, when the UN was debating the prospect of a Jewish homeland after the horrors of the Holocaust, Rose guesses that back in Golders Green her father was an activist for the cause. But she has to hide her efforts to learn what is happening. She borrows a wireless radio from one of the British expat wives and listens to it in secret. Her joy and relief when the partition of Palestine into two states was voted into being had to be hidden too, just as her Jewish identity had to be hidden in an Arab world. But it’s not that which drives her flight home to Britain, it’s the arrival of a second wife for Faisal.

For Ashi, moving on means shedding parts of his identity:

My father’s already diluted observance of Islam had become unrecognizably watered down by the time we were driven out of Zanzibar. In hindsight, I’m glad it was so, as it was one less skin to shed later in life. (p. 93)

For an Arab boy with a Jewish mother, there seems to be no safe place to be during the upheavals of postcolonial Africa. At different times he is betrayed by both sides of the family and by both his parents.

His father was hostile to Israel especially during the Gulf War, and was embarrassed by his son’s exile in Israel. Even though he was exempt from compulsory military service because of his Arab paternal line, they remain estranged.

But avoiding the military was not enough for my proud father, and we’d not spoken for many years, since I’d first ended up here and decided to stay. After painstakingly building a new status in Oman after the Revolution drove us away from Zanzibar, for him, public knowledge of his eldest son’s whereabouts would have been a disgrace. Our new homes were at war, and I wished desperately for peace with my father. (p. 94)

Just posting a letter from Israel to Oman involves taking a risk since it involves subterfuge, and visiting a dying father is even more risky. But taking a risk has become part of his DNA.

It is remarkable how a young man can be fearless when the world’s gloss has been rubbed off. Being a refugee can do that to a person. No longer shiny, the roughness around the edges becomes a new normal. You would think a man would be more hesitant before leaping from the cliff, knowing there are rocks at the bottom.

But in my experience, once you know there are rocks there, you know they are everywhere. Rocks on the sandbank can be stonefish, poisonous berries, fuel surcharges, Shin Bet agents, or cunning old men. (p. 302).

Without a family, Ashi yearns to make a new one of his own, despite an identity of not belonging anywhere:

I was the schoolboy with ants in my pants. I was the son of the Chief Qadi, with skin a few shades darker or lighter than everyone else’s. I was the brother who didn’t belong to Najat. I was a refugee in Kenya who didn’t fit in. I was the fisherman’s apprentice who defended the Jews. Forever a square peg in a field of round holes, it was time to stop trying to fit in and find something else to do, some different way to be. (p. 303)

In Israel amid so many mere remnants of family and community, he forms a wonderful relationship with Catani. But she betrays him too.

All this is a compelling story, with twists and turns and unexpected diversions. But for those of us who’ve had the experience of losing a loved one to dementia, the sections in the present are a real strength in the novel. Most of us learn the hard way, how to navigate the complexities of maintaining a loving relationship through to the end of a dementia journey. And as Caplin shows through the belated appearance of Ashi’s stepsister Dinah, it’s not learned through belated, spasmodic visits; it emerges through day-to-day experience and guidance from skilled nursing staff.

Based on the author’s experience with her own grandmother, she depicts how Ashi steers his mother through diagnosis, through going into care, and eventually through that very painful realisation that dementia is a terminal illness that shuts down bodily functions because the brain no longer issues instructions to swallow, to move and eventually to breathe.

As I was, Ashi is fortunate with staff who recognise that there is a need to care for family as well as the loved one nearing the end.

This is such a terrific book, I investigated to see who won the Vogel that year. It was A Place near Eden (2022) by Nell Pierce, which I reviewed here.

And the title? It comes from a Yiddish proverb: You cannot empty the sea with a spoon.

Rachel Caplin is an Israeli author who was born and raised in Perth, Western Australia.

Author: Rachel Caplin
Title: The Spoon and the Sea
Publisher: Independently published, 2025
Cover design ~~not credited~~ [LH edit 27/1/26]: Rachel Caplin**
ISBN: 9798900010632, Kindle edition, 358 pages
Source: Kindle Unlimited (trial*)

* I decided to give Kindle Unlimited a try but it is a waste of money. It doesn’t offer the full range of books, so it’s useless for the occasional book I might want to buy because I can’t get it anywhere else.

** Update 27/1/26: I had a lovely email from Rachel explaining that she was the one who designed the cover, but had thought she shouldn’t credit herself!

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Posted in Ageing / Coming of Age / Bildungsroman, Aust 2025, Australian authors, BOOK REVIEWS, C21st by Aust women, CAPLIN Rachel, Dementia, Displacement, migration & refugees, eBooks, England (settings), FICTION — AUSTRALIAN, Israel, can include Palestine pre 1948 (settings), Israeli authors, Purchased, Read in 2026, War, armed conflict & its aftermath, Western Australian authors | Tags: BOOK REVIEWS, Rachel Caplin, The Spoon and the Sea

Posted by: Lisa Hill | January 24, 2026

The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (1308-1321), 1984 translation by Mark Musa, 1985 Penguin Edition, #16 Paradiso, Cantos 25-33

Before I begin, I want to thank the readers who’ve been with me on this journey. Without your encouragement I might have felt as if I were writing into the void and might not have persevered. The fact that I am here at the end of the Paradiso is thanks to you.

Following on from my previous posts about the Purgatorio; the Inferno; and the Paradiso, we now conclude the Paradiso using Volume 3 of Mark Musa’s excellent translation and notes.

Canto XXV

This canto begins with what seems like a surprising request: here at the portal to heaven which is where all good believers would like to be, Dante expresses his hope that this poetic masterpiece will enable his return to Florence and there at the site of his baptism into the faith receive the poet’s crown. This is another glimpse of the private pain his exile continues to inflict on Dante the poet.

If ever it happen that this sacred poem
to which both Heaven and earth have set their hand,
and made me lean from labouring so long,

wins over those cruel hearts that exile me
from my sweet fold where I grew up a lamb,
for to the wolves that war up it now,

with a changed voice and with another fleece,
I shall return, a poet, and at my own
baptismal font assume the laurel wreath (Canto XXV, Lines 1-9)

(That would be why we see paintings of Dante wearing a laurel crown, including this posthumous one by Botticelli).

This query prompts Beatrice to intervene. It’s time for the ‘second examination’ and she asks St James to interrogate Dante about Hope. What is Hope? What is its source? What does it promise? With a bit of help from Beatrice on the second question, Dante gets the answers right, but it’s all about hope in God which is not all that inspirational for those secular souls like mine who hopes are for a better world here on earth. Whatever about that, (Yay! some music!!) the souls all sing Sperent in te. (‘They hope in you’, but NB this Latin verb is in the subjunctive, indicating conditionality.) Here it is:

Peter, James and John join in the dance, prompting Dante to wonder about the truth of the medieval legend about St John’s body ascending to heaven with his soul. St John says no, this belief is false. His body returned to dust on earth and that until the Day of Judgement only Christ and the Virgin Mary possess both body and soul, and Dante should enlighten those on earth who give credence to it. Thanks to the excessive brilliance of this sphere of heaven, Dante suddenly find that he has lost his sight and can no longer see Beatrice.

Canto XXVI

As we knew he would (because how could he write the poem otherwise?) Dante gets his sight back when he correctly answers St John’s third question: what is the goal of love, and how and why is he drawn to it.

The instant I stopped speaking, all of Heaven
filled with sweet singing, as my lady joined
the others chanting ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’. (Canto XXVI, Lines 67-69)

I would have liked to find this hymn in a version with a soprano breaking through the male voices, but this male voice choir’s rendition of Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus is rather nice:

And now Adam joins the assembly, and it is Dante’s turn to ask questions.

Musa’s summarises these queries: Dante wants to know how long ago he was created, how much time did he spend in the Earthly Paradise, what did he do to provoke God’s wrath, and what language did he speak. Interesting questions, eh? We all know the answer to the third one (but still, it’s nice to see that he doesn’t blame Eve) but the last one fascinates anyone who is interested in how human language emerged. Dante, could not of course have known what we know now about the hyoid bone of early humans and how it’s an integral part of human speech, so his explanation is naïve.

The language that I spoke was long extinct
before that unaccomplishable task
entered the minds of Nimrod’s followers; [i.e. the Tower of Babel]

no product of the human mind can last
eternally for, as all things in Nature,
man’s inclination varies with the stars.

That man should speak is only natural,
but how he speaks, in this way or in that,
Nature allows you to do as you please. (Canto XXVI, Lines 124-132)

Musa’s notes point out that by this time Dante has moved through the hierarchy of these heavens, and is now in the eighth sphere. Adam is here at the summit of the ‘human hierarchy’ as the father of the human race and the only being created mature and perfect. Plus, that middle tercet is a reminder of medieval ideas about astronomy:

The turning of the heavenly spheres affects the operations of Nature and beneath the sphere of the moon, including the human mind, which is a variable thing. (Musa, p, 317)

Canto XXVII

The Gloria is the prayer of Benedictine monks…

But as they stop singing, the light emitting from St Peter changes to red and he launches into a tirade against the corruption of the Church.

and I heard, ‘Do not marvel at my change
of colour, for you are about to see
all of these souls change colour as I speak.

He on earth who usurps that place of mine,
that place of mine, that place of mine which now
stands vacant in the eyes of Christ, God’s son,

has turned my sepulchre into a sewer
of blood and filth, at which the Evil One
who fell from here takes great delight down there.’ (Canto XXVII, Lines 19-27)

Strong words, eh, and note that repetition of ‘that place of mine’. Dante is told that when he returns to earth he must tell about what he has seen, and then all the souls ascend to the Empyrean, leaving Dante and Beatrice to watch them go. But Beatrice does that thing where she tells Dante to look down and lo! they are transported up to the ninth sphere of the Primum Mobile. (Click here to see the diagram that shows you where they are now that they have left the Sphere of the Fixed Stars.)

Beatrice explains that the Primum Mobile is the starting point of everything in the universe:

The nature of the, which still
its centre while it makes all else revolve,
moves from this heaven as from its starting point;

no there ‘Where’ than in the Mind of God
contains this heaven, because in that Mind burns
the love that turns it and the power it rains.

By circling light and love it is contained
as it contains the rest; and only He
Who bound them comprehends how they were bound.

It takes its motion from no other sphere,
and all the other measure theirs by this. (Canto XXVII, Lines 106-116)

This sent me back to Part C of my post about C S Lewis and The Discarded Image. To quote my own imperfect understanding of this medieval concept…

God as the transcendent and immaterial power behind the First Movement, the Primum Mobile, starts the rotations of the spheres. He occupies no place and is not affected by Time. But he can’t be moving anything because this theory demands that the end point be an unmoving Mover. Aristotle solved this conundrum by saying He moves as beloved i.e. as an object of desire moves those who desire it. Therefore the Primum Mobile is moved by its love of God, and thus makes the rest of the universe move.

There are two senses of this Love of God:

the aspiring love of creatures for Him, and

His provident and descending love for them.

Beatrice then has a bit of rant about the greed of mankind and the absence of anyone governing earth as it should be governed, so the human family goes astray. She finishes up with the optimistic promise that things will be set straight before long, which gives Dante the opportunity to use the enigmatic ‘before all January is unwintered/because of every hundred years’ odd day’. (Lines 142-44). Musa explains what Dante is alluding to:

The Julian calendar made the year 365 days and 6 hours long. Due to this inaccuracy the solar year gained one day per century over the regular year. Thus, in less than 90 centuries [i.e. about 2221 AD] under this system January would have been shifted into spring. (In 1852, Gregory XIII corrected this error in the calendar.) (p.329)

So we’ve only got a couple of hundred years to go before things get sorted out here on Earth…

Canto XXVIII

This canto is a bit arcane, to say the least, but at least there’s music. Dante sees nine spheres spinning around but they don’t look the way he thinks they ought to. Musa tells us that Beatrice explains that what he is seeing is the physical universe from the spiritual point of view from God’s eye, as it were, with God at the centre. The fiery circles sing

… ‘Hosanna’ choir on choir
to the Fixed Point that holds each to its ubi [Latin for ‘where’ i.e. place]
the place they were and will forever be. (Canto XXVIII, Lines 94-96)

Beatrice then names the order of angels, their functions and their hierarchies. (You might want to take a look at my first post about C S Lewis’s The Discarded Image to read about celestial hierarchies.)

Moving on…

Canto XXIX

Beatrice gives us a dissertation about the angels. She offers clarifications about human misconceptions of angels, e.g. that angels don’t have memories because they see everything through God. Then (not quite what I expected in a heavenly realm) she goes off-piste with a bit of a rant about show-offs inflating their own self-importance with grandiose theories about the scriptures. Illustrated in this lovely miniature from Giovanni de Paolo we can see Satan lurking in the preacher’s cowl, and the figure at the back is the founder of monasticism, St Anthony of Padua, whose emblem is a hog as a symbol of the Devil’s temptations. According to Musa,

The monks of his order kept herds of swine which ran free through the towns and which the people fed and fattened because of religious superstition. When Dante says in this verse On this Saint Anthony fattens his pig, he means that these preachers now make money by playing on the credulity of the people (Line 121), just as the order of Saint Anthony long ago fattened their pigs by allowing their parishioners to feed them. (Musa, p 350)

After this digression, there’s more about the angels, who are so plentiful that the human mind can’t imagine it. (Gosh, it must be crowded up there in heaven by now, not just billions of people who saw the light or repented just in time but scads of angels as well!)

But do not think that any of this is for God’s aggrandisement…

Not to increase His good, which cannot be,
but rather that His own reflected glory
in its resplendence might proclaim I am

in His eternity, beyond all time,
beyond all comprehension, as pleased Him,
new loves blossomed from the Eternal love. (Canto XXIX, Lines 13-18)

Enough already…

Canto XXX

The nine circles fade away and we are in the Empyrean. Again Dante is briefly blinded but then sees a river of light — but what he thinks are flowers on its banks are the souls of the Elect, forming a rose.

Between the rose and God, there are angels flying ceaselessly. This image, from Experimental Theology, likens them to bees, pollinating the rose, an allusion made more explicit in the next canto.

There’s not a lot of room left in the centre of the rose, but one of the remaining spots, says Beatrice, is for Henry VII who tried and failed to reform Italy because Pope Clement V sabotaged his efforts. She predicts he’ll be damned, recalling that gruesome image of each new arrival in the Eighth Circle of Hell shoving his predecessor (in this case Boniface VIII) deeper down into his hole for simony.

‘But God will not permit him to stay long
in Holy Office: he shall be thrust down,
where Simon Magus pays his guilt, and he

shall stuff the Alagnese deeper down!’ (Canto XXX, Line 145-148)

Beatrice’s glee seems a little undignified, eh?

Canto XXXI

Well, well, it looks like Beatrice has got her spot in the rose, (#HierarchiesAgain) third from the highest tier). She is enthroned where her own merit destined her, and as Musa explains in the Notes:

The first row in the amphitheatre of the Rose is that of Mary, the second is Eve’s, and the third is Rachel’s. Beside Rachel sits Beatrice. Thus Contemplation (Rachel) and Revelation (Beatrice) are side by side. Beatrice’s position in the Rose is a matter of preordained grace bestowed upon her by God when he breathed life into her soul. (Musa p 372).

(Rachel, we learn in the Notes to the next canto, was the second wife of the Patriarch Jacob and mother of Benjamin and Joseph, who, Wikipedia tells us, were two of the twelve progenitors of the tribes of Israel.(Genesis, 29:9 and 30:1-24). She was one of the souls released from Limbo in the Inferno IV, line 60, when Christ descended into Hell, and she represents Contemplation.)

But Dante is busy enthusing about the Divine Light he can see (unimpeded by all those angels flying in between) and fails to notice that Beatrice has gone from his side until he turns around and find an old man there instead. His new guide turns out to be St Bernard of Padua who was the force behind the Second Crusade. He urges Dante to shift his gaze from Beatrice far above him in all her glory crowned/by the reflections of eternal light…but instead to end all desire and to concentrate instead on the Virgin Mary one whom his spiritual progress now depends.

‘My son of grace’, he spoke again, ‘this state
of blissful being will not be known to you
as long as you keep your eyes fixed down here;

look up into the circles, to the highest
until your eyes behold, enthroned, the Queen
who holds as subject this devoted realm.’ (Canto XXXI, Lines 112-117)

Mary’s beauty surpasses anything Dante has ever seen, and as is his wont, he can’t even attempt to describe her. Countless artists have tried it, however, including this colourised version of Gustave Doré’s etching. (The detail is clearer even than in my Barnes and Noble Longfellow translation with Doré’s B&W etchings throughout.)

Canto XXXII

Hmm, the figures in Doré’s etching don’t quite correspond to Dante’s hierarchy. Musa’s summary explains it succinctly:

A line of souls bisects the Rose vertically, separating those who believed in Christ before His coming from those who believed afterwards. The Virgin is in the highest seat and heads the half of the line containing Hebrew women (Christ to come); St John the Baptist heads the half comprised of male saints (Christ already come). When St Bernard instructs the Pilgrim to focus his gaze on the Virgin in order to acquire sufficient grace to contemplate Christ, he sees the angel Gabriel hail her with outspread wings, and all the souls respond in song. Then St Bernard points out the position of other prominent souls: Adam and Moses; St Peter and St John the Evangelist; St Anne, the mother of the Virgin; and St Lucy, who, by inviting Beatrice to come to the aid of her lover, set the Divine Comedy in motion. (Musa, p 376)

There’s music, the Ave Maria. It’s a bit anachronistic, but we are spoiled for choice with Schubert’s 1825 version of Ave Maria, gratia plena: the great Jessye Norman; Luciano Pavarotti and Renée Fleming and the angelic voice of Maria Callas:

The penultimate Canto XXXII segues into Canto XXXIII with a prayer…

Canto XXXIII

St Bernard prays to the Virgin that Dante will be able to see God’s glory.

In you in tenderness, in you is pity,
in you munificence—in you unites
all that is good in God’s created beings.

This is a man who from the deepest pit
of all the universe up to this height
has witnessed, one by one, the lives of souls

who begs you that you grant him through your grace
the power to raise his vision higher still
to penetrate the final blessedness. (Canto XXXIII, Lines 19-27)

He prays too for Dante to stay the course once he has returned to earth, and he invokes all the prayers of the other Blest:

I pray you also, Queen who can achieve
your every wish, keep his affections sound
once he has had the vision and returns.

Protect him from the stirrings of the flesh:
you see, with Beatrice, all the Blest,
hands clasped in prayer, are praying for my prayer. (Canto XXXIII, Lines 34-39)

Dante is thus enabled to see the Divine Light, in the three circles of the Trinity. He is mystified at first, until his mind is illuminated by the Truth.

As the geometer who tries so hard
to square the circle, but cannot discover,
think as he may, the principle involved,

so did I strive with this new mystery:
I yearned to know how could our image fit
into that circle, how could it conform;

but my own wings could not take me so high—
then a great flash of understanding struck
my mind, and suddenly its wish was granted.

At this point power failed high fantasy
but, like a wheel in perfect balance turning,
I felt my will and my desire impelled

by the Love that moves the sun and the other stars. (Canto XXXIII, Lines 133-145)

And so ends Dante’s journey, with a vision of the stars that were at there at the very beginning, and at the end of each canticle where his eyes were fixed upon the stars.

And now, to celebrate getting to the end of The Divine Comedy, here’s some medieval street music from Ensemble Anonymous & Strada:

All posts in this series:

The Cone-Gatherers (1955), by Robin Jenkins

The Cone-Gatherers (1955) was Robin Jenkins’ fourth novel, and it is outstanding. IMHO it belongs in the pantheon of great 20th century novelists and I wasn’t surprised to learn that it featured as a set text in the Scottish curriculum for many years.

This is the book description from my King Penguin edition:

While the Second World War rages overseas, the life of a large Scottish country estate flows on, lapped by the seasons and enfolded in tradition. Ruled by the equivocal, confused Lady Runcie-Campbell and dominated by Duror the gamekeeper, it seems a world untouched by the tides of destruction.

But as he moves through the forest the brooding figure of Duror undergoes a monstrous transformation. Driven by pent-up love and obsessive hatred to hunt down the small, hunchbacked cone-gatherer, he seeks — and finds — terrible apotheosis.

Written by one of Scotland’s finest novelists, The Cone-Gatherers is an extraordinary story of violence, lost innocence and sorrow — at its heart the unresolvable mystery of evil, counterpointed by a terrible redemption.

The authenticity of this story comes from Jenkins’ own experience as a conscientious objector doing forestry work, and it seems to me that some of his concerns involve working through conflicted attitudes of the times — not only his own feelings, but also those that emerged among the other COs with whom he worked. Far from being offstage, as the book descriptions implies, the war is there in many references. The figure of Duror is evil personified, symbolising the irrational hatreds of the Nazi regime. But there are also acknowledgements of the heroism of those fighting it. The local doctor, chafing under wartime rationing, has a nephew in the Merchant Navy and is well aware that these convoys are dangerous and heroic. Tulloch the forester has a brother killed at Dunkirk, and Maggie, the stoic waitress in the café, has a sister whose windows in Greenock had been blown in by a bomb.

I’d love to be eavesdropping in a senior class that’s discussing the idea that the unresolvable mystery of evil is counterpointed by a terrible redemption. Who is redeemed by the climactic act of horror and does Jenkins resolve the complex question of conscientious objection to wars against monstrous evil? In a sequence that does not spare the reader from the disgusting, offensive thoughts of a man like Duror, Jenkins clearly represents the horror of the Nazi program of exterminating people with a disability. This passage forces the reader to confront the moral complexity of conscientious objection when there is evil that must be overcome.

Duror had read that the Germans were putting idiots and cripples to death in gas chambers. Outwardly, as everybody expected, he condemned such barbarity; inwardly, thinking of idiocy and crippledness not as abstractions but as embodied in the crouchbacked cone-gatherer, he had profoundly approved. (p.21-22)

He thought how incomprehensible and unjust it was that in Europe, in Africa and in China, many tall, strong, healthy, brave, intelligent men were killing one another, while in this dirty little hut those two sub-humans lived in peace, as if under God’s protection. He could not understand that, and he was sure nobody could. (p.22)

It’s because the narration ranges across the thoughts and conversations of the main characters, that the sense of foreboding grows in intensity.

Jenkins also makes clear that wartime manpower regulations affected everyone, including the COs who lost any sense of personal agency when they were despatched from their usual occupations and places of residence to support the war effort indirectly. In the novel some of these experienced scorn and abuse, but not from Neil and Calum. They are not COs, and Neil would enlist if not for the need to care for his brother, whom he dearly loved. But like the COs, thy are moved about like chess pieces and have no choice about the work they do, because they are poor and because there are few options for a worker with disabilities like Calum’s. Although Calum is deft and capable in the trees, their work is undervalued and so they are reliant on the good will of Mr Tullloch the forester, and on the grudging acceptance of Lady Runcie-Campbell who tolerates their presence on her estate only if they are out of sight and out of mind.

The representation of the underclass is potent. Time and again Jenkins shows how Lady Runcie-Campbell’s sense of the superiority of her class makes her blind to the way people are used without any concern for their welfare. The estate dogs are better fed and housed than Calum and Neil who live in a foul hut — small as a rabbit hutch, and as filthy —without adequate protection from the weather. Despite Neil’s plea that Calum not be dragooned into the hunt because he can’t bear to see animals harmed, Lady Runcie-Campbell won’t hear of it because she can’t tolerate the idea that a man such as Calum cares more for animals than she does for the humans she exploits.

Graham the handyman is too old and infirm to be a beater and was previously injured in a hunt but he is also merely someone to be used by Lady Runcie-Campbell for the hunt she wants on a whim — to please her brother before he goes back to war. He warns Neil:

‘Let me give you some advice,’ he said grimly. ‘When we get near the guns, drop down on your face as if you were praying for your life; and that’s exactly what you will be doing, for there’s a man yonder with a gun that’s as blind as a mole and shouldn’t be trusted with a pea-shooter. He damned near shot the arse off me. I didn’t even see the deer. I was too busy finding breath and picking bramble hooks out of my hands. The guns started banging as if I’d wandered into the middle of the war itself. I did what any sensible man would have done. I ran for the nearest tree, but this blind character took me for a deer and banged away at me. Damned if he missed too. Now you would think that that man would never be trusted with a gun again as long as he, or anybody else, lived. You’d think, in a sensible world, nobody would allow him another chance for murder. Well I’m warning you that he’s yonder, at the far end, waiting, with a gun and an itching finger, to let fly at any living thing, deer or man, that bursts out of the wood. There are men getting medals for far less than what we’re going to face.’ (p.85)

As Iain Crichton-Smith says in the Introduction, the novel has some similarities with Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (1937), but

…because of his Scottish background Jenkins has succeeded better than Steinbeck in showing us the forces that attack the innocent and weak for, of course, it is not true, in Yeats’s phrase, that the beautiful and the innocent have not enemy but time. […] The fable of Jenkins’ book [has] more power to move us because of the complex linkage of symbols… (p.4)

There is so much more that I could say about this book, but the tradies are coming to deconstruct and then reconstruct The Shed tomorrow and the power will be on and off for most of the day, so I plan to loaf on the sofa with Shokoofeh Azar’s amazing second novel The Gowkaran Tree in the Middle of our Kitchen (Europa, 2015, ISBN 9798889660989). (Readers might remember that I was impressed by her first novel The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree (2017) which was subsequently nominated for multiple prizes including the International Booker.)

While I like the cover of the King Penguin edition that I read, which depicts a figure suspended perilously on a branch while a sinister figure looms at the edge of the trees, I also like the First Edition because (for those of us not so familiar with European trees) it shows the cones that were being gathered!

Author: Robin Jenkins (OBE, 1912-2005)
Title: The Cone-Gatherers
Publisher: King Penguin (Penguin Books) 1983, first published 1955
Cover illustration by Grizelda Holderness
ISBN: 9780140062922, pbk., 223 pages
Source: personal library, purchased from World of Books via AbeBooks, $2.07USD

21 Comments

Posted in BOOK REVIEWS, British authors, Classics, FICTION — OTHER, Jenkins Robin, Read in 2026, Scotland (settings), Scottish authors | Tags: BOOK REVIEWS, Robin Jenkins, The Cone-Gatherers

Posted by: Lisa Hill | January 18, 2026

The Eye Opener (1982), by Geoffrey Dutton

A-hem, my timing for this review could perhaps be better, but I swear that I began reading this novella before current events made the Adelaide Festival topical. And now I’m catching up with belated reviews…

Geoffrey Dutton was a founder of the Adelaide Festival back in the 1960s and The Eye Opener is his satirical salute from the harassed 1980s to the sleepy South Australia of the 1960s.

This is the book description from the inside front jacket:

The scene is set against the backdrop of preparations for the first Adelaide Festival of Arts.

The reader first encounters Sir Lumley Lapwing in London from Adelaide in search of a Publicity and Liaison Officer for the upcoming festival. He spends an afternoon with his old friend, Lord Rumblebridge, lingering over an elegant and very liquid lunch. In due course Lord Rumblebridge describes to Sir Lumley the perfect man for the job — Ralph Bustard, nephew of the Earl of Appledown.

‘First rate,’ says Lord Rumblebridge. ‘Got a DSO and DFC, Spitfires. Then he was dropped into France working for the Resistance. He’s got a Croix de Guerre… Balliol man. Speaks several languages. Been everywhere…’ Sir Lumley is impressed and Ralph is subsequently hired.

However, Ralph is not quite what he seems, and this is true of a number of the characters in the book.

There’s more, but you get the drift.

As a founder of the festival, Dutton was poking fun at himself and Adelaide’s ambitions to be the cultural capital of Australia, but still, even in 1982 when this was published, some of it is offensive in a Barry Humphries kind of way. I don’t think it’s Presentism to say that he, and his publisher the University of Queensland Press, should have known better than to use the ‘N-word’ or to make jokes about clerical abuse of schoolboys. Even in satire.

Anyway…

BEWARE: SPOILERS. (This book is long out of print and not likely ever to be reissued.)

Ralph Bustard has been head-hunted in Britain because of the cultural cringe that afflicted so many aspects of Australian life in the years before the Whitlam government(1972-75). But notwithstanding his recommendation by titled ‘connections’ in the UK, Ralph is a fraud. He’s not Appledown’s nephew, he’s his son by a French-Senegalese housekeeper. He’s not a ‘Balliol man’; he worked in their kitchens before joining the RAF in the war. He bought his medals in a pawn shop because was only ever ground crew, and his smart clothes are courtesy of a not-really-adequate annual allowance from his father’s Will. He does speak multiple languages despite an inadequate education because he picked them up when the household travelled in Africa, Egypt and Turkey.

When Ralph arrives in Australia, he’s billeted with Lady Wire along with her widowed daughter Alison and three children. Despite a dalliance with Clarissa he falls for Alison, and when he proposes at the end of the story, it’s not clear whether he’s going to come clean with her or with anybody else.

There’s another fraud, who’s a real con man masquerading as a clergyman and teacher. Since it takes one to know one, Ralph soon recognises this and thus raises the issue of whether he should be exposed. Some of Dutton’s characters seem to think it doesn’t matter since he’s not harming anyone. Contemporary readers are unlikely to agree.

I bought this book, along with a couple of others, because when I was at university I had read from cover to cover a book that Dutton had edited. It was The Literature of Australia (1964, reissued 1976) and it’s still one of the most comprehensive surveys of OzLit I’ve come across though it’s obviously out of date by now. Although I don’t think Dutton himself was a great novelist, I was impressed by the originality of his novel Tamara which I read for the 1970 Club. But although there may be reviews tucked away in academic bookshelves, I couldn’t find any for his novels, which is why I think it’s important to share my impressions of The Eye Opener.

I nearly abandoned it. Dutton’s intention was obviously to satirise racism, snobbery, the cultural cringe and hypocritical attitudes to sexuality, but it is uncomfortably outrageous.

How strange it is that the Adelaide Festival should be outrageous now in an entirely different way…

Author: Geoffrey Dutton
Title: The Eye Opener
Publisher: University of Queensland Press, 1982
Cover art and design by Luke Perkins
ISBN: 0702216224, hbk., 151 pages
Source: Personal library, purchased from Bookwood Booksellers, via AbeBooks, $6 not counting postage

The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (1308-1321), 1984 translation by Mark Musa, 1985 Penguin Edition, #15 Paradiso, Cantos 17-24

Well here we are at the end of another week of Shed Hell, we have four days left to get the last of the stuff out of the shed (and have of course left the hardest stuff till last) and I haven’t written my review of Robin Jenkins The Cone Gatherers or Geoffrey Dutton’s The Eye Opener. Dante, however, must not be deferred because I am determined to do the last one next week. So onward!

Following on from my previous posts about the Purgatorio; the Inferno; and the Paradiso, we now continue the Paradiso using Volume 3 of Mark Musa’s excellent translation and notes.

Canto XVII

Canto XVII is prophetic, more than Dante the Poet knew or may have hoped for.

Beatrice tells Dante the Pilgrim to release the flame of his consuming wish and so he asks his illustrious ancestor Cacciaguida about what his own fate will be. He explains that

While I was still in Virgil’s company,
climbing the mountain where the souls are healed,
descending through the kingdom of the dead

ominous words about my future life
were said to me… (Canto XVII, Lines 19-22)

And his great-grandfather tells him what lies in store: betrayal, injustice and exile.

As Hippolytus was forced to flee from Athens
by his devious and merciless stepmother,
just so you too shall have to leave your Florence.

So it is willed, so it is being planned,
and shall be done soon by the one who plots
it there where daily Christ is up for sale.

The public will, as always, blame the party
that has been wronged; vengeance that Truth demands,
although shall yet bear witness to the truth.

You shall be forced to leave behind those things
you love most dearly, and this is the first
arrow the bow of your exile will shoot.

And you will know how salty* is the taste
of others’ bread, how hard the road that takes
you down and up the stairs of others’ homes.

But what will weigh you down the most will be
the despicable, senseless company
whom you shall have to bear in that sad vale;

and all ungrateful, all completely mad
and vicious, they shall turn on you, but soon
their cheeks, not yours, will have to blush from shame.

Proof of their bestiality will show
through their own deeds! It will be to your honour
to have become a party of your own. (Canto XVII, Lines 46-69)

* Here’s a little snippet that Musa doesn’t mention in the Notes. He does, of course, explain that Dante will know the sadness of depending on others for food and lodging, and that is true. But it’s also a reference to the fact, established in the Middle Ages, that after a tax dispute with Pisa, Tuscans did not (and still don’t) put salt in their bread. So these words in the prophecy alert Dante the Pilgrim and all those who read or heard The Divine Comedy in its day, to the sad reality that Dante the Poet is destined to be homeless far beyond his native Tuscany, where even the bread — the staff of life — will be alien to him.

These poignant words seem more like a curse than a prophecy, but Cacciaguida goes on with some words of comfort. He tells the Pilgrim that his first host will be the great Lombard, who is identified by Musa as Bartolommeo della Scala of Verona, and Dante will not need to beg from him:

and he will hold you in such high regard
that in your give and take relationship
the one will give before the other asks. (Canto XVII, Lines 73-75)

And not only that, Dante can expect good things from the Lord’s son who will affect the fate of many men, rich men and beggars changing their estate. Cacciaguida goes on to say that Dante will have a future that will outlast them all:

No envy to your neighbours should you bear,
for you will have a future that endures
far longer than their crime and punishment. (Canto XVII, Lines 97-99)

Dante, Beatrice & Cacciaguida by Francesco Scaramuzza

And that is certainly true. Dante did, literally, outlive his nemesis Pope Boniface VIII, but his fame has lasted for centuries.

Canto XVIII

Dante is pondering the bittersweet fate that lies in store, when Beatrice commands him to look at her eyes filled with Divine Love and think other thoughts. As he does so, he is transported from the rosy glow of the fifth sphere of Mars to the silvery sixth sphere of Jupiter.

What does C S Lewis have to say about the medieval view of the planet Jupiter?

Jupiter, the King, produces in the earth, rather disappointingly, tin; this shining metal said different things to the imagination before the canning industry came in. The character he produces in men would now be very imperfectly expressed by the word ‘jovial’, and is not very easy to grasp; it is no longer, like the saturnine character, one of our archetypes. We may say it is Kingly; but we must think of a King at peace, enthroned, taking his leisure, serene. The Jovial character is cheerful, festive yet temperate, tranquil, magnanimous. When this planet dominates we may expect halcyon days and prosperity. In Dante wise and just princes go to his sphere when they die. He is the best planet, and is called The Greater Fortune, Fortuna Major. C S Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (pp. 91-92). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.)

It seems to me that Dante focuses more on justice than joviality, and that he is interested in a somewhat muscular version of justice, but we shall see…

Soldier-souls cast their light to spell the words: Diligite iustitiam qui iudicatis terram. These words mean ‘Love justice, you who judge the earth’ and they come from The Book of Wisdom of Solomon in the Apocrypha. More lights descend, singing, and they form the neck and head of an eagle. (Ok, the artist who created the image below for an illuminated manuscript used blue instead of silver, but if he took the opportunity to use the most expensive paint for his wealthy patron, why not?)

Dante and Beatrice ascending to the Heaven of Jupiter

From Line 120 Dante addresses his bitter thoughts about the Pope, who has forgotten the words of Saints Peter and Paul who died/to save the vineyard you despoil.

Canto XIX

Ah, ok, the Eagle has some discouraging news: man is weak, but not so weak that he doesn’t see that its own Principle/is far beyond what our eyes can perceive.

And so the vision granted to your world
can no more fathom Justice Everlasting
than eyes can see down to the ocean floor:

while you can see the bottom near the shore,
you cannot out at sea; but nonetheless
it is still there, concealed by depths too deep. (Canto XIX, Lines 58-63)

So no, he’s not going to answer Dante’s enduring question: what justice is there in damning a good soul who, through no fault of his own, has not heard of Christ and has not been baptised? Indeed, the eagle gets quite cranky and — dare I say it of a heavenly creature? — rather abusive towards poor old Dante, who is, after all, only asking a question which has bothered theologians and ordinary believers for centuries.

Now who are you to sit in judgement’s seat
and pass on things a thousand miles away,
when you can hardly see beyond your nose?

The man who would argue fine points with me,
if holy Scripture were not there to guide us,
surely would have serious grounds for doubt.

O earthbound creatures! O thick-headed men!
The Primal Will, which of Itself is good,
never moves from Itself, the Good Supreme. (Canto XIX, Lines 79-87)

There is more of this, but you get the drift. Don’t ask impertinent questions.

Dante and Beatrice before the Eagle of Justice

Canto XX

Ah, here we get Champions of Justice on earth:

King David
the Emperor Trajan
Hezekiah
the Emperor Constantine a.k.a. Constantine the Great
King William II of Naples and Sicily
the Trojan Ripheus (who gets a mention in Virgil’s Aeneid)

Did you notice? There’s a couple of pagans in that list, and Dante has the temerity to ask ‘how come’? The eagle delivers another (not quite so mocking) putdown:

‘I see you believe these things are true
because I say them, but you see not how;
thus, though they are believed, their truth is hid.

You do as one who apprehends a thing
by name, but cannot see its quiddity
unless someone explains it for his sake.

Trajan

Musa explains that there was a legend that Pope Gregory prayed so hard for Trajan to be redeemed because he consoled a grieving mother (see Purgatorio, Canto X, Lines 73-93) that he was brought back to life, baptised pronto and was therefore redeemed.

For Ripheus, let’s quote from Wikipedia here (footnotes and unnecessary links removed):

In his Divine Comedy, Dante placed Ripheus in Heaven, in the sixth sphere of Jupiter, the realm of those who personified justice.

Here, he provides an interesting foil to Virgil himself—whom Dante places in the first circle of Hell, with the pagans and the unbaptized—even though Virgil is a major character in the Commedia and for much of it remains Dante’s guide through Hell and Purgatory. Although Ripheus would historically have been a pagan, in Dante’s work he is portrayed as having been given a vision of Jesus over a thousand years before Christ’s first coming, and was thus converted to Christianity in the midst of the Trojan War.

So Ripheus gets a leave pass a thousand years before Christ, while Virgil is left among the pagans in Hell. Some justice, eh? I do not believe that Dante the poet-philosopher was satisfied with this, and chose these examples to show just how random Divine Justice appeared to be.

Let’s have some music. Gustav Holst was more interested in Jupiter as the planet bringing jollity.

Canto XXI

Gosh, this is one of those sudden transitions. We’re in the Sphere of Saturn, which is the transition point between the six lower spheres (see the diagram of the hierarchy of the heavens here) and those above: we’re nearly at the Sphere of the Fixed Stars and after that it’s the Primum Mobile!

Again I turn to C S Lewis:

Saturn. In the earth his influence produces lead; in men, the melancholy complexion; in history, disastrous events. In Dante his sphere is the Heaven of contemplatives. He is connected with sickness and old age. Our traditional picture of Father Time with the scythe is derived from earlier pictures of Saturn. A good account of his activities in promoting fatal accidents, pestilence, treacheries, and ill luck in general, occurs in [Chaucer’s] The Knight’s Tale (A 2463 sq.). He is the most terrible of the seven and is sometimes called The Greater Infortune, Infortuna Major. (ibid p. 91).

Beatrice’s beauty is now so radiant that if she were to smile at Dante he would become like Semele because mortals cannot look upon the gods and he would be burned to a heap of ashes. As Musa says, Beatrice is both regal and threatening. (Isn’t it a bit sacrilegious to portray her as a goddess??)

Here Dante gets another warning not to be presumptuous. He wants to know why there is no music in this sphere (I’d like to know that too); why can’t Beatrice smile without inflicting disaster; and why is it this soul (who turns out to be Peter Damien) that welcomes him and not some other. The souls whirl about him but there is no explanation other than that humans are too mortal to bear such magnificence, and Dante should not ask.

Yet even heaven’s most illumined soul,
that Seraph who sees God with keenest eye,
could not explain what you have asked to know.

The truth you seek to fathom lies so deep
in the abyss of the eternal law,
it is cut off from every creature’s sight.

And tell the moral world when you return
what I told, so that no man presume
to try to reach a goal as high as this. (Canto XXI, Lines 94-99)

This warning not to seek to know for fear of Divine punishment held back Christian thought for centuries. It led to ‘witches’, great thinkers and inventors being burnt at the stake. This impression is reinforced by an overwhelming shout at the end of the canto.

Arvo Pärt‘s Te Deum (1984) seems to suit this stern invocation of perils in store for the unwary Dante.

Canto XXII

Beatrice reverts to her ‘motherly’ role and reassures Dante that the deafening shout, had he been able to understand it, was about the just vengeance about to befall the corrupt clergy in his own lifetime. And now Saint Benedict, the founder of monasticism (who has a great deal to say about the corruption of his ideals) arrives to escort them up the ladder to the next sphere: the sphere of the fixed stars.

Here they are in an image I found at Facebook on the page of Gruppo Panini Cultura. It is annotated:

Dante and Beatrice are in the Eighth Sphere of the Fixed Stars so there are stars all around them. Dante is in the constellation of Gemini, his own zodiac sign. Above you can see the sign of Taurus and below that of Cancer. Beatrice shows Dante the long path he has travelled:

“Rimira in giù, e vedi quanto mondo / sotto li piedi già esser ti fei”
“Look down and see what a universe I have / Already contrived to put beneath your feet,”
(Canto XXII, 128-129)

Canto XXIII

And now, the arrival of the Church Triumphant! The light of Christ shines down and now Dante can look upon Beatrice — though once again he has to leave it undescribed:

If at this moment all the tongues of verse,
which Polyhymnia and her sisters nourished
with their sweet milk, sang to assist my art,

their singing would not come to one one-thousandth
part of the truth about her sacred smile
nor how it set her holy face aglow;

so I find that my consecrated poem
describing Paradise will have to make
a leap, like one who finds his road is blocked.

Now bear in mind the weight of my poem’s theme,
think of the mortal shoulders it rests on.
and do not blame me if I stagger here:

this stretch of sea my vessel’s prow now dares
to cut is not place for a little boat
nor for a captain who would spare himself. (Canto XXIII, Lines 55-69)

And lo! now he can also look upon the brightest of the remaining lights, the Virgin Mary.

…who is crowned by a torch borne by an angel who circles the Virgin summoning her to follow her Son to the highest sphere. They ascend while all the souls of the Church, their arms stretched towards the heaves, begin to sing with unforgettable beauty the hymn Regina celi. (Musa, p.271)

Here’s a lovely rendition of Regina Caeli (Queen of Heaven):

Canto XXIV

Have you ever wondered how St Peter decides who to let in at the Gates of Heaven? This canto tells us. When Beatrice asks him to test Dante on his faith (not because it’s necessary but so that he can glorify it), St Peter asks him to define Faith, and Dante answers, also pointing out that it is the nature of mortal men not to have everything revealed to them:

Faith is the substance of those hoped-for things
and argument for things we have not seen.
And this I take to be its quiddity. [essential nature] (Canto XXIV, Lines 64-66)

Then he is asked if he possesses faith:

he added: ‘Now that you have thoroughly
examined both this coin’s alloy and weight,

tell me, do you have such coin in your purse?’
I answered, ‘Yes I do, so bright and round,
I have no doubt as to its quality.’ (Canto XXIV, Lines 83-87)

So then St Peter asks about the source of that faith and how he knows it is valid, to which Dante replies:

…’The bountiful
rain of the Holy Spirit showering
the parchments, Old and New, is to my mind

unquestionable certainty of Faith,
so accurate that any other proof
compared to it would sound most unconvincing.’ (Canto XXIV, Lines 91-96

And he goes on to say that he knows The Old and New Testaments is proven by the works that followed them: Nature’s hand/ could never heat or forge that kind of iron.’

Since Dante gets all the answers correct, the souls sing Te Deum Laudamus while St Peter blesses him.

Next week, Cantos 17-24, i.e. the Primum Mobile and the Empyreum!

All posts in this series:

Saturation (2025), by William Lane

William Lane’s sixth novel Saturation (2025) was such an interesting book for the 2026 Speccy Fiction challenge hosted by Book’d Out.

Ambrose and Ursula, two librarians, strive to have a baby in a world where children seem less prevalent. Their story becomes increasingly punctuated by seemingly random episodes of violence inflicted upon their world as Bottrell, a fascist leader, preys on the insecurities of a populace saturated with information and the act of remembering. He attempts to master the past, viewing it as a source of corruption. He persecutes librarians and begins to selectively cull collections.

Ambrose and Ursula attempt to remain outside this conflict, but inevitably are drawn into it, through their desire to save the books they have spent their working lives preserving. They realise that they must save the past for a new generation to be able to understand it.

Narrative and character-driven, this is a startlingly original novel that passionately opposes the trend for banning books and attempts to rewrite history. Set in a slightly future world that has managed the climate crisis but with a dramatic decrease in population, Saturation feels eerily like now. As we constantly forget names and passwords, and lean into a tyranny of reductivism, it calls us to a position of knowledge and hope.

The novel is (deliberately) a curious mix of the shocking and the mundane. Despite privations caused by climate change, Ambrose and Ursula seem to live an everyday life in most ways. But even from the first page there are disconcerting elements, such as the discussion about the mere presence of a child in the library. This is unusual, and so is the fact that he is preceded by two guards and then escorted in by two women.

The dialogue is often banal because both Ursula and Ambrose are struggling with memory loss, exacerbated in Ursula’s case by heavy drinking. As they regress, they remember less and less of the past, which reminded me of the brain fog that accompanied Covid for so many people. Disease, deliberately spread at mass entertainments, is another tool used to control the populace, presumably because the planet is in such a mess that it can’t support a larger population.

We also see that despite what seems like a fond relationship there are cracks in it. Somehow Yoremind has been able to suppress desire, but these two are trying for a child. Although they argue occasionally, and neither always submits to the other, minor differences show that it’s not a marriage of equals. Ursula is obsessed by knitting for a baby they are unlikely to have and Ambrose doesn’t approve. She hides a jar of honey that she’s been eating because it’s expensive and Ambrose doesn’t buy it any more, so we deduce that she’d rather avoid conflict. But it’s more than that: Ursula is inclined towards acceptance, whereas Ambrose chafes against the situation and commits small acts of rebellion. They are not much comfort for each other which is painfully poignant when a crisis occurs.

Things seem more odd for this ordinary couple in small moments. Ursula checks her phone to see how many points she’s accrued. She’s not checking loyalty points for Woolworths, and they don’t accrue from buying consumer goods. They accrue from undertaking approved behaviour, which means that somehow they are being monitored all the time, and that some authority has decided what that approved behaviour should be. Texts issuing ‘invitations’ and instructions come from Yoremind, Yoremind2 and YM3, ‘encouraging’ people to participate enthusiastically at violent entertainments, to discriminate against citizens who don’t conform, and to cheat on their partners. Perhaps these texts issue from darker instincts of the human mind, but they serve the needs of a dictatorship by making the populace complicit in violence and xenophobia and by fostering suspicion.

Later, things take a more sinister term when a demagogue rival for power hacks the system and nobody knows which messages come from whom.

When Ursula finally becomes pregnant, it becomes clear that children are so rare that ignorance about childbearing is the norm. There are no medical services and Ursula has to rely on the long-unused knowledge of older women in her life.

Saturation has a dense and complex plot which moves from the city to a rural refuge when things become intolerable, and back again when a spy and her child infiltrate the farm. Oppression vacillates with renaissance of some freedoms, but the hope seems to lie with youth who evade the official curriculum and develop skills that help to restore some infrastructure against the pervasive flooding.

William Lane is also the author of Over the Water (2014), The Horses (2015), The Salamanders (2016), The Word (2018), Past Life (2021), and the short story collection Small Forest (2018). You can read my reviews of four of those novels here.

Other reviews are at Meanjin and Paperbark Words

Author: William Lane
Title: Saturation
Publisher: Transit Lounge, 2025
Cover design by Josh Durham/Design by Committee
ISBN: 9781923023352, pbk., 288 pages
Source: Bayside Library

I read this book at this time for the 2026 Speccy Fiction challenge hosted by Book’d Out.

17 Comments

Posted in FICTION — AUSTRALIAN | Tags: #SpeccyFicChal, BOOK REVIEWS, Josh Durham cover design, Saturation, William Lane

Posted by: Lisa Hill | January 14, 2026

Spell the Month in Books January 2026

Spell the Month in Books is a linkup hosted on Reviews From the Stacks on the first Saturday of each month, but that’s the day for #6Degrees, so here we are, a week later instead.

This month’s theme is ‘New’ and I’ve chosen to interpret this with books written by authors new to me, who were recommended by somebody else.

Links go to my reviews:

J

Johannesburg (2019), by Fiona Melrose. This is a novel that explores the inter-generational friction that can arise over feminist issues. When mother-daughter expectations about gender roles diverge, there can sometimes be mutual disappointment. I found out about this book from the Johannesburg Review of Books.

A

All the Beautiful Things You Love (2024) by Jonathan Seidler, a bittersweet back-to-front love story about two people who really love each other but break up over irreconcilable differences. It’s also wickedly funny. Lee Kofman recommended this one.

N

Napoleon’s Double (2007) by Antoni Jach. This was a book club recommendation back in the day, and it made me a lifelong fan of Jach’s writing. It’s a sort of philosophical travel novel about seven rogue-adventurers, who are conscripts in Napoleon’s army during his campaign in Egypt.

U

The Unknown Judith Wright (2016), by Georgina Arnott. I discovered this bio of a beloved Australian poet at the Williamstown Literary Festival in 2017. There are, of course, other biographies about her, but as Arnott explained at the festival, this one interrogates the contradictions in Judith Wright’s life.

A

All the World’s a Stage (Erast Fandorin Mysteries, 2009), by Boris Akunin, translated by Andrew Bromfield. What was it that induced me to read a crime novel? It was nominated for the EBDR Translation prize, and it features a detective called Fandorin, who has established himself in the previous novels of the series as a sleuth every bit as good as Sherlock Holmes and with a moustache at least as impressive as Poirot’s.

R

The Raptures (2022), by Jan Carson. On my radar because I’d read the review by Kim at Reading Matters. Kim, who is often ahead of the game, reviewed it before it was shortlisted for the Irish Book of the Year

Y

The Yellow Bird Sings (2020), by Jennifer Rosner. This one was recommended by Anna Blay Rosner from Hybrid Publishers. Not one that they published: Anna, like all good publishers, reads other books from other publishers too.

Thanks to the Jana for reminding me. Her January post is here.

Forthcoming themes:

February 7: Freebie

March 7: Take your pick from Pi Day, March Madness, or Green Covers

April 4: Easter OR Pastel Covers

13 Comments

Posted in Spell the Month in Books | Tags: Spell the Month in Books

Posted by: Lisa Hill | January 13, 2026

The sabotage of the Adelaide Writers Festival and the Posturing Parade of Australian authors

Ever since the news about the Adelaide Festival broke, I have kept my counsel, expecting — as has now come to pass — that the saboteurs would have their way and the festival would be cancelled.

I have been a strong supporter of Australian books and writing ever since I started this blog, but I am disgusted by the parade of authors pretending that their boycott was in defence of free speech.

This is not about free speech. Australian authors boycotting the festival have no record of supporting Jewish freedom of speech, or of protesting against the doxxing and boycotting of Jewish writers to intimidate them into silence. With few exceptions, the Australian arts community has been vigilant in excluding Jews from author events and festivals, and declining to publish their books. These posturing authors have chosen not to listen to Jewish voices about the rape, torture, murder and hostage-taking of men, women and little children on October 7th. They have declined to offer any words of consolation to the victims of the Bondi atrocity. They are our wordsmiths and poets, but where are the words of empathy and kindness for a community reeling in shock and horror, and to assuage the grief of the rest of us whose ideals about Australia as a place of safety and refuge lie shattered on the sands at Bondi?

Why did our arts community not join the chorus of eminent Australians who called for a Royal Commission after Bondi? Perhaps because a Royal Commission might reveal the antisemitism that pervades the sector?

Instead of using their voices to provide comfort and solace to the victims of Islamic terrorism, these authors and all those who support them have preferred to shift the agenda. Instead their voices are loud and clear in support of a speaker who holds abhorrent views. She is on record as saying that “Zionists have no claim or right to cultural safety.” Well, that includes me, even though I am not Jewish, because I believe that Israel has a right to exist and so did the UN when it first voted to establish the State of Israel.

This bullying of festival organisers has got to stop. First Bendigo, now Adelaide, what next, unless programming silences Jewish voices by default and gives all the airtime to authors posturing about Palestinian ‘freedom’?

I supported the Adelaide Festival Board’s decision to remove Randa Abdel-Fattah, and I am pleased that the Premier of SA supported it too. The silence about this issue from our other political leaders, state and federal, is shameful.

Update: this article at the AFR, you may be able to read it more clearly here.

Comments Off on The sabotage of the Adelaide Writers Festival and the Posturing Parade of Australian authors

Posted in ARTICLES & OPINION

Posted by: Lisa Hill | January 12, 2026

Kokoro (1914), by Natsume Soseki, translated by Edwin McClellan

I’m the first to admit that it takes a certain amount of chutzpah to share my thoughts about Kokoro because I haven’t read much J-Lit, and — with the exception of Death by Water (2009) by Kenzaburo Oe (translated by Deborah Boliver Boehm), and more recently Under the Eye of the Big Bird (2016), by Hiromi Kawakami, (translated by Asa Yoneda) — I haven’t been very enthusiastic about it. Michael Orthofer, in his chapter on Japanese fiction in The Complete Review Guide to Contemporary World Fiction (Columbia University Press, 2016), suggests a possible reason for my disinterest: discussing the novels of Ryu Murakami, he writes that more recent novels […] explore the duality in Japanese society of a surface that is formal, orderly, and polite, contrasted with a dark underbelly to which many just turn a blind eye.

However, according to 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, (2006 edition) Kokoro (1914, translated by Edwin McClellan) established Natsume Soseki (1867-1914) as one of the greatest writers in modern Japanese Literature:

In its delicate depiction of Sensei’s malaise the novel is not only a testament to the rapid modernisation of Japan, but also an examination of an individual’s tortured sense of failure and responsibility. (1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, 2006 Edition, edited by Peter Boxall, ABC Books, ISBN 9780733321214, p268.)

Our informant for Sensei’s malaise is a first-person narrator reflecting on past events. I’d be interested to know if other readers think he is an unreliable narrator. I think he is. Soseki doesn’t portray him as deliberately trying to mislead the reader. But this is a coming-of-age story so his naïve narrator is a confused young man in thrall to his older mentor, and although as his illusions about Sensei fall away, he acknowledges his failings along with some personal growth, not everything he says can be taken at face value. He doesn’t know enough about himself or the world to be objective about many things.

Consider his opinions about women. By his own account he doesn’t know much about women, and even feels a revulsion for them. But when he dines with his mentor Sensei, he comes in contact with Sensei’s wife. There are signs of Europeanisation in the table setting, but he’s relieved that Sensei’s wife is not so modern as to take pride and pleasure in being able to display her mental powers.

What also impressed me was the fact that. though her ways were not those of an old-fashioned Japanese woman, she had not succumbed to the then prevailing fashion of using ‘modern’ words. (p.37)

But when he begins to be concerned by Sensei’s persisting melancholy it’s Shizu’s advice and reassurance that he wants.

He expects empathy and kindness from women, and he is scornful about his mother when she fails to guess what his needs are. This is despite lying to his parents, both by omission and with deliberate falsehoods, claiming afterwards that it was too late and he lacked the courage to tell them the truth.

And then there’s his first impressions of the woman who becomes his wife. #sigh He’s judgemental about her flower arranging. (Yeah, I know, flower arranging is a Big Cultural Deal in Japan, and we mustn’t judge authors of the past by the values and attitudes of today, but still, I’d like to know if this was Soseki expressing his own views or critiquing the prevailing attitudes to women.)

And then… I don’t know what to make of this passage. The narrator’s father is rueful about causing trouble to the household:

And my mother’s eyes would suddenly fill with tears. Afterwards, she would remember how different he used to be in the old days, and say, ‘Of course, he sounds rather helpless now, but he used to be quite frightening, I can tell you.’

Among the tales she was fond of telling was the one about the time he had beaten her back with a broomstick. We had often heard the tale before, but now we listened more carefully, as though the tale was a keepsake to be treasured. (p.118)

And then, without missing a beat, the narrator goes on to talk about the issue of his father’s will.

I was thinking about my discontent with this novel when right on cue, Paula at Winding Up the Week linked to an article by Santiago Campodonico about Dostoyevsky’s influence on Japanese writing that made the moodiness, melancholy and violence comprehensible to me. ‘Dostoevsky’s Influence on Modern Japan: From Meiji to Today’ is subtitled ‘Noise, fracture, and moral tension collide as a nineteenth-century Russian novel resurfaces inside Japan’s long, uneasy conversation with modernity’. Kokoro does indeed seem to have elements of that.

As the article says, during the Meiji Era (1868-1912) Japanese borders were opened to western trade, bringing rapid industrialisation and modernisation in architecture, clothing and literature. Here’s a brief history of events which were the catalyst:

Kokuro is littered with allusions to this trend. It’s not just the narrator’s unease with changes in women’s behaviour, Soseki also shows the narrator’s experience of university education as different to Sensei’s. There is the narrator’s restlessness about his parents’ inactivity compared to life in Tokyo, and there are hints of angst regarding old wealth confronting a modernising economy. Sensei is bitter and resentful about decent people turning into scoundrels, not just because they took his money, but also because they represent lost power structures and certainties that he thought he could rely on.

The narrator isn’t interested in the traditions that guide his parents’ life, and he’s also concerned about his father’s rejection of modern medicine. OTOH his father, too ill to be angry about it but very concerned about his wife’s welfare when she becomes a widow, reminds the narrator that in the past parents were supported by their children and not still paying out an allowance to a son who won’t even look for work after graduation.

The novel’s climax occurs when the Emperor Meiji dies and General Nogi commits suicide: this is the catalyst for Sensei’s actions. Wikipedia says of Nogi that:

He was a national hero in Imperial Japan as a model of feudal loyalty and self-sacrifice, ultimately to the point of suicide. In the Satsuma Rebellion, he lost a banner of the emperor in battle, for which he tried to atone with suicidal bravery in order to recapture it, until ordered to stop. In the Russo-Japanese War, he captured Port Arthur but he felt that he had lost too many of his soldiers, so requested permission to commit suicide, which the emperor refused. These two events, as well as his desire not to outlive his master, motivated his suicide on the day of the funeral of the Emperor Meiji. His example brought attention to the concept of bushido (moral code of the samurai) and the controversial samurai practice of junshi (following the lord in death).

In the Introduction by translator, Edwin McClellan writes that the timing of Nogi’s suicide coincides with waiting until he could no longer serve his emperor to redeem his honour.

Soseki was too modern in his outlook to be fully in sympathy with the general; and so is Sensei. Despite Soseki’s attitude towards the old-fashioned notion of honour, however, he could not help feeling that he was in some way part of the world that had produced General Nogi. (p.vi)

Half a century later in the Pacific there were kamikaze pilots and their leaders who subscribed to this ‘old-fashioned’ notion.

In addition to Dostoyevsky’s influence, indolence and passivity in the characterisation of both Sensei and the narrator put me in mind of the Russian literary concept of ‘a Superfluous Man‘. To quote my own review of Oblomov (1859), by Ivan Goncharov, (translated by C. J. Hogarth)

Oblomov is an example of the Russian literary concept of the ‘Superfluous Man‘, which Wikipedia says is a by-product of Nicholas I‘s reactionary reign when the best educated men would not enter the discredited government service and, lacking other options for self-realization, doomed themselves to live out their life in passivity.

But where the satirical fiction of Goncharov, Turgenev and Pushkin was a demand for change in the face of an intransigent ruler, Kokoro presents the reader with characters who struggle to adapt to change.

BTW Kumiko Kiuchi, back then a DPhil student at the University of Sussex, who wrote the entry for Kokoro for the 2006 edition of 1001 Books, also claims Soseki as the one who established the form of the first-person novel. Though she doesn’t specify it, she must mean in J-Lit, since first-person narration was around long before Soseki’s lifetime (1867-1916). Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is an example from 1847 and before that in the Hebrew Bible’s Song of Solomon (900BC), not to mention a couple of Roman examples such as the Satyricon by Petronius (C1 AD) and The Golden Ass by Apuleius’s (C2 AD.) An editor should have made this clear because it’s an example of modernisation rather than innovation in J-Lit, catching up with long-established forms in Western literature.

I read this book at this time for January in Japan at Tony’s Reading List.

Author: Natsume Soseki
Title: Kokoro
Translated from the Japanese and with an Introduction by Edwin McClellan
Publisher: Regnery Publishing, 1957, reprinted in 2000
Cover design by Dori Miller, ‘Fallen Leaves’ cover painting by Hishido Shunso
ISBN: 9780895267153, pbk., 248 pages
Source: personal library

19 Comments

Posted in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, Ageing / Coming of Age / Bildungsroman, BOOK REVIEWS, Classics, FICTION — OTHER, Japan (settings), Japanese authors, Read in 2026, Societies in transition, Soseki Natsume, Translations | Tags: BOOK REVIEWS, January in Japan, Kokoro, Natsume Soseki, Translations

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