A Better Life (2026) by Lionel Shriver

/ Lisa Hill / 7 Comments

ImageI haven’t read anything by prolific American author Lionel Shriver since We Need to Talk About Kevin won the Orange Prize in 2005.  In my reading journal, I prefaced my thoughts by declaring that it was the most horrible book I’d ever read, and though I’ve read too many horrible books since then, We Need to Talk About Kevin put me off reading anything else by this author.

But I stumbled on a YouTube interview with Shriver and one of the conservative commentators at the Manhattan Institute, where amongst other things she mentioned that although immigration is a hugely divisive issue throughout the West, literature about it is always about the refugee/migrant experience.  She said that the narrative is always from that point-of-view and sympathetic to it, and not from the varied perspectives of the host nations.  The novel is a response to what she says is a period during the Biden administration when the United States was overwhelmed by an influx of migrants in the millions and there was a Right to Shelter legislation in New York which imposed obligations on the city and its taxpayers.

And so her novel  depicts an absurdist situation, with characters who represent a variety of responses to an influx of people from Honduras, ranging from cynical, to exploitative, to gullible, to sympathetic, to humane, to distrust, and to outright hostility.  Shriver thinks that it’s not a satire because it’s actually a realistic depiction of the situation, but a review by Seth Barron at City Journal says otherwise .  Since I don’t know how  much of the plot is or could be realistic, I’d leave that to other readers to decide.

This is the book description:

In a provocative novel addressing contemporary immigration by the sharply observant Lionel Shriver, a New York family takes in a Honduran migrant—who may or may not be the innocent paragon she claims to be.

Gloria Bonaventura, a divorced mother of three living with her 26-year-old son Nico in a sprawling house in Brooklyn, decides to participate in a new city program that would pay her to take in a migrant as a boarder. Liberal to the extreme, Gloria is thrilled when sweet, kind, helpful Martine arrives. But Nico is skeptical. A classic live-at-home Gen Zer with no interest in adulthood, Nico resents any interruption of his “hovercraft repose.”

As the months go by, Martine endears herself to both Nico’s sisters, while finding her way into Gloria’s heart and even, briefly, Nico’s. But as Martine’s disturbingly dodgy compatriots begin to show up, Nico conceives a dark twin hostile to both his mother’s altruism and the “migrant crisis” in general—and turns out to be anything but a reliable narrator himself.

Based loosely on a program New York City Mayor Eric Adams floated but did not initiate, A Better Life is Lionel Shriver at her smart, funny, and sensitive to the moral nuances of perhaps the most divisive issue of our times.

ImageA Better Life is not the sophisticated novel that this complex issue demands.  Of the 142 novels that I’ve tagged ‘Displacement, migration and refugees’ that I’ve reviewed on this blog, it’s true that contemporary literature does present only one side of the story and either suppresses or demonises any response other than empathy.  With the sole exception, depending on how it’s interpreted, of Small Boat (2023), by Vincent Delacroix, translated by Helen Stevenson, which explored the perspective of a woman who failed in her job to monitor people-smuggler vessels in distress in the English Channel.

But reading A Better Life is exhausting.  It’s a polemic on steroids, deliberately written to be provocative, and while it purports to be even handed because it depicts the progressive left perspective, it is tiresomely scornful.  I kept reading because I wanted to see how Shriver resolved the situation — a family at the mercy of uninvited Honduran thugs who could not get rid of these ‘house guests’ when their presence becomes oppressive — but the resolution isn’t convincing.

At the end of the day, A Better Life is preaching to the choir.

Author: Lionel Shriver
Title: A Better Life
Publisher: The Borough Press, Harper Collins, 2026
Cover design: Claire Ward
ISBN: 9780008800116, pbk., 289 pages
Source: Kingston Library

 

‘Why Iranians Continue to Seek Refuge in Australia’ by Shokoofeh Azar

/ Lisa Hill / 4 Comments

Quite by accident, today I stumbled some powerful essays online by Perth-based Iranian-Australian journalist and author Shokoofeh Azar.  She is one of my favourite authors and I have recently reviewed her second novel The Gowkaran Tree in the Middle of our Kitchen (2025) which was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, and before that The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree (2017) which was longlisted for the 2020 International Booker.

Amongst other reasons, and quite apart from the way she weaves Iranian folklore, history, traditions and beliefs into wholly engaging novels, Shokoofeh’s writing is distinctive in Australia because although her English in these essays is flawless, she writes in Persian and has her novels translated.  By translators who remain anonymous for security reasons i.e. because of fears about the long reach of the oppressive Iranian regime.

Anyway, I was chasing up a BlueSky post from the US literary journal World Literature Today because they were bragging about posting 32 reviews in March, and I was curious to see if they included OzLit in ‘World Literature’.  Amongst other things, I’ve posted 4 reviews of Australian books in March, and 3 from New Zealand, but it’s always interesting to see which books ‘land’ internationally.  So I did a search for the Australian presence on their site.

Well, there is one, though it takes patience to locate anything by writers I recognise, and even more patience to find a review of a novel, (The Shepherd’s Hut by Tim Winton). New Zealand fares even worse.  So, no, WLT is not an overlooked source of reviews of antipodean literature.

But there was some writing that piqued my interest…

The very first result in the search list for Australia/Australian, was Shokoofeh’s 2012 essay entitled ‘Why Iranians Continue to Seek Refuge in Australia’ and it is shocking to see how relevant it still is, more than a decade later.  Even more shocking is another essay of hers, from 2022, entitled ‘The Victory of Our Revolution Is the Final Triumph of Tahirih, Homa Darabi, and the Blue Girl’. Click the links to read them, but we warned, you may feel a sense of shame about the way the West has #understatement let down the women of Iran.

There were, it turned out, also reviews of Shokoofeh’s novels at World Literature Today.  See here and here.  They didn’t turn up in a search for Australia/Australian, because WLT hasn’t tagged her as Australian.  This is a bit unfortunate because she says herself that Australia is not only the country that gave her asylum, but it’s also the country that launched her career as a novelist when Wild Dingo Press first published The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree in 2017, which was later picked up by Europa Editions and published in 2020.  (Somebody at Wikipedia ought to amend its first date of publication.  It is not a ‘2020 novel’ it is a ‘2017 novel’. )

It’s good to see that WLT is hosting Shokoofeh’s writing.  She was a speaker at the recent Sorrento Writers Festival but #pout I wasn’t well enough to go. Maybe next time!

 

Capture (2026), by Amanda Lohrey

/ Lisa Hill / 11 Comments

ImageFailure.  It comes to us all, at some time or another, in our personal or professional lives, and though some times are harder than others,  we have to learn to deal with it.  That’s what adulthood is.

But what if your entire professional life seemed a failure?  I don’t mean reputational damage or embarrassment about the occasional mistakes that we all make, I mean a private cringe or a flood of shame when looking back over a lifetime of work and recognising a failure at something that was really important.

Amanda Lohrey’s thought-provoking new novel Capture is about a psychiatrist called James Mather who takes on a project to interview people who’ve ‘been captured by aliens’, to see if he can identify a pattern that explains why they believe it.  He wants to develop a theory of the mind that makes sense of the phenomenon.

So Mather sets up interviews, takes on a research assistant called Lucy and also consults experts such as a theologian who might shed light on reasons or motivations for these abnormal beliefs.  His ‘experiencers’ are not oddities whose ego makes them believe that they are The Chosen, nor are they conspiracy theorists who believe the government is hiding the truth.  They are not proselytisers who advertise their experience but rather people who keep it quiet because they recognise that others will judge them crazy.

So here’s the thing: as we read Mather’s interviews and his thoughts and discussions with Lucy and his experts, we readers start to think, how can Lohrey resolve this?  Starting with the premise held by Mather and Lucy and Helena, (the instigator of the research project), and we readers as well — that there aren’t really any aliens abducting people for their own purposes — what can her psychiatrist character do?  At the intellectual level, either he can identify some catalyst that triggered the beliefs of these people (who’ve never met each other and who don’t share the same experiences), or there is some personality aberration that predisposes them to believe these crazy things sincerely — or he can’t, and his research project has failed.  And if he can’t, what then?  Does he suggest therapy to reconcile their beliefs with reality?  Or, surely not! Does he (and will we as readers?) reassess his initial premise and believe in their ‘experiences’?

But if not that, then what?

Ethically, although his is a research project, and whatever its boundaries were, he has a moral responsibility to help these people, doesn’t he?  That’s what he’s spent his whole career doing.  But what does ‘helping’ mean, in this context? The dilemma is that these people, the psychiatrist and we readers can only accept their beliefs as authentic experiences, or dismiss them (as kindly as we can) as nonsense.  There isn’t a middle ground.

This is where the last paragraph of the book description brings us:

James Mather is a psychiatrist in his sixties. He is invited to take on a new group of patients. All he knows about them is that each one claims to have been abducted by aliens.

His wife, Deborah, is sceptical, but he gets going anyway. His patients tell mesmerising stories. There’s Anthony, for instance, who was camping one night by the Aral Sea; or Mary, the owner of a beauty salon, confronted by a ball of light moving towards her in her bedroom.

James’s research assistant Lucy Cheng sits in on each session. She’s an attractive young divorcee, who has made a study of anxiety, and who takes notes about each conversation.

Capture is a strange philosophical fable about what we can believe in a post-truth world. It will beguile and baffle its readers. Amanda Lohrey is an extraordinary writer. Her novel might be full of crazy stuff, but who could deny its sanity?

Yes, I am ‘beguiled and baffled’… what is Lohrey on about in this perplexing novel?

ImageUntil I remembered that in my review of Julianne Lamond’s Lohrey (from the MUP Contemporary Australian Writers Series), I had noted this:

[There is] a destabilising effect recurring in Lohrey’s fiction: it creates readerly confusion because the author disallows a point-of view.  Her fiction is always unsettling partly because there are multiple perspectives including assertive narrators who undercut the characters, and partly because she creates such irritating characters, who act in ways that we don’t approve of and yet we feel some sympathy for them. But, says Lamond, her broader concern is how our lives are impacted by the economic and political structures in which we live.

ImageYes, to the destabilisation, and yes to an irritating character.  In some ways, Mather in Capture reminds me of A Short History of Richard Kline (2015, see my review).  Kline was a middle-aged man having a mid-life crisis.  Despite having what looks like a successful life, he’s unhappy, because he’s not happy.  He’s searching for meaning, so much so that he thinks he finds it via a guru, but it isn’t very convincing, especially for those of us who think that although we might try to give our lives meaning, it’s more a case of we are born, we live and then we die.  Why should we think that the inhabitants of an obscure planet in the universe are destined to have meaning in our lives, eh?

ImageSo here we are then, in the same place as Lohrey’s character? With all his qualifications, experience and professional knowhow — and kindness — he cannot make meaning out of these people’s beliefs.  He cannot deal with people who sincerely believe something ridiculous that derives from their ‘lived experience’ and retain his professional integrity.  Mather’s ‘experiencers’ are like those people who have gone so far down internet rabbit holes, or confined themselves to online news sources that are pushing peculiar points-of-view about climate change, migration, vaccines or whatever, that their opinions are impenetrable.  (Rebecca Huntley wrote an optimistic book called How to Talk about Climate Change in a Way that Makes a Difference (2020, see my review) but not many people have tried it, I guess, because if there’s one thing we’ve learned from the latest crisis in the Middle East, it’s that the world is not only still utterly dependent on fossil fuels but that wealthy nations can and will do anything to get it, including dumping high-minded sanctions on rogue oil suppliers.)

What a couple of the ‘experiencers’ seem to hope for is that benign aliens are enacting a #NoSpoilers flawed program to ensure the survival of our species albeit in a form we might not recognise.  It’s the fear of an apocalyptic world which might be the core of their beliefs, and that perhaps is the context in which the unconscious mind hopes for rescue.

Book groups which are comfortable with ambiguity will love this book.  I know I did.

Author: Amanda Lohrey
Title: Capture
Publisher: Text Publishing, 2026
Cover design by W H Chong
ISBN: 9781923058842, pbk., 232 pages
Review copy courtesy of Text Publishing

 

All Her Lives, Nine Stories (2025), by Ingrid Horrocks

/ Lisa Hill / 9 Comments

ImageIt’s not long now before the winners of the 2026 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards are announced on May 13th, so I’m pleased that All Her Lives by Ingrid Horrocks has finally come in from the library. (Alas, I still haven’t been able to get my hands on the other two shortlisted titles.)

All Her Lives is a short story collection themed in a way similar to Laura Elvery’s Ordinary Matter (2020, see my review).  Both collections are inspired by iconic  women whose work has altered history and changed the lives of millions of women.

ImageWhile Ordinary Matter links women who’ve won the Nobel Prize for Sciences into stories of inspiration, motherhood, sacrifice and legacy, All Her Lives is inspired by the 18th century feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, and Laura Jean Mackay describes it as a protest song book, calling through the ages for change, revolution and peace.

This is the book description from the UQP website:

What if the choices of women centuries apart could echo across time?

A sister haunted by her return from war. A young woman discovering her identity at a Berlin rave in the mid-2000s. A mother whose son’s climate activism threatens everything she’s built. At the heart of these fictional stories is Mary Wollstonecraft, the radical 18th-century feminist whose own struggles with love, loss and revolution illuminate the threads that connect all their lives.

From quiet moments of caregiving and curiosity to acts of bold rebellion, the women in this striking story collection navigate the eternal tensions between duty and desire, safety and freedom, the past they’ve inherited and the future they’re determined to create.

All Her Lives brings together extraordinary women fighting to define themselves on their own terms.

The first story, ‘Evie on Branch’ turned out to be well-timed for Anzac Day.  Set in 1919, it inverts the more common characterisation of a soldier’s homecoming to the story of Evie, home from service as a nurse in WW1.  Much has changed on the family farm in her absence.  Her brother Finn, too disabled by an accident to enlist, has married and become a father, and he and his wife Mae are sleeping in the master bedroom since their father died, very suddenly of cancer.

Both letters — the one saying he was ill and the one saying he was dead — had arrived at the same time, blurry and incomprehensible in her unsteady hands as she sat in the field tent and the other nurses moved around her, shaking out clothes, setting out their belongings. Unable to take it in, she had stood, mechanically unpacked, made up her bed, readied herself for the work she had come to do. (p.6)

Finn’s other news during her absence is commonplace:

… she tried to rouse herself by asking what he’d done with the farm in her absence.  There was now a workers’ whare [a communal house] and a frame had gone up for another small dwelling, which the neighbours were helping to build  for another family.  The man had a job working the homestead garden over the river; the wife would be company for Mae.  The two milking cows in the home paddock were new as well.  Finn had plans for a herd and a proper milking operation. (p.7)

Evie, however, is irrevocably changed.  She has seen things and had experiences that she could not convey in letters home.  Nursing the black lesions of wounded men when she knew there was only one end to the stench of gangrene.  She realises, before Finn does, that he will have to adjust to a new reality too.

She understood the blood-soaked crying, the terrible fear of the returned men — more than Finn ever could, here in his domestic clearing, felling trees and putting up fences. More for that matter, than most of the wives of those men. (p.16)

All those crutches on the ship’s rolling decks — his could as easily be a war injury.  But it wasn’t.  There would be a whole new separation from those stumbling their way back to hunch over memory-shot drinks or wake nightly in terror.  Or to want only to dance — she’d seen that too. (p.15)

What hasn’t changed is that their father’s Will leaves the farm to Finn, with a small sum set aside for her. The world for women has changed enough for Evie to play a vital role on the battlefields but not enough for her to escape the expectations of her homecoming.

Some of the stories are loosely linked though it can be easy to miss.  Evie makes an appearance in the next story, ‘Marvellous Instruments’, set in 1955.  She is mentioned as one of the qualified nurses at a mother-and-baby’s home which became a eugenics scandal after the war.  She and Vanessa (briefly mentioned as a possible love interest in ‘Evie on Branch’) are living together, in another example of women stepping outside their expected roles.  There’s also a reference to the Plunket nurses from this story in another one.

The 20th and 21st century stories are IMO more convincing than others.  Curiously, despite their source, ‘The Silver Ship’ and the concluding ‘Silver Ship II’ featuring text drawn or paraphrased from the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) don’t seem to have the same sort of authentic narrative voice as the others. It’s as if the author identifies more with her invented characters and their preoccupations, and has let her Wollstonecraft narratives be captive to their origins.

‘The End of the Fair’ and its pair ‘Murmuration’ are IMO the most compelling.  ‘The End of the Fair’ is set in 1981 when New Zealand was torn apart by anti-apartheid protests against the Springbok rugby tour, but the focus of the story is the conflicts sparked by a grass-roots campaign to ban nuclear-powered warships from a town where a naval base is a major employer.  One of the campaigners goes too far with chilling consequences.  ‘Murmurations’ is set ‘now’ and features a mother coming to terms with her son’s extreme activism.  It’s very good indeed.

I hope we see a novel from this author in due course.

About the author, adapted from the UQP website

Wellington-based New Zealand author Ingrid Horrocks is the author of a genre-bending memoir Where We Swim; a literary history, Women Wanderers and the Writing of Mobility; and two collections of poetry. Her writing can be read online at her website. She completed a PhD at Princeton and teaches for the Faber Writing Academy. In 2024, Ingrid was the Creative NZ Writer in Residence at Victoria University Wellington, and in 2025 she was an International Exchange resident at Varuna National Writers House in New South Wales.

Beyond the Broken Years: Australian Military History in 1000 Books (2024) by Peter Stanley

/ Lisa Hill / 5 Comments

ImageBeyond the Broken Years: Australian military history in 1000 books by prolific historian Peter Stanley really is a very interesting book.  Although I’m grateful to the defence forces that put their lives on the line to protect our way of life, I’ve never had any interest in military history, as in which forces were deployed where and when and why.  But this book isn’t about that.  It’s about the way Australia’s military history has been written and by whom.  About the ways it has responded to emerging issues and how it has adapted over the years.

As Stanley writes in his Introduction, explaining the impact of Bill Gammage’s The Broken Years: Australian Soldiers in the Great War (1974):

Bill reflected that he was ‘part of the generation which took them from memory to history. ‘That phrase is central to the conception of this book.  It’s mostly not about how those who experienced war remembered it or described it: it’s about how those who have mostly not experienced war have sought to understand and write about it. (p.xii)

The book is so comprehensive, it’s hard to do it justice.  I haven’t read most of the books he talks about, but the Spouse has bought  (IMO too many) of the ‘storians Stanley mentions.  One of the most interesting aspects to Stanley’s overview is the issue of who writes the history, when and why and what their qualifications are.  This has made me think about our own home library of military history, most of which has been bought by The Spouse.  Most of the books named by Stanley that are authentic memoirs from participants in war are not on our shelves, and many of those written by military historians aren’t either.  But we do have books by authors Stanley refers to as ‘storians’ who are not professional historians with professional skills, and I have read three by Peter Grose who is not an academic historian either, but Stanley admires his balanced style.

He is less sanguine about the ‘simplistic’ or ‘flawed’ efforts of those he names as Peter Charlton, Peter Fitzsimons, John Hamilton and Jonathan King.  They are amateur historians, often journalists, who have filled the gap in the market when professional historians weren’t doing it.  This market of readers seems to have an endless appetite for books of re-telling about Big Name events or people but don’t want to read books that are more academic in tone (and probably don’t have the knowledge to know what’s authentic and what’s been overdramatised).

Stanley says that there has been a kind of ‘history wars’ about military history, between the brutal honesty about the tragedy of war versus a focus on heroism, opportunity and the development of skills. There’s very little in public discourse about the last two, yet my first father-in-law can’t have been the only one for whom war was life-changing in a good way.  He was a child in the Depression, and got his first well-paid job as a soldier in New Guinea.  He learned his trade as a carpenter in the army and made a successful post-war career as a builder of prestige homes.  Yet he never went to RSL reunions, was embarrassed about his medals and resisted queries about his war service.  It’s not hard to surmise that he maintained a tactful silence about his experience because it didn’t fit the prevailing narrative of PTSD, disability, loss and grief.

Stanley thinks there needs to be a better balance between the two, and in the chapter called ‘Shattered Anzacs: Between the Wars’, he mentions Joan Beaumont’s Broken Nation which argued that we should be ‘Remembering the Resilient’ and Ian Hodges’ He Belonged to Wagga (2022) as an example of more nuanced portrayal of the costs of war to individuals. He goes on to write that…

The decades between the two world wars saw the divisions the war had exposed persist.  Keith Amos’s The New Guard Movement 1931-1939 (1976) made clear the degree to which the war disrupted the progressive trajectory of a federal Australia. (p.65, see here, scroll down)

ImageI find it very interesting that the first time I encountered this PoV about Australia’s progressivism being hijacked by WW1 was in Clare Wright’s You Daughters of Freedom (2018).  To quote from my own review:

Hundreds of millions of dollars – more than all the other dominions put together – have been spent on marketing Gallipoli as the making of our nation.  This myth is founded on the masculinist idea of manly blood being spilt in war, and thus proving ourselves as a nation.

I don’t entirely agree with Wright’s gendered interpretation about the dominant mythology of Gallipoli because I think the appalling loss of life and the grieving men and women of Australia were contributing factors.  I’m not an historian, but I think that the bereft needed to believe that their loved ones had not lost their lives in vain, and the politicians responsible acceded to that need.  And maybe, the contested history of Australia encourages people today to want to identify an ancestor with what they perceive as a noble cause.  But I do think she was right in identifying the extravagance of the Anzac centenary as a political tool for conservatives.

And I think that Stanley is right in identifying how the military history industry needs scrutiny:

The chasm between the more astringent academic approach and the bombastic nationalism of popular writers is perhaps the clearest example of contemporary agendas as much as it constitutes a simple record of the past.  (p.96)

The Table of Contents reveals how military history morphed from a neglected topic for research and publication, to become a field with multiple themes.  Chapters 29 through to 50 lists them, and it’s interesting for me to see so many of these themes mirrored in the war fiction that I have read (which dwarfs the number of nonfiction titles (67) I’ve reviewed here.)

  • Inventing Anzac: the perennial legend
  • They Dared Mightily: heroes
  • The Commanders: biography
  • No Memory for Pain: Memoirs
  • HMAS Australia: the Royal Australian Navy
  • A Thousand Men at War: (Army) unit histories
  • The Third Brother: The Royal Australian Air Force
  • Through Women’s Eyes: Women’s wars
  • Celluloid Anzacs: Australian military history in film
  • And the Band Played On: War and culture
  • War by Stealth: Secret and special
  • Revealing Secrets: Codes and code-breakers
  • Our Mob Served: First Nations at war
  • Soldiers and Aliens: Ethnicity and Anzacs
  • A Stout Pair of Boots: Battlefields
  • The Cost of War: Aftermaths
  • Sacred Places: Memory and memorials
  • What’s Wrong with Anzac? Critiques and challenges
  • The Once and Future Army: the Australian Defence Force
  • A Military History of Australia: Overviews
  • A Dictionary of Australian Military History: Australian military history now
  • This War Never Ends: the future of Australian military history.

Two themes which seem to be missing from this list are ‘occupation’ which I have discerned from reading war fiction; and ‘betrayal’ which has its genesis in Gallipoli and gained strength in popular discourse from the Fall of Singapore and from Churchill’s refusal to return our troops for the defence of Australia in WW2.  These ‘betrayals’ are referenced in various chapters and the betrayal of the ‘Bird Forces’ for example, comes to light for people like me who’d never heard of it, in Chapter 17, ‘The Japanese Thrust: The defeats of 1941-43’. The ‘bird forces’ were island garrisons called Lark Force in New Britain; Gull Force on Ambon and Sparrow Force in Dutch Timor, but their betrayal was not (as apparently one history would have it) down to British duplicity but to poor Australian decision-making in placing the bird forces on isolated islands.  The defeat of these forces and the loss of Java generated a clutch of books, the tone of which is exemplified by the title of Katherine Spurling’s Abandoned and Sacrificed (2022).  A chapter on ‘betrayal’ could also have included the narratives about communist sabotage of the war effort in WW2.

ImageThough there is a chapter called ‘Other People’s Wars: peace and peacekeeping’ and the history of Australia’s occupation forces do get a mention in other chapters, notably in Chapter 42 titled ‘Soldiers and Aliens’ with Robin Gerster’s history of BCOF in Travels in Atomic Sunshine (2008, see my review).  But it’s hard to find anything about occupying forces in Iraq and Afghanistan because the index lists only author names, so I may have missed others.  (Or maybe nothing’s been written yet, or they weren’t badged as occupation forces even though that’s what they clearly were once the combat was over.)

In the chapter titled ‘And the Band Played On: war and culture’ Stanley takes a brief survey of poetry and fiction, and brought my attention to some titles I might chase up i.e. Big Noting (1987) by Robin Gerster, which traces The Heroic Theme in Australian War Writing, and Christina Spittel’s (forthcoming?) The Great War in the Australian Novel. However, in a rare example of misjudgement, Stanley is dismissive of Donna Coates Shooting Blanks at the Anzac Legend. 

As this book shows, writers about war are mostly male; however Donna Coates Shooting Blanks at the Anzac Legend (2023) goes a step further to claim that women’s voices have been actively silenced.  I think that’s an exaggeration; women are now prominent in the writing of military history. (p.178)

ImageI’ve read the Coates book, and constructed an entire page dedicated to Australian War fiction, and Stanley has missed the point.  It is not that women haven’t written military history or whether they are prominent or not. Her survey, for a start, is about war fiction, not military history. Her point is that in fiction women’s experience of war — and not just on the Home Front — has been swamped by the dominant narrative, and, moreover, that this adherence to the dominant narrative about brave Anzacs etc was in many cases self-inflicted by women themselves.

Still, these are minor criticisms in what is a very fine book.

To give you some idea how much military history there is (and remember that it really only got started after the Bill Gammage book!) the Index, which lists only the authors and film makers, not other topics or book titles, runs to seven pages.

Beyond the Broken Years is terrific reading for people like me who are interested in the broad brushstrokes of military history, but I think it’s also required reading for Australian teachers of history or for anyone looking for a reading list on particular events or themes.  As this book shows so adroitly, military history is so much more than individuals and events; depending on who the authors are, it’s about the social history of Australia.  Stanley’s scholarship dissects the attitudinal change to war in the wake of popular film and TV; it unpacks the mythology of ‘forgotten’ wars; it weaves the emergence of the home front and women’s perspectives into our national preoccupations.

Highly recommended.

From the UNSW website:

Peter Stanley recently retired as Research Professor at UNSW Canberra. He has published over forty books, many in Australian military history, among which Bad Characters jointly won the Prime Minister’s Prize for Australian History in 2011. He was formerly Principal Historian at the Australian War Memorial, where he worked from 1980 to 2007. He has been a crucial participant in the field for over forty years, known as mentor, supervisor and examiner of doctoral theses, reviewer, critic, exhibition curator, and collaborator. He was inaugural President of Honest History and is a Principal of Defending Country, a coalition dedicated to encouraging the War Memorial to keep its undertaking to acknowledge Frontier Conflict fittingly.

©Lisa Hill

Author: Peter Stanley
Title: Beyond the Broken Years: Australian military history in 1000 books
Publisher: NewSouth Publishing, University of New South Wales Press, 2024
Cover design by Peter Long
ISBN: 9781761170140, pbk.,253 pages including Acknowledgements and an Index
Source: Kingston Library

 

‘The Hotel’ (2026), by Nicole Hazan

/ Lisa Hill / 20 Comments

Image

It’s not just in Australia that Jewish authors are being cancelled with exclusion from book events, book reviewing and even publication, it’s happening all over the world, though we need to be alert to what’s missing to be fully aware of the extent of it.

I notice it even here on my blog.  The missing ‘likes’ and shares and comments on anything I post that features Jewish authors or antisemitism.  The publishers and publicists who’ve dropped me off their list of potential reviewers because I’ve told them I won’t give air to anything antisemitic.  Do I care? No.  I’ve always been clear about the moral failure of acquiescence to Nazism in WW2, and if all I can do in the climate of escalating antisemitism is to speak up about it on my blog, then that’s what I’ll do.   But I notice, and I make my judgements accordingly.

Anyway…

Well, just as there were initiatives here in Australia to redress the discrimination against women authors, the American Jewish Book Council now has an initiative to redress the discrimination against Jewish authors.  It’s called Paper Brigade and it offers a bookish newsletter we can subscribe to, and they are about to host A Celebration of the Short Story in May.

To launch it, the JBC has made available a short story for us to read.  It’s called ‘The Hotel’, and it’s by emerging author Nicole Hazan.  It’s speculative fiction so I thought I’d read it to support the #SpeccyFicChal hosted at Book’d Out.  There are four categories for this challenge, and I think (*chuckle*) I’m lurking as a Spectator because I’ve (so far) only contributed Oops! one novel, two novels, Bird Deity by John Morrissey and Saturation by William Lane (both of them new releases in 2026).

Spectator: Read & review any speculative fiction book. Set your own goal, or none at all, just share what you read through the year. 
Squint: Read & review 3 books, from any 3 listed categories 
Stare: Read & review 6 books, from any 6 listed categories 
Survey: Read & review 12 books, one for each category

Reading a short story isn’t going to alter my status even though it (maybe) fits two categories: Published in 2026, and it might be Romantic speculative fiction.  Oh well…

ImageThis work of speculative fiction, set in an Israeli hotel in the immediate aftermath of October 7th, explores the way we mourn and love after tragedy.

The story is carefully constructed so that it isn’t immediately obvious to the reader, that the narrator is in conversation with people who aren’t there.  The illustration by Maya Ish-Shalom captures this, but I didn’t look at it closely before reading the story.

It sounds like a contradiction in terms, (and it is), but the ghosts are fully human. Sav­ta Sara is pushy and bossy, but she is showing signs of dementia because she asks the same question repeatedly.

“That boy will have an acci­dent,” she says, nod­ding after Ari. She often lec­tured your broth­er about keep­ing his sev­en-year-old in check. You were her favorite grand­child; you had the patience to play shesh besh with her and lis­ten to kib­butz gos­sip. When you were a kid, she picked you up from school and made you lunch and let you watch hours of TV. Even after she start­ed for­get­ting things, you still went over twice a week.

Her presence and those of her inseparable friends is an extra stress for Naomi, but like the surviving families in ‘temporary’ housing after October 7th, these ghosts have nowhere else to go because the kibbutz is gone.

When Tal turns up, there is suspense for a while because the author withholds whether he is really there or not.  And he brings with him the dilemma of when or if it eventually becomes okay for Naomi to form a relationship with her BFF’s on-again-off-again boyfriend.

So is this Romantic Speculative Fiction? You’ll have to read it and see. Read it now .

Author: Nicole Hazan
Title: ‘The Hotel’
Publisher: Paper Brigade, 2026, online
https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/pb-daily/the-hotel

Image credit: Illus­tra­tion (cropped) by Maya Ish-Shalom, from https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/pb-daily/the-hotel

PS The Australian Jewish Australia Online Network has a database of Australian Jewish writers but (perhaps because the publishing ecosystem is smaller here?) the site doesn’t have a sole focus on books in general and new releases in particular.

Vale David Malouf (1934-2026)

/ Lisa Hill / 17 Comments

ImageIt is sad to pass on the news that beloved author, poet playwright, and librettist David Malouf AO has died today, aged 92.

He won an astonishing number of Australian and international awards, including the 2016 Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature, the 2000 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2008. 

Malouf was the award-winning author of nine novels.  I’ve read them all, but only five of them are reviewed here, so links on the titles are to Wikipedia.

  • Johnno (1975)
  • An Imaginary Life (1978), which won the 1979 Christina Stead Prize for Fiction in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, see my review
  • Fly Away Peter (1982), which won the 1982 Age Book of the Year and the 1983 ALS Gold Medal,  see my review
  • Child’s Play (1982),  a novella, see my review
  • Harland’s Half Acre (1984), see my review
  • The Great World (1990), which won the 1991 Miles Franklin Award and the 1991 Commonwealth Writers Prize, see Brona’s review here and Emma’s at Words and Peace here.
  • Remembering Babylon (1993) which won the 1993 Christina Stead Prize for Fiction in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and the Dublin IMPAC award and was shortlisted for the 1993 Booker
  • The Conversations at Curlow Creek (1996), which won the 1996 Age Book of the Year and was shortlisted for the 1997 Miles Franklin Award
  • Ransom (2009), shortlisted for the Dublin IMPAC award, the International Booker, see my review

His fiction also included short story collections:

ImagePoetry collections

  • Bicycle and Other Poems (1970)
  • Neighbours in a Thicket: Poems (1974), which won the ALS Gold Medal and the Colin Roderick Award
  • Poems 1975–76 (1976)
  • First Things Last (1980)
  • Wild Lemons: Poems (1980)
  • Selected Poems 1959–1989 (1992)
  • Guide to the Perplexed and Other Poems (2007)
  • Typewriter Music (2007)
  • Revolving Days: Selected Poems (2008)
  • Earth Hour (2014)
  • An Open Book (2018), see my review

ImageHis nonfiction includes memoir, essays, critical writing and the ABC Boyer Lectures.

  • 12 Edmondstone Street (1985) — memoir, on my TBR
  • A Spirit of Play: The Making of Australian Consciousness (1998) — the ABC Boyer Lectures
  • Essays:
    • Made in England: Australia’s British Inheritance (Quarterly Essay 2003) 
    • The Happy Life (Quarterly Essay 2011)
    • On Experience (2008) — in Melbourne University Press’s Little Books on Big Ideas series, see my review
  • The Writing Life: Book 2 (2014)

His plays and libretti include Blood Relations (1988); and Voss (1986); Mer de glace (1991); Baa Baa Black Sheep (1993) and Jane Eyre (2000).

Image credit:

Acknowledgements:

Sororicidal (2026) by Edwina Preston

/ Lisa Hill / 16 Comments

ImageOh my, Edwina Preston knows how to represent malice!

This story of two sisters, trying to outdo each other in coercive control since childhood, is absolutely gripping.

This is the book description:

In the vineyards above Edwardian Adelaide, Mary dazzles while Margot trails in her shadow.  But Mary’s malice will soon find its match in Margot’s icy resentment.

As the century turns convulsively modern, their childhood games mutate into a war of attrition.  From polite cruelty to absolute devastation, Sororicidal is a punk-gothic history of two sisters who become the executioners of each other’s dreams.  It is a novel about the necessary and unendurable entanglements of family; the thin, volatile line between care and spite; and how love is a flame that both feeds and consumes.

Mary, returning home after a painting residency in France, has told Margot that she is bringing a special present, but (true to form) she has forgotten about this (and everyone except herself) until her last day in Paris.  Nothing is suitable… until she sees the fruit bowl:

It is a pint-sized fruit bowl, with a stem, made of golden glass and filled with gem-like coloured-glass fruits; a heap of glossy blue grapes that look like sapphires; emerald-coloured miniature pears; mandarins the size of cumquats; ruby-red tombola-sized apples; topaz bananas in laughing crests.  It is perfect.  It is full of colour and reflection.  A precious jewelled artefact that need not be worn on the body and embarrass an old lady, but might be enjoyed nevertheless. (p.281)

One might think that this is a gift chosen with love, but… not quite… Mary’s ego makes this gift all about herself.  She wraps it up very carefully so that …

It is safely mummified and carefully stowed and a happy little glow of satisfaction occurs on my face when I imagine Margot unwrapping it and thinking of me thinking of her when I chose it. (p.281)

But Margot punctures that fantasy:

She removes the paper gingerly.  That is how spinsters and widows receive gifts, gingerly.  What exactly is being given and what is being bought? <snip>

But when the marvel is revealed, when the genie’s lantern springs its brilliance upon us, Margaret is unmoved.

‘Oh,’ she says.  ‘I see.’

The fruit bowl of clustered gems does not look very precious in the gloom of our kitchen light.  It looks dusty, second-hand.  I did not even wrap it in proper paper, with a pattern. Margot clenches the spent tissue paper into two balls and puts them aside. (p.291)

If we were children, Mary thinks, I would’ve given her a hard time about her ungratefulness. But the power balance has shifted from their childhood days when Mary was prettier and stronger and cleverer.

The punishment of the present will be the silence around it, and its ultimate positioning, in a dark place on a cabinet where it cannot shine, with bits of tape and paper still stuck to its bottom. (p.292)

Polite cruelty indeed!

The fruit bowl, however, is not the only artefact which has lost its French appeal.  Mary has used a ‘European’ palette in her paintings… the shades of French villages: pale pink, pale blue, pale green, pale yellow.  Grey against brown against mustard. In Australia, it is hard to paint the soft colours, easier to paint the hard, the primary, the solid.  

But I am using a more muted palette now, in keeping with my Anglo-Saxon European heritage. Last thing I would want to do is steal the colours of the Australian Aborigines. (p.257)

In Australia, the paintings look dull, and her male models look ordinary.  She gets her revenge on widowed Margot with a malicious use of another face.

Surely she must have known that Margot would take her own revenge!

This is a dark novel indeed!!

ImageImageEdwina Preston is the author of two novels I have previously enjoyed: The Inheritance of Ivorie Hammer (2012, see my review) and (nominated for the NSW Premier’s Award and the Stella Prize)  Bad Art Mother (2022, see my review.)  I won’t be at all surprised if this one is nominated for major prizes too.

Author: Edwina Preston
Title: Sororicidal
Publisher: Picador, 2026
Cover design: George Saad
ISBN: 9781761775550, pbk., 338 pages
Source: Kingston Library

 

2026 NSW Literary Awards shortlists

/ Lisa Hill / 3 Comments

The 2026 NSW Literary Awards shortlists have been announced:

This is the Christina Stead Prize for fiction ($40,000), and links on the title go to the Judges comments

I haven’t read any of the other books on the shortlists, and the website is too clunky to have to keep opening pages and type lists out, so visit it here for the ones that interest you.

Blind Spot, Southeast Asia and Australia’s Future (2026), by Michael Wesley (Quarterly Essay #101

/ Lisa Hill / 5 Comments

ImageI gave up my subscription to the Australian Foreign Affairs journal because it was nearly always about China, America and AUKUS, and hardly ever about our Australia’s relationships with anybody else.  So I was pleased to see this latest issue of Quarterly Essay taking up the slack and focussing on our relationship with our Southeast Asian neighbours. This is the book description from the QE website:

Australia has forgotten what keeps it safe. So argues Michael Wesley in this sharp and compelling essay about our place in the world.

Southeast Asia is the key to our national security and prosperity. If China dominates the region, as it plans to, Australia will be very vulnerable. So why are we following an American strategy that isolates and alienates us from our neighbours?

Wesley argues that the focus on AUKUS and sticking with Trump is a dangerous distraction. Whereas the United States has little at stake in Southeast Asia, Australia has everything to lose. How did our foreign policy elite become so wedded to the US worldview? What do our Southeast Asian neighbours have to tell us, if only we would listen? Blind Spot is a gripping essay about strategic folly and the future of our region.

“It should be clear that Australia has made the wrong bet: that relying on the US alliance to address the threat of a Chinese-centred Sphere of Deference on its northern doorstep has left it dangerously exposed and unprepared. If anything, Canberra’s adherence to the US strategy has led to an increasing divergence of interests and perceptions between Australia and its neighbours. As a consequence, Australia is arguably at an all-time low in its ability to shape events and attitudes in Southeast Asia.”

Some time ago, former Australian Prime Minister, Foreign Policy wonk and Sinophile Kevin Rudd PhD (Oxford) wrote a book called The Avoidable War about the imperative to avoid conflict with China.  It was very long and I only read the first chapter before it went back to the library, but (I think) I grasped the thrust of his argument which was that Australian had the option to choose ‘strategic trust’ because China wasn’t interested in conflict.  Rudd’s most recent book, On Xi Jinping, however, declares that he has changed his mind.  Summarising its main arguments at Bitter Winter, Massimo Introvigne writes that Rudd now thinks that

…the only way to protect Taiwan is military, that a ‘strategic confusion’ making China uncertain about how the West will react to military aggressions may be the best option in the near future, and that Xi Jinping no longer believes (if he ever did) that a major war should be avoided at all costs.

On Xi Jinping is about 600 pages long, so I won’t be reading that either. Suffice to say that I’m not entirely convinced that Australia should get involved in protecting Taiwan when the Chinese Taiwanese are themselves colonisers of the indigenous people there, and colonisers of the modern era at that.

Whatever about that, Wesley’s essay is a (much shorter) counter to this more recent view of protecting Taiwan militarily.

Well, I’ve read Blind Spot, and thought about it, and I’m really not much the wiser about what Wesley thinks Australia should be doing apart from being more independent in our foreign policy (which is hardly a new idea as we activist Boomers know).  We are just one of many middle powers caught between the US-China rivalry, but unlike the others, Australia is geographically isolated in a region that’s not interested in alignment with the US or with China, and our economy depends on trade with China.  On top of that, US attitudes under Trump have changed: they don’t see Asia as an economic opportunity any more, they now see it as a threat to American prosperity and jobs.  (Hence the punitive tariffs).

So here we are.  FWIW it’s worth, it seems to me that if there is a stoush between China and the US, whether we try to stay out of it or not, Australia will be a target because it hosts US military and intelligence bases.  And if we do join in a conflict over Taiwan in support of our alliance with the US, we have a lot to lose.

Wesley’s main argument is that Australia has entrapped itself in a foreign affairs culture that isn’t fit for purpose.  This has been caused by :

  • the Americanisation of our strategic and intellectual culture which has built a cadre of devotees to the alliance;
  • the cultivation of a sense of the US as essential to our wellbeing and success;
  • the proliferation of US-orientated Think Tanks; and
  • the progressive embedding of US experience into career trajectories via travel postings and being embedded into centres of US strategy.

Our SE Asian neighbours, OTOH, are staying out of confrontation because they’re too militarily weak to do anything else.  But they don’t like being lectured by Australia, and they are alarmed by our strategic initiatives with the US.  (I expect that they’re probably not much impressed by our Prime Minister doing a diplomacy dash through the region to shore up our oil supplies in the current crisis — without any apparent effort to ensure that smaller nations in our region have enough for their needs too.)

Wesley argues that the world has changed for middle powers like Australia. Previously, the post-WW2 world order was based on multilateralism; alliances, globalisation and a benign region:

  • Global institutions empowered us;
  • Global alliances centred on the US held widely shared values;
  • The Free Market enabled stable exports and imports; and
  • Our region was pragmatic, stable, with mutually beneficial economic development and shared ideas about sovereignty and equality of states.

It’s not like that now.

In Trump’s two terms of office, the value of security partnerships has been questioned by both the United States and its allies. And now we watch the astonishing spectacle of the US threatening a NATO ally with force to acquire Greenland. (p.69)

And although Wesley doesn’t say so, more and more states have fragmented into micro states with no viable economy or self-defence (e.g. East Timor).  They have nothing to offer Australia in terms of regional defence.   Nauru and Tuvalu have populations of about 10,000 (about the same size as regional Australian towns like Castlemaine and Portland) and yet they have full voting rights in the UN. This is not only ludicrous, it’s also prejudicial to good governance because it makes them open to vote buying, or agreeing to host military bases or other infrastructure for foreign powers.

(Today, New Caledonia proudly hosts a WW2 museum that tells the history of the US building a base here during WW2.  That infrastructure (airport, roads, hospital etc) is the basis of their tourist economy today.  It’s easy to see the appeal.)

I think we should have good relationships in our region not for utilitarian defence reasons, but because they are our neighbours and their cultural diversity is an asset to the region.  We should also care about them for humanitarian reasons.  We are a wealthy nation and if invited to do so, we should help them with initiatives to improve their standard of living, educational and investment opportunities.  We should also live up to our responsibility to assist with adapting to climate change, since it’s wealthy nations like ours that caused it.

Does it matter what a retired school teacher thinks about any of this? No, it doesn’t.

©Lisa Hill
Author: Michael Wesley
Title: Blind Spot, Southeast Asian and Australia’s Future
Publisherer: Quarterly Essay #101, Black Inc, 2026
ISBN: 9781760645793, pbk., 121 pages
Source: Quarterly Essay subscription.

When I Am Sixty-Four (2026), by Debra Adelaide, and some thoughts about ‘Grief-Lit’

/ Lisa Hill / 11 Comments

ImageDebra Adelaide’s latest book, When I Am Sixty-Four,  is a novel about caring for a friend who took her own life.  In the Acknowledgements she says that it’s a work of autofiction based on her friendship with her dear friend Gabrielle Carey.  She says that she has ‘played around with many aspects of the story, but never deviated from the essential facts.’

So it’s not a grief memoir, but it has made me think about the ethics of reviewing grief memoirs all the same.

Can one really, with integrity, ‘review’ a book expressing personal, heartfelt grief in the same way that one might review any other book? Should we put emotion to one side and attend to the features we usually discuss and be done with it, and if the book fails to meet expectations so that the review turns out to be mean and critical, so be it?

I don’t think so.  I think that we have to consider the feelings of the bereaved (who may or may not include the author).

I think that while we are reading, we can consider whether a book has been written too soon, or so ‘late’ that the impact of grief is muted; we can consider whether it invades the privacy of the dead person, revealing too much or too little of the person’s life and relationships; we can consider the framing of the book and the quality of its prose.  We can also make judgements about exploiting a death to write a story for commercial purposes, and we can assess whether the author has other agendas (e.g. mental illness, family violence, medical issues etc) as well as the grief.  More than anything, we can identify the way the book made us feel as readers, and most importantly, we can ask ourselves whether the work offers a nuanced portrait of the person who has died so that we understand what the loss means to her family and friends.

But which of these aspects should make it into a review to be read by others, who may not have read the book themselves, needs careful thought.

Debra Adelaide is a professional writer and When I Am Sixty-Four is beautifully written.  It brings this cherished friendship alive even as she struggles with her own inability to help her friend navigate the depths of depression.  We learn about her response to the friend’s wishes — rearranging furniture so that the house seems less oppressive, for example — and we see her realisation that the lovingly prepared uneaten meals in the fridge are a symptom of mental distress that she cannot fathom or redress. There are moments of humour, and shared memories of the past.  And there are walks in companionable silence, just being there for her friend. But we also see the author’s growing recognition that sometimes love might not be enough. We see her panic when she is absent from her friend and fears for her safety because she cannot be there all the time, to protect her from herself.

But what if this story were not beautifully written?  What if the prose were ordinary, and the story seemed banal?  Most deaths are part of the ordinary stuff of life, but they are still shattering to the  bereaved, while some deaths are horrific, and there can sometimes be a public interest in writing about them.  But what if the bereaved are not wordsmiths?  What if they have been badgered into writing their story?  What if the stories are written by survivors writing in a language that is not their mother tongue or, as ordinary people recounting an extraordinary experience, they have no background as writers and don’t have the skills to shape their story well? What if their story doesn’t encompass agendas that other readers want it to have?  (I am thinking of a review that I’ve seen that castigated a writer for not acknowledging Aboriginal deaths in a memoir — is that a reasonable expectation to have?)

I’m not the expert on grief. I only know what mine feels like; I only know what I’ve recognised in other people in my life.  For a wider perspective you need to be a regular visitor to Kate’s blog, Books are My Favourite and Best, where she brings professional expertise to reviews of ‘grief-lit’.

But I do think that when we are reviewing a book about grief, we should respond from the heart about how it made us feel, and leave the analysis to professionals in the field.

©Lisa Hill

Author: Debra Adelaide
Title: When I Am Sixty-Four
Publisher: UQP, 2026
Cover design by Josh Durham Design by Committee
ISBN: 9780702271168, hbk., 208 pages
Source: Kingston Library

The Rest of Our Lives (2025), by Ben Markovits

/ Lisa Hill / 21 Comments

ImageShortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize, The Rest of Our Lives is the twelfth novel of American author Ben Markovits.  I came across it via an author talk on Zoom, and while it was a welcome contrast after two disconcerting books about resurgent Nazism, the story of a mid-life crisis was never really more than mildly diverting.

The 2025 Booker Prize, BTW, brought us some interesting books: Flashlight by Susan Choi;  Audition by Katie Kitamura; and Seascraper by Benjamin Woods.  I don’t need to have read Tash Aw’s The South (on my TBR) to know that it’s good, and I expect Jonathan Buckley’s One Boat is too. I don’t quite understand how The Rest of Our Lives belongs in this company.

Anyway…

Middle-aged Tom has reached a crisis in his life.  With the departure of his daughter Miriam to college, the nest is empty and his reason for staying in an unsatisfactory marriage has dissolved.  His wife Amy had had an affair twelve years ago and He Has Not Got Over It.  So, brooding on this betrayal without doing anything decisive about resolving His Issues,  he had promised himself to leave Amy when their son and daughter were adults, and so after he drops Miriam off at the college he decides to take off there and then on a road trip.   Various encounters ensue, and we read a lot about their low level marital contests, and #Spoiler the symptoms he’s been experiencing suddenly cause major trouble, and he learns to let the people who love him into his life.

It’s a very American novel.  There are many cultural references that meant nothing to me, such as mystifying acronyms for colleges (universities) and brands of packet snacks I’d never heard of so #NotThatICared I had no clue about what he was eating as he made his way across state borders. There was also stuff about sport that puzzled me.  Tom toys with a long-held fancy to write a novel about ‘pickup basketball’, and I had no idea what that was. It turned out to be ad hoc games between a couple of strangers who are practising their shots on a court.  As we soon see, it’s not exactly compelling material for a novel.

Tom is also dissatisfied with his career as a lawyer.  I can’t tell whether it’s the character or the author who has a problem with diversity in the workplace, but it made me feel uneasy.  But it was mainly the tone of the novel that exasperated me: it’s confessional, as if he’s talking to, or rehearsing talking to, a therapist about the way he has drifted through life, not caring about anything much, and not making an effort to improve things.

It’s not only narcissistic twenty-somethings who are into overthinking.

There’s nothing I can say to surpass the opinion of Henk at Goodreads, who starts his review with:

“I could have done without this” the main character thinks 2/3 into this book, and I full heartedly concur with him. Like the worst Woody Allen movie in writing.

©Lisa Hill

Author: Ben Markovits
Title: The Rest of Our Lives
Publisher: Faber, 2025
Cover design by Faber (which probably means AI)
ISBN: 9780571402403, pbk., 237 pages
Source: Kingston Library

 

Heat Wave in Berlin (1961), by Dymphna Cusack

/ Lisa Hill / 34 Comments

ImageHard on the heels of a contemporary novel about resurgent post-war Nazism in the 1950s, (The Watchmaker’s War (2026) by Danny Ben-Moshe, see my review), came the utterly unexpected same theme in a novel I read for the #1961 Club. This is the book description, from my 1962 edition:

Heat Wave in Berlin is a powerful and topical novel based on a strong, simple plot. After ten years of happy marriage, Joy Miller, a young Australian woman, overcomes the reluctance of her German-born husband to return to his native land. With their small daughter, she and Stephen (formerly Stefan von Muhler) go to visit his family in West Berlin.

The Von Muhlers amaze Joy: they prove to be a rich, immensely influential and close-knit family, playing a strong part in West Germany’s post-war recovery. For a time, Joy is fascinated by the glittering new life they offer her, so exotically different from her own.

But — slowly at first, then swiftly and brutally — disillusionment and fear strike at her happiness as dark secrets are revealed. They are the secrets which, she learns, drove Stephen out of Germany in the first place, and have made him loathe his German kin, except his wonderful mother, all these years…

With the benefit of 21st century hindsight which readers of 1961 obviously did not have, I was expecting from this description that the ‘dark secrets’ of this novel would be about a wife’s shocked discovery that her husband’s family had been Nazi industrialists, perhaps profiteering from the manufacture of munitions, and perhaps employing slave labour. These may well have been ‘dark secrets’ for readers of the Sun-Herald Readers Club in 1961, especially for those too young to have watched the cinema newsreels from the immediate aftermath of WW2.  By 1961, West Germany was normalised as part of the Cold War anti-communist west: it had been welcomed into NATO in 1955, and was allowed rearmament against the Soviet Bloc.

BEWARE: SPOILERS

If this had been a contemporary novel, I might not have been so surprised by its revelations.  But reading this novel from 1961 I was not expecting that when the penny dropped for this naïve and somewhat complacent character, Joy would discover that the Von Muhlers were still enthusiastic Nazis anticipating and actively working towards a resurgence of the Third Reich.  Having conned Stephen ‘home’ with false warnings about his beloved mother’s health, they were demanding that he stay to help with their plans and they had the connections to prevent his departure.  I was also not expecting that their sick child would be treated by a doctor (probably modelled on Herta Oberheuser) who was convicted of medical experimentation on women and children at the Ravensbrück concentration camp but released after only five years of a 20 year sentence.  And I was certainly not expecting that Joy’s husband, an otherwise kind and decent man, had as a youth participated himself in atrocities.

I was intrigued, and troubled: what was the impetus for this story by an Australian author?  How authoritative was it, and what were Cusack’s research sources?  It’s commonplace now for books to include an Author’s Note that provides such information, but that was not so in 1961 when readers had to take a story on trust.

And what was the novel’s reception in 1961? What on earth did readers think, at a time when they believed that Nasizm had been soundly defeated and its perpetrators dealt with at Nuremburg?  Cold War rhetoric encouraged them to think of West Germany as an ally against the Communists.  Wikipedia quotes an un-named, unhelpful review:

A reviewer in The Canberra Times was not impressed with the novel: “Dymphna Cusack’s new documentary novel, Heatwave in Berlin, has the pace, the excitement and something of the basic hollowness of a thriller…What it makes as a novel, however, is something which cannot be taken very seriously. The characters have the larger-than-life quality of figures in a melodrama, and they speak with something of the same staginess.

I dug out the review at Trove and found that the entry at WP has been somewhat selective… Dymphna Cusack was a progressive Leftie, in a relationship with Norman Randolph Freehill, chief-of-staff of the Communist Party of Australia’s newspaper, the Tribune.  Although not as blatantly hostile as the WP snippet suggests, the review was clearly intended to discourage any potential readers.

Because I’m so interested in the reception of this novel in 1961, I think it’s worth quoting the review in full, letting the reviewer speak for himself (and make what you will of his suggestion that a musical education should have given Joy the ability to detect Stephen’s decade of lies yet conclude that he has ‘basic integrity’.):

THEME THAT LACKS CONVICTION

Dymphna Cusack’s new documentary novel, Heatwave in Berlin, has the pace, the excitement and something of the basic hollowness of a thriller.

It no doubt will be widely discussed, and in some quarters enthusiastically praised, because it deals vividly with the situation in present-day Berlin, dramatising a state of affairs where ex-war criminals are reinstated in positions of power, where industrialists live richly on the profits from factories run in wartime on slave labour, where an undercurrent of spying, international intrigue, Jew-baiting and the resurgence of neo Nazi organisations lies beneath the surface of a prosperous city.

What the facts are I am in no way qualified to say. What it makes as a novel, however, is something which cannot be taken very seriously. The characters have the larger-than-life quality of figures in a melodrama, and they speak with something of the same staginess.

The Australian heroine, Joy, married to a German who migrated to Australia after the war, returns with him and with one of her children to visit his family. She finds herself in a mansion dominated by the powerful industrialist father and her husband’s massive, strong-minded and mildly sinister sister. One can almost hear the sound of the villain’s music as this heavy-jowled pair take the stage. They do not approve of the outspokenness of an Australian child. They keep a household given to an almost feudal formality and rule there like despots.

Joy’s gradual discovery of the facts which support the luxurious edifice which these people inhabit provides the book with its theme. In chapter after chapter her own exploration of Berlin and her contacts with people outside the family — with an American scientist’s wife, a journalist, an old professor who, as a refugee of an earlier period, had trained her as a pianist — give Miss Cusack the opportunity to “lift the lid off” various facets of a corrupt society. It moves swiftly and with considerable power, so that one is driven on at an uncritical pace.

Even so, however, the heroine seems extraordinarily obtuse. For a young woman trained as a musician she seems to lack fine perception — indeed, the psychological interest of the novel centres round her inability to decide how far her husband shares the Nazi sympathies of his family. One might perhaps manage to live with a man for 10 years and know nothing of his politics; but one would have expected that 10 years of happy and fruitful marriage would have revealed something of his basic integrity. Stephen, however, never becomes more than a lay figure, and the revelations about his sympathies have a detective-story interest, but never seriously stir us. The other characters exist on much the same level of reality.

This book deals with serious matters. Some at least of the documentary material it is at pains to present has truth in it; and it does no harm to be reminded of what happened at Auschwitz and Buchenwald and of the depths to which human degradation can descend. But there was a human spirit which survived these experiences and lived to tell the tale in Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man. Miss Cusack finds no depth of perception to match this.

Her book appears, rather, as a fast-moving , “tract for the times”, with very little conviction on the human level, and a great deal of fairly shoddy writing. It is a shame that a theme of such seriousness could not be treated in way that was genuinely moving. -M.P. (Canberra Times 13 May 1961, at Trove edited to improve the paragraphing.)

*deep breath* Cusack criticised for not matching the depth of perception in Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man?? She was sounding an alarm against trusting Germany not to lapse back into Nazism!

So what was the inspiration for the novel and were her sources authoritative? I don’t (yet) have a biography of Dymphna Cusack*, but I found an answer at the ADB:

In the winter of 1958-59, en route to London from Peking, Cusack happened to witness a Nazi SS officers’ reunion and the beginnings of the neo-Nazi cult in Germany. The result was Heatwave in Berlin (1961), also widely published and translated.

Indeed it was.  Wikipedia tells us that the European reception looks to have transcended the negativity of the Australian review:
The novel was also translated into Norwegian, French, Danish, Dutch, and German in 1961; Hungarian and Russian in 1962; Bulgarian in 1963; Romanian and Estonian in 1964; Albanian in 1965; Latvian in 1966; and Uzbek in 1971.
You can read Perry Middlemiss’s more sophisticated contemporary review of Heat Wave in Berlin here. I agree with his conclusion:  A forgotten book by a forgotten writer, both of which should receive greater recognition.

ImageI read this book at this time for the #1961 Club, hosted by Kaggsy’s Booksh Ramblings and Simon at Stuck in a Book. Other Australian novels from 1961 include Solo for Several Players by Barbara Jefferis on my TBR, and those that I’ve read include

Image

*I’ve ordered a copy of Dymphna (Thomas Nelson, 19785) by Norman Freehill. The seller’s description was irresistible:

This compelling biography chronicles the remarkable life of the acclaimed Australian author Dymphna Cusack. Dymphna uncovers her significant contributions to literature and her passionate advocacy for social justice throughout the 20th century. The narrative presents a vivid portrait of a woman who defied conventions, illustrating her struggles and triumphs with insightful detail. Readers will gain a profound understanding of the forces that shaped her writing and her unwavering commitment to humanitarian causes. This work stands as a testament to her enduring legacy, offering an intimate look into the mind of a literary giant.

Update, later the same day: I have since discovered a doctoral dissertation called The Cold War Author & Humanist Dymphna Cusack: The first Doctoral Dissertation on this Australian cultural phenomenon by Adjunct Prof. Dr. Tania Peitzker (who seems to have ventured since into other non-literary fields.)  There’s extensive information about the genesis and research for Heat Wave in Berlin, its reception in Germany and propaganda usage in the USSR, and a claim that what was common knowledge in West Germany was not published in the West though the media knew about it.  More about that when I finish reading it…

©Lisa Hill

Author: Dymphna Cusack
Title: heat wave in Berlin
Publisher: Readers Book Club (Herald -Sun), 1962, first published by Heinemann, Melbourne 1961
Jacket design by Vern Hayles
ISBN: none, hbk, 252 pages
Source: personal library, probably purchased via AbeBooks.

The Watchmaker’s War (2026), by Danny Ben-Moshe

/ Lisa Hill / 10 Comments

ImageLike most people my age, I suppose, I grew up thinking that the Nazis and their loathsome ideology were vanquished.  I thought they had been eliminated and that post-war de-Nazification during the Allied Occupation had removed the threat of any resurgence, except for a few ageing die-hards who had escaped to South America. It certainly did not occur to me that the waves of post-war migration to Australia brought Nazis with it.

So you can imagine my reaction to seeing a man wearing Nazi insignia outside my local library a short time ago. I felt physically sick. I had only ever seen Nazi symbols in films, documentaries and books, never in real life, never in my quiet Melbourne suburb.  I walked away and sat down until I gathered my wits, and then I rang the local police.  The officer I spoke to explained that it wasn’t illegal (at that time, it is now) but he would have a talk with the offender.  I had a restorative coffee and then went back to the library.  The man was gone. But the memory lingers.  What seemed unthinkable until recently is now not so improbable. I am well-read in Holocaust literature, and I know how this story starts and ends.

But it was a different matter altogether in 1951, for a Jewish migrant who had escaped the Holocaust by Shooting that took place in Lithuania in 1941. For him, the sight of a Nazi symbol at the Bonegilla Migrant Hostel in north-eastern Victoria — a place he had thought safe —  was an existential threat.  That insignia evoked the recent, painful past in which he had lost his entire family and witnessed the near extermination of the entire population of Lithuanian Jews.  In a fictionalised version of these real-life events, Danny Ben-Moshe’s novel evokes his character’s terror well.

In the novel Berel does what I did, he went to the authorities at the camp.  But though he gets a sympathetic hearing from one of the staff, he isn’t believed.

Berel raced ahead and turned and stopped against the rear wall of the library.

‘There’s no charge for walking on the main path,’ Rogers teased.

‘I must hide,’ Berel said.  ‘I can’t be seen.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Shh.’ Berel put his finger to his lips.  ‘They are Nazis.  There are Nazis here.’

‘Who are?’

‘The Lithuanians, from my hut.’

‘Rogers looked at him, perplexed.  ‘Are you all right?’

‘They are Nazis,’ Berel insisted. ‘If they find me, they will kill me.’

‘Listen, I’m no doctor, but what you’ve been through can affect your mind, Rogers said.  ‘I’ve seen it happen to my mates from Changi.  Some of them have all sorts of problems, trouble sleeping, nightmares, hallucinations.  It’s not the same, but I do have some idea what it’s like.  Let’s go and have a cup of tea in the mess hall, and when you’ve calmed down we can have a chat about it.’

‘No!’ Berel burst out, surprising himself with his assertiveness.  ‘It’s too risky, they could kill me.’

‘All right, Rogers said, speaking quietly, ‘Tell me who is going to kill you.’

In an urgent whisper, Berel relayed what he’d heard last night in the hut.  ‘They spoke about all the Jews they killed, all the death pits they filled, burning people alive in a synagogue.’

Rogers tried in vain to assure him that was not possible.  ‘Anyone who had served with the Germans or their allies is barred from entry into Australia.’

‘I know what I heard,’ insisted Berel. (p.154)

He flees to Melbourne to seek help from his friend Yakov, who he’d met on board the ship bringing European migrants to Australia.  And that sets in train a chilling story that would be unbelievable — except that it’s based on a true story.

For Lithuanian Boris Green (née Greineman) — the real-life inspiration for Danny Ben-Moshe’s novel The Watchmaker’s War — seeing the evidence of a Nazi past, meant seeing that the man responsible for the mass murder of his family and thousands of other Jews, Poles and Soviet citizens, was alive and well and living in Australia. The film-maker Danny Ben-Moshe has brought this shocking story to life, revealing not only the lax screening processes that enabled Nazi migration, but also the government agency behind the intentional importation of Nazi operatives to spy out communist sympathisers in the community.

This is the book description:

When Yakov Holtzman arrives in Melbourne – about as far away as he can possibly get from the graveyard that is Europe – he puts behind him the years he spent in the forests of Lithuania as a leader of the resistance, fighting the Nazis. He has come to join his brother – his only surviving family member – and start a new life as the watchmaker he once was.

Yakov looks for solace – and love – in the fragile, traumatised community of Jewish refugees taking root in a new land. But when swastikas, threats and, most frightening of all, the faces of old enemies appear on the streets of suburban St Kilda, his new-found peace is shattered.

Fierce instincts are reawakened in Yakov, and he knows he must act. But how can justice – or revenge – best be served? And will Yakov’s drive to destroy his enemies overtake him too, and leave his new life in ruins?

Based on a true story, The Watchmaker’s War is a gripping, high-stakes tale of Nazi hunters in Australia and the war criminals they pursued — killers with links to the highest levels of Australia’s spy agency. It offers profound insights into the lingering trauma of genocide, posing difficult questions about competing desires for peace and vengeance, and how far a victim should go in the pursuit of justice when the authorities fail to act.

The Watchmaker’s War is carefully structured to reveal the ethical tensions surrounding justice and revenge, reminding me of other novels on the same theme, most recently The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden (2024, see my review.) Needless to say, I don’t agree with vengeance; I don’t even approve of capital punishment.  I think that diplomacy, dialogue and negotiations are better ways to resolve conflict, and that the justice system, flawed as it might be, is better than revenge.  But I am not naïve.  I concede that there are intransigent problems where one side refuses to engage in efforts to resolve conflict; where one side persists with violence; where there is an evil that is implacably resistant to change, and where there are terrorists who murder innocent people in pursuit of their agenda.  And as in real life, The Watchmaker’s War deals with mass murderers who evaded justice, and the characters had the opportunity and capacity to exact revenge.

Brothers Yakov and Benny hold opposing views.  As with their real-life counterparts, both had been partisans in the fight against the Nazis, and had joined forces with the Russian partisans in the Baltic forests of Belarus, but Benny was the more experienced having gone to fight from the outset whereas Benny thought it was possible to survive and did not join until his family was killed.  Still grieving his loss, Benny just wants to suppress his feelings by focussing on establishing a livelihood through his business.  Among his arguments to dissuade Benny, is that Yakov has found love again, so his marriage to another fragile survivor would be at risk if he got involved as a vigilante.

Though the violence is always offstage and never made explicit, I don’t know which I found creepier: that the entire premise of this novel is based on documentary evidence, some of which is reproduced in Notes at the back of the book; that there were Lithuanian Nazi war criminals migrating to my country at the invitation of ASIO and that as a sideline to their work as anti-communist spies, they were planning the murder of Jews here; or that there were refugee vigilantes responsible but not held accountable for the mysterious deaths of Nazis in postwar Melbourne and Sydney.

For those reasons, The Watchmaker’s War is compelling reading.  It invites reflection about the amoral skulduggery of our security services and the politicians who directed them; about the weakness of our justice system over time in failing to convict Nazi war criminals, and most importantly, about an ethical response to the failures of the justice system when the guilty walk free.

©Lisa Hill

Author: Danny Ben-Moshe
Title: The Watchmaker’s War
Publisher: Harper Collins, 2026
Cover design by Darren Holt
ISBN: 9781460763612, pbk., 404 pages
Source: Personal library, purchased from Benn’s Books, $34.99

 

2026 Age Book of the Year shortlists

/ Lisa Hill / 5 Comments

The shortlist for the 2026 Age Book of the Year has been announced. I’ve read three of the fiction list.  Links on the titles go to the Age (paywalled) review, links to my reviews are after the author’s name.

The fiction books on the shortlist are:

ImageImageSalvage by Jennifer Mills
Fierceland by Omar Musa
The Immigrants by Moreno Giovannoni
A Piece of Red Cloth by Leonie Norrington, Djawundil Maymuru, Merrkiyawuy,   Ganambarr-Stubbs and Djawa Burarrwanga, see my review
Out of the Woods by Gretchen Shirm, my review deleted from my blog at the ‘request’ of the publisher.
You Must Remember This by Sean Wilson, see my review

The non-fiction shortlisted books are:

Blue Poles by Tom McIlroy
Red House by Kate Wild
A Woman’s Eye, Her Art by Drusilla Modjeska, on my wishlist
The Shortest History of Australia by Mark McKenna
Gutsy Girls by Josie McSkimming
Mr and Mrs Gould by Grantlee Kieza

The 45th Age Book of the Year winners each receive $10,000, courtesy of the Copyright Agency’s cultural fund, and the winners will be announced on May 7th.

Department of the Vanishing (2026) by Johanna Bell

/ Lisa Hill / 16 Comments

ImageWinner of the University of Tasmania’s Best New Unpublished Work prize in the 2025 Tasmanian Premier’s Literary Awards, Joanna Bell’s Department of the Vanishing is a spellbinding, innovative work of eco-fiction with a message about species extinction that can’t be ignored.

Hobart-based author, poet and Churchill Fellow, Johanna Bell has published award-winning children’s books and founded a storytelling studio to elevate voices from regional Australia. Department of the Vanishing is her first book for adults.

The novel is a pastiche and credit must go to Jo Hunt who did the complex internal design.  The book consists mainly of pages which purport to be archival materials including photos; records of police interviews (with some redactions); newspaper headlines; emails; and lists of facts.  Documents are ‘stamped’ with ‘File Copy’, ‘Restricted’, and the minutiae of archival practice: Accession numbers, Received dates, Date stamps, Not for Loan etc.  These are supplemented by narratives of free verse and a typed record of a confused mother’s ramblings and the daughter’s frustrated response in handwriting.  This extraordinary collage comes together to tell the story of mass bird extinctions in the very near future and an archivist’s struggle to protect the documentary record.  In a silent environment where birdsong has vanished, Ava Wilde is also seeking an explanation for her ornithologist father’s disappearance some years ago, and negotiating her own relationship with a man called Luke.

Yesterday, I spotted a tiny bird ducking into the jasmine vine just outside my library window.  It’s an elusive bird: though sometimes I find an empty nest when I prune the vine, it moves so quickly that I never see it for long enough to be sure what it is.  It’s smaller than a sparrow, and light brown so it could be a brown thornbill but it could also be a silvereye. We also see honeyeaters, magpies and magpie-larks, galahs (which eat our apples), and the occasional eastern rosella, but this dear little bird is my favourite of the visitors to our garden.

Whichever my little bird is, it’s not an endangered species, but neither were lyrebirds until the 2019–2020 Australian bushfire season.

The vanished birds in Department of the Vanishing include many examples of Australia’s unique birdlife: lyrebirds, magpies, albatross, honeyeaters, rosellas, cockatoos and pelicans.  The book begins with a photo of dead birds, neatly tagged in the kind of specimen tray that museums use, and on the facing pace, a quotation from D H Lawrence:

In the beginning, it was not a word, but a chirrup. (p. 1)

Then there is a double page of birdcalls approximated phonetically , so many that they tumble over each other, everything from the ‘coo-coo’ of a pigeon to the ‘tonk’ of a cockatoo. And then another quotation, this time from an ornithologist at Charles Darwin University, by name of Stephen Garnett:

After a few days of fourty [sic] degrees plus, the country’s just silent. (p.5)

And then there’s the first of a number of chilling Orwellian interviews where the archivist Ava Wilde is interviewed by the police.

It is only page 7 and words have been few but already the reader is drawn into a scenario that seems only too possible.

Department of the Vanishing is a remarkable book.  Highly recommended.

©Lisa Hill

Other reviews:

Author: Johanna Bell
Title: Department of the Vanishing
Publisher: Transit Lounge, 2026
Cover and internal design: Jo Hunt
ISBN: 9781923023550, pbk., 311 pages
Source: Bayside Library

PS You can see footage of Albert’s lyrebird at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyrebird# where you can also hear the lyrebird’s song.

Audition (2025), by Katie Kitamura

/ Lisa Hill / 29 Comments

ImageBEWARE: SPOILERS

… the truth was I had almost no idea of what she was talking about, it was all a way of talking rather than talking itself.  The sensation of dread increased. Max was looking at me but when I stared back her face closed down a little, as if she had been confronted, and I knew then that she had no idea what she had written, no idea of how it would work in the play, how it would bridge the two versions of the character, the scene she had written was no more than a placeholder.  She had grown bored of [sic] the character in the midst of writing, I realised, and wanted to write a different character, and so had created this impossible scene to segue between not two versions of the same character, but two different characters altogether.  I could see it now, I could see it all over the writing. (p.87-8)

By the time you reach this ah-ha! moment on page 87, having waded through all the overthinking and the deliberately confusing elements of Katie Kitamura’s (2025) Women’s Prize longlisted Audition, you will either think this is brilliant, or that this is an author describing exactly what has happened during the writing of this novel and that the really creative aspect of it is the elaborate aura Kitamura has manufactured to explain it to a mystified audience.  You then re-read the preceding page…

She made a little grimace, as if she had a bad or bitter taste in her mouth, she seemed to feel a certain amount of contempt toward the very character she had created and centred her story around, <snip> I saw in the flicker of her eye that even if I was correct, even if this was the character as she had conceived of it, she not only held her and her grief in some disdain, she was also—and this was perhaps worse—a little bored by her. (p.86)

How many times have we seen or heard authors talking about investing time in a new novel, only to find that it’s just not working, and they put it aside with a mixture of relief and regret? But what if they don’t? What if they continue with it, without a segue, adding a Part II with all kinds of ensuing contradictions, improbabilities and impossibilities and submit it to a publisher as a postmodern text? The reader then has to do what the unnamed actor/narrator does, invent that segue and come up with an explanation for the disconnected halves. Perhaps either Part I or Part II represents the illusions of a woman not coping with grief, but which part, eh? Are we reading an actor  inhabiting two different roles from plays she performs in?

Perhaps not.

ImageAudition reminds me of the infamous Ern Malley hoax.  In 1943, a pair of writers by name of James McAuley and Harold Stewart, despised modernism and wanted to discredit ‘Angry Penguins’, the literary journal of its Australian champions, the Australian poet Max Harris and art patron John Reed.  McAuley and Stewart created sixteen poems in the modernist style they deplored, and in the guise of the poet’s sister Ethel, submitted them to the journal as the work of ‘Ern Malley’.

The poems were hailed a work of genius and took on a life of their own.  When the hoax was revealed, modernist poetry got a very bad press, and the journal folded. Wikipedia, however, says that:

Since the 1970s, however, the Ern Malley poems, though known to be a hoax, became celebrated as a successful example of surrealist poetry in their own right, lauded by poets and critics such as John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch and Robert Hughes. The poems of Ern Malley are now more widely read than those of his creators, 

ImageThe hoax has inspired various novels including most recently Stephen Orr’s Sincerely, Ethel Malley (2021, see my review.)

For a different take on Kitamura’s novel, there are multiple enthusiastic reviews everywhere, but see also

PS At the Women’s Prize reading guide, Rachel Cusk’s Second Place is suggested as another author one might like. Cusk has legions of fans but I’ve never been tempted to read her, and Audition has cemented my suspicions.

©Lisa Hill

Author: Katie Kitamura
Title: Audition
Publisher: Fern Press (Penguin Random House), 2025
ISBN: 9781911717324, hbk., 197 pages
Source: Bayside Library

Six Degrees of Separation, from The Correspondent…

/ Lisa Hill / 19 Comments

ImageThis month’s starter book for #6Degrees hosted by Kate at Books are My Favourite and Best is an epistolary novel called The Correspondent by Virginia Evans. (See Kate’s review).  I’ve had it on reserve at the library for ages, uncertain about whether I might like it, because it’s described at Penguin as Charing Cross Road meets A Man Called Ove. 

Image A Man Called Ove doesn’t appeal but I loved Helene Hanff’s 84, Charing Cross Road (1970).  I read it long before it was made into a film, and I loved it, of course, because it was about booklovers.

ImageBut it was not the first novel I’d ever read that was written in the form of letters.  That was Jean Webster’s Daddy Long Legs which I read when I was about twelve, and I still have my very battered copy of it.  It has lost its spine because it was on the bottom shelf of the bookshelf and Amber disgraced herself in puppyhood and chewed it off.

ImageOne of the earliest epistolary novels I’ve read is Dostoyevsky’s Poor Folk (1848, English translation 1894). The letter writers are not separated by an ocean… but merely by a road.  To quote from my own review:

The couple whose letters form this epistolary novel, write from their rooms in miserable tenements across the road from each other.  They are cold and hungry and they get sick from their privations.  They can’t even have an in-person relationship because they can’t afford to marry and her reputation would be ruined by gossip if he were to visit her.

1960A Descant for Gossip (1960, see my review) is a powerful indictment of small town gossip. Again, from my own review…

When Thea Astley (1925-2004) wrote this marvellous book way back in 1960, she would not have dreamed of today’s sordid celebrity culture and its spiteful gossip, justified by its readers as harmless fun because they think its victims are rich, offstage, and ‘asked for it’ anyway by becoming famous.  What Astley did know, and has depicted in her trademark incisive style in A Descant for Gossips, is the viciousness of small-town gossip.

ImageThis reminded me of Tell (2024, see my review), by Jonathan Buckley (which won the Novel Prize). It featured narration by a garrulous, gossipy, self-righteous woman and the author withholds the identity of her audience until almost the end of the story. Tell’s narrator reveals more than she intends to because she can’t help herself.

ImageTell reminds me of the most recent winner of the Novel Prize, Anna (2025) see my review by Angus Gaunt. It’s a story of dogged survival to a fragile re-emergence of self after imprisonment and there’s a universality to the tale because there are people in camps and detention centres all over the world. The Finlay Lloyd 20/40 Publishing Prize is a terrific prize for novella-length works and has brought us some beaut books since its inception.

©Lisa Hill

 

Next month (May 2, 2026), we start with a book that is longlisted on the Women’s Prize and the Stella – Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy. By then, we’ll know if it’s been shortlisted.

The Best of Everything (2025), by Kit de Waal

/ Lisa Hill / 17 Comments

ImageI’ve had the wrong kind of life to be sentimental, and Kit de Waal’s The Best of Everything is a bit too sentimental for me.  But the novel has been longlisted for the Women’s Prize and has many admirers, so I stuck with it and found that it has insights that I hadn’t predicted from the first third of the story.

Set in 1970s Britain, The Best of Everything is the story of a West Indian woman called Paulette, foolishly committing her future to a man she should have known was married and then bearing a child to his friend Garfield while both are grieving his loss. When finally she realises that she doesn’t love Garfield and never will (because *sigh* she’s still in love with Denton despite the betrayal), the child ‘Bird’ becomes the mainstay of her life.

Although somewhat idealised, the positive portrayal of a single mother is refreshing.  Paulette supports her child with her work as a nursing auxiliary which gives her both job satisfaction and security.  Though she would have liked to realise her dreams of home and family with Denton and a couple of daughters, her child with Garfield becomes her entire life and he brings her great joy.  (He’s an easy, placid baby who grows into a good-natured boy.)

As Bird grows, she plays with him endlessly, not ever too tired after her day at work; not ever exhausted by the responsibilities that come with being a single parent. Within her means she gives Bird ‘the best of everything’ that she can afford.  However, she lets some of her friendships fall by the wayside, (along with any potential suitors) which puts her at risk of a worse-than-usual ’empty nest syndrome’.  As if in defiance of the blurb which says she likes ‘to map out the future’,  she doesn’t look too far ahead.  It will be a long time, she thinks, as she ponders her ambitious plans for him,  before he finishes university and leaves home.

One of the ways Paulette expresses her love is by cooking the West Indian cuisine that she learned from her grandmother in St Kitts, and her pantry and fridge are always well stocked for impromptu visitors.   However, De Waal’s poignant portrayal of the way Paulette has ‘all her eggs in one basket’ is revealed by her dependence on Bird’s presence in her life.  Garfield had developed a strong and loving relationship with Bird before Paulette sent him on his way, and he insists on maintaining contact with financial support and regular access visits. There are long, lonely times when Garfield takes Bird away for these access visits which expand to overnight and then weekends, and  then Those Special Days when everyone else is celebrating with family and she is alone.   It is loneliness that makes her take refuge in drinking.

BEWARE: SPOILERS

The novel bears an epigram from J M Barrie’s Peter Pan: ‘Try to be a little kinder than is necessary’ and it’s dedicated to ‘all the people that have shown me kindness’.  But The Best of Everything is not just about how Paulette’s genuine kindness leads her to take on some of the mothering of Cornelius a.k.a. Nellie, the forlorn grandchild of Frank, the very man whose careless driving killed Denton.

Paulette privately calls Frank ‘Shirt &Tie’ because of his quaint English manner that marks him as fallen on hard times and not belonging in her working-class neighbourhood.   Although she hates him for ruining her (improbable) dreams of family life with Denton, she pities Cornelius, whose mother died as a result of the same car accident.  He bears all the signs of a neglected child, and her heart bypasses her reservations and she brings him into her life.

And so begins the friendship between the two boys, one black, one white.  And as time goes by and teenage rebellion enters the plot, De Waal portrays the caution with which People of Colour must live their lives lest they run foul of a prejudiced society.  Inverting the stereotypical trajectory, it is ‘Bird’ a.k.a. Curtis with the guidance of his West Indian parents who does well at school and with the help of his ambitious father Garfield (who recovers quickly from Paulette’s rejection and has a new family) is soon on the path to success and respectability.  It is Cornelius whose life runs off the rails, making the point that it’s nurture not nature that matters, and the life Cornelius has with his very troubled grandfather is bleak.

The novel also portrays the considered forbearance which makes Paulette able to negotiate the crises in her life. Apart from a couple of incidents when she is pushed beyond endurance, she mostly holds her tongue and keeps her temper, her interior thoughts the only sign to the reader that she has not forgiven an offence, but has decided on a prudent response instead. She models this behaviour to her son, offering strategic silence as a tactic to negotiate life as a Person of Colour in a society that can be unpredictably racist.

One of the things I liked about this novel was that De Waal doesn’t stereotype the white characters as racist.  Realistically, some are, especially when judgements are made about wrongdoing of some kind e.g. at school or when the police are involved.  But some aren’t, e.g. Maggie the staunch Irish friend and neighbour and also Sister Mackenzie (Paulette’s supervisor at the hospital, who goes out of her way to help Paulette through her difficulties).  But it’s clear that People of Colour can’t make assumptions about whether they will be treated equitably or not.  In Paulette and Garfield’s world, it’s prudent to teach their children to keep out of trouble because they may be held to account for their behaviour with more stringent standards than other children.

Will The Best of Everything be shortlisted for the Women’s Prize?  I haven’t read enough of the longlist to have a fair overview of it, but I don’t think it’s in the same league as The Benefactors, Flashlight or A Guardian and a Thief. We’ll find out later this month when the shortlist is revealed.

PS Via Library Thing, I discovered that this novel has also been published as Sweet Pea.

©Lisa Hill

Author: Kit de Waal
Title: The Best of Everything
Publisher: Tinder Press, (Headline, Hachette), 2025
Cover design: Emma Ewbank
ISBN: 09781035404803, pbk., 303 pages
Source: Bayside Library

Sea Green (1974, reissued 2025), by Barbara Hanrahan

/ Lisa Hill / 18 Comments
Image

1st edition

ImageFirst published in 1974 by UK publishers Chatto & Windus, and now reissued by SA publisher Pink Shorts Press, Sea Green was Barbara Hanrahan‘s second novel, following an impressive debut with The Scent of Eucalyptus (1973, on my TBR).  Born in 1939, she was 35 when this autofiction was published.  It depicts her journey of self-discovery when she escapes from teaching in Adelaide to take up a career as an artist in London.

This is the book description:

Virginia is on a ship bound for London, lured by her creative dreams, leaving behind her weeping mother and father in Adelaide. On the cocoon-like journey she is struck by the messiness of relationships and her uncontrollable body. But things on the other side of the world are no neater, as she is pulled between her conservative expectations and her magnetic internal life.

In innovative poetic prose, artist and author Barbara Hanrahan plunges us into the possibility-filled London of her youth while reflecting the all-but-unchanged experience of finding independence as a creative woman. Originally published in 1974, Sea Green was inspired by Hanrahan’s experiences but has a life and immediacy all its own.

The novel begins at sea, where Virginia is among other young women with inchoate ambitions.  They are off to see the world, but Virginia has saved up her money to attend the  Central School of Art in London.  (Barbara Hanrahan is listed among the alumni of this school of art, now one of the colleges of the University of Arts in London.) But first there is the long, slow voyage, which turns out to be more tedious than she had expected, except for a shipboard romance, which culminates, as most of them as did, in disappointment. What makes this first part of the novel a delight to read is Hanrahan’s sharp wit and innovative writing style.  It’s narrated in singular and plural first person and third person points of view, transitioning from one to another with only a line break as a guide:

I left Adelaide with only my hopes, a couple of mock-leather cases, a cardboard folder.  Now, in a strange climate, on a steely ship, the hopes have turned dull, been smothered by the present’s grip and the sentimental stranglehold of what’s past. Without the mediocrities I spurned I am adrift on more than an ocean.  The only solution seems to keep on moving, try to outpace both present and past, abandon the needs of an identity I can no longer serve.

But I can’t do it by myself.  And the one I wait for doesn’t come.

 

In the end darkness made her afraid.  She climbed down to the glassy lounge where bodies danced to music she couldn’t hear. People stared from deck chairs; judged as they promenaded beside the rail.  Romance was mocked by a showy trail of foam.

On the deck, though the tropics drew near, it was cold.  Breezes swooped, but Virginia burned.  Disappointment, the shame induced by waiting, the burden beneath her arm, had set her on fire.  Tears stung her eyes; she blundered on.

Yet even in the descent to the cabin she couldn’t succeed, couldn’t find the way; lost herself in a maze of identical antiseptic corridors, wastes of tapestry weave lounges.  She passed through rooms where flagging pens embroidered yesterday’s memories on flimsy pages; where women forgot they were wives in the queue for an ironing board, the evening’s crumpled dreams of glamour over their arms. (p.45)

Sea Green would have been a salutary tale for Australian readers planning the same escape with hopes of an expat lifestyle like Germaine Greer, Robert Hughes and Clive James.

At times, the novella is almost unbearably poignant.  Anticipation derailed by disappointment, over and over again.  The voyage, her companions, the shipboard romance, the reality of cheap digs in London, the discovery that people she mixes with are not the icons of good taste and progressive politics that she had anticipated.  Britain is depicted as the stratified and class-conscious society that you’d expect, and some of it rubs off on her.  Though she knows her very self is altered, she falters in its snare:

Once I was secure.  I had lecture notes and paint brushes, etching needles and timetables.  My life was ordered; hedged behind tidy lanes of habit, apportioned neatly between the portmanteaus and holdalls of my compartmented life.  I was artist and teacher and daughter; I was even myself.  I was fragmented, it was safer that way.  Dangerous passions were reserved for my art, love was only a game; I mocked it on the pillion of motorbike, with a lily in my hand, in a station wagon before the sea.

My world was self-enclosed, a formal garden that never knew aphis or mildew, canker or thrip or gall.  At night I slept soundly, chastely, in a room scented in little bags, roses in a cut-glass vase.

I crossed the sea in a ship.  And on the ship I lost something.  Hands that were cold ripped something precious away.  And now, in another city as snow flies at the window and icicles hang from pipes, I falter — snared.  (p.140)

Despite her sharp observations about her encounters, Virginia’s naiveté about people in general and men in particular makes for a steep learning curve.   Because it’s set in the 1960s (i.e. before The Pill when ‘nice’ girls ‘saved themselves’ for marriage — and that was the expected trajectory for a woman’s life) her ignorance about her own body is disastrous, and her lack of confidence leads to awful betrayal.  The Dannie referred to in this passage is a nasty piece of work and most readers will be hoping to see the back of him.

Yesterday I went to Smith’s in Kingsway to get another of the books on anatomy.  Then I felt quite sick and faint because I thought I saw Dannie by the Panther books.  At least his haircut and stance — legs apart, leaning forward slightly.  Sometimes after staring at the zinc [used in etching at the art school] my eyes are weak and I see things blurred, so I wasn’t sure. But it looked like him, and I went over to the Penguins where there is a mirror, wondering if I looked good enough to speak to him. (p. 139)

That passage took my breath away: a young adult worrying about looking good enough to speak to him…  

4ZZZ has reviewed this book too, at Goodreads.

©Lisa Hill

Author: Barbara Hanrahan (1939-1991)
Title: Sea Green
Introduction by Laura Elizabeth Woollett
Publisher: Pink Shorts Press, 2025 , first published by Chatto & Windus, 1974
Cover art: ‘The necklace of water drops’, screenprint by Barbara Hanrahan, 1982
ISBN: 9781763554108, pbk., 187 pages
Review copy courtesy of Pink Shorts Press

Image credit: 1974 Chatto & Windus 1st edition, cropped from Good wood Books: https://www.goodwoodbooks.com.au/product/sea-green-by-barbara-hanrahan/377