Congratulations — you made it to the (almost) end of yet another stranger-than-fiction year. You probably want to escape to a different reality; reconvene your sense of hope; feel inspired? This list of 2022 favourites from ABC's book experts — ranging from hot new Australian fiction to Booker Prize nominees, lesser-known gems and snackable morsels — has got you covered for summer (and may even help with gift inspiration).
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
Picador (Pan Macmillan)
Canadian Emily St. John Mandel is one of the most exciting authors writing today. Her books are ambitious, complicated, and a little bit weird, and this novel, with its timeshifting storyline, might just be her most accomplished yet.
It opens in 1912, with a young British aristocrat, Edwin St. John St. Andrew, "hauling the weight of his double-sainted name across the Atlantic". He eventually finds himself on Vancouver Island in Canada, where something unexplainable happens: He's standing beneath the branches of a maple tree when there is a sudden flash of darkness; he hears violin music, a strange whoosh, and feels as if he's in two places at once.
In 2020, a composer in New York City is showing a home-video to an audience, where something similar happens: A woman is walking underneath a maple tree when suddenly the video goes black, there's some violin music, and another whoosh.
The story travels on, to an ill-fated book tour in 2203, and even to a moon colony in the year 2401. If you're feeling lost – never fear. By the end of the novel, Mandel has everything click into place, leaving the reader with the satisfied feeling of a completed jigsaw puzzle.
This is speculative fiction of the highest literary standard. Read it – you won't regret it. CN
The Strangers by Katherena Vermette
University of Queensland Press
Katherena Vermette is a poet and novelist of Métis (Michif) heritage (one of the three recognised Indigenous groups in Canada). Her writing is tough, beautiful, confronting and designed to take your breath away.
In The Strangers, she takes us into the lives of four generations of women from the Stranger family.
When the book opens, Phoenix is incarcerated in a cruel juvenile detention system; she is chained while giving birth. This is a character almost bursting out of her skin with anger and despair, roiling with the repercussions of the terrible crime she committed. She names her baby boy Sparrow, for a sister who died in foster care.
From Phoenix's story we move out and into the lives of the other women: her mother Elsie, moving from one drug fix to the other, mourning her lost children and trying to get by; her sister Cedar-Sage, studying hard, always alone; her grandmother Margaret, whose resentment is epic; and great-grandmère Annie, who keeps the family together, in her big brown house in Winnipeg, as much as she can.
The story moves back and forward in time, solidifying the branches of a family tree that has grown from both mythology and a harsh realpolitik, becoming stronger all the while. This is a fictional family to believe in — and one I have not been able to forget. KE
This is an edited version of the original review from June.
The Trees by Percival Everett
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Comedy and lynching are very unusual bedfellows, but prolific American author Percival Everett (Erasure; I Am Not Sidney Poitier) combines them brilliantly in this powerful novel, shortlisted for this year's Booker Prize.
Set in Money, Mississippi, The Trees follows two droll Black detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation (MBI), who are called in when two white men are found brutally murdered, each in the company of a dead Black man.
As the body count of dead white people mounts, and a similar dead Black man continues to appear at the crime scenes, clues point to Money's notorious history as the site of the 1955 lynching of 14-year-old Black boy Emmett Till by two white men (who were acquitted by an all-white jury).
Everett pillories racist white people and highlights the injustices and repercussions of lynchings. In a powerful interlude, he lists the names of people known to be victims of lynching; horrifyingly, the list goes to almost 10 pages.
This book reckons with a brutal history, and the gallows humour guarantees you won't look away. SL
An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life by Paul Dalla Rosa
Allen & Unwin
Paul Dalla Rosa's stories are hilarious – and even funnier if you hear them read (lucky you!) by the author. Each line of dialogue is given its due – a laconic treatment in which Rosa enunciates each word and sentence in a drawl thick enough to strip paint.
Each story in An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life is predictably unpredictable: You can predict Bad Things will happen, but exactly what kind of Bad Thing often remains gratifyingly difficult to envisage.
Yet, for all the trouble he puts his characters through in his scalpel-sharp set-ups, there is never any doubt that it is the frail, the misguided, and the innocents who are Rosa's people: The story Short Stack convincingly portrays the inner world of a loser who genuinely enjoys working a dead-end job at a pancake parlour; Charlie in High Definition features the most adorably malevolent feline this side of Lucio Fulci's 1981 horror film The Black Cat.
I Feel It offers the most convincing humiliation via fried food since Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke filmed a character being repeatedly slapped in 2002's Unknown Pleasures.
It takes great skill to do what Rosa does: the fiendish way he wields his adverbs; the devastatingly sardonic dialogue; the not-quite non-sequitur repetitions; the glazed re-emphases. He makes it look easy. Good authors often do. But you can't levy a vein of humour this deep without intelligence, wit, and heart. DF
Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart
Picador (Pan Macmillan)
Scottish author Douglas Stuart won the Booker Prize in 2020 for his debut novel, Shuggie Bain. His follow-up is even better.
Set in the housing estates of 90s Glasgow, this is a story about forbidden love, between two teenage boys, Mungo and James. The boys' love is pure and joyful – think passionate kisses and sausage rolls in the bath – but the world around them is violent and dangerous.
Be warned: There are scenes in this novel that are breathtakingly painful to read; somehow, however, Stuart makes it work. None of the darkness feels unearned or voyeuristic. And amongst the brutality, Stuart finds moments of transcendence. A scene where Mungo and his sister make a celebration cake out of slices of bread and jam is the most moving thing I've read this year.
Of all of the books engulfing my desk at the ABC, this is the one I have recommended to colleagues again and again. I'll leave you with this review, scrawled on a yellow sticky note, left for me by one such reader: "Claire, this book devastated me. If it weren't for that tiny crumb of hope at the end, I might have thrown it at you today. I LOVED it, it broke my heart." CN
Iris by Fiona Kelly McGregor
Picador (Pan Macmillan)
Iris Webber is not averse to a bit of tea-leafing and is familiar with the cockatoos and sly groggers on the streets of 1930s Sydney, but is unsure how much she identifies as a "tootsie doll". And if these and other slang terms from the underworld aren't familiar to you, fear not, because her world and her language will quickly make sense.
To translate: Iris is a thief, who finds her way into the queer demimonde, falling in love with Maisie (who might just break her heart) and doing her very best to survive.
As the story opens, in 1937, a 31-year-old Iris has been charged with murder – and the rest of the novel tries to make sense of what's happened, tracing her life from childhood in Glen Innes to the mean streets of Surry Hills.
Sydney author Fiona Kelly McGregor based the titular character on the real Iris Webber, gleaning details from court records and charge sheets, mugshots, and the occasional newspaper story. (Other real-world figures who pop up in the novel include crime queens Tilly Devine and Kate Leigh, gangster John "Chow" Hayes, and police officer Lillian Armfield).
This year, we've been well-served by Australian historical fiction: Fiona McFarlane's The Sun Walks Down, a mystery about a missing child in the late-19th century; Gail Jones's Salonika Burning, inspired by four real-life World War I workers in the Greek port city; and Robbie Arnott's Limberlost (recommended elsewhere in this guide). KE
The Settlement by Jock Serong
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The Settlement is a book everyone should read — because it unfolds during a dark and terrible time in the colonial history of Van Diemen's Land, and because it's very, very good.
This is the final novel in Victorian writer Jock Serong's historical fiction trilogy set in the Furneaux Islands, off the coast of Tasmania. In The Settlement, Serong takes the reader to the Wybalenna Aboriginal Settlement on Flinders Island in the Bass Strait. This is where the First Nations people of lutruwita/Tasmania were coerced to live by the "protector of Aboriginals", George Augustus Robinson.
The aim of the settlement was to provide a sanctuary away from the genocidal violence on the mainland, although the end result was the same: Wybalenna was a place of misery, disease and death.
While the white characters in the novel are nameless (referred to only as the Catechist, the Man, the Commandant, the Storekeeper), Indigenous characters are referred to by their names. It's a clever way to up-end the historical narrative that has rendered Indigenous people invisible in colonial art and writing.
Serong's obvious deep historical research combined with his talents as a novelist make this an important if uneasy read. SL
Kin: Thinking with Deborah Bird Rose
Duke University Press
This is the year the more-than-human broke through. As writers across genres and forms grappled with questions of kinship, more-than-human futures, ecological justice, interdependence and care, there was no escaping the question of what responsibilities we have to the world around us — a world that teems with human and non-human lives, all of whom face oblivion wrought by colonisation, capitalism and ecocide.
American-born anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose's decades-long career saw her work with Yarralin and Lingara Aboriginal communities in northern Australia as her friends and mentors. Their collaboration led her to poke and prod at the limits of the European humanities and sciences.
As editors Thom van Dooren and Matthew Chrulew note in their introduction to the collection, Kin, "[Bird's] great art and skill was to bring diverse stories, ideas, and concepts into generative conversation, not to create harmony or synergy but rather to stretch them beyond their comfort zones."
Kin sees multiple contributors – including the Bawaka Collective, an Indigenous and non-Indigenous, more-than-human research collective – take up the spirit of Rose's work in pieces of writing that consider the art of living on a damaged planet; of thinking with rather than simply thinking with reference to; of being with more-than-human worlds.
Four years after Rose's passing in 2018, this collection is a reminder of how relevant the questions she asked are for our times. DF
Limberlost by Robbie Arnott
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Is there such a thing as a perfect book? Australian author Robbie Arnott comes very close with his stunning third novel, about a 15-year-old boy living in 1940s Tasmania, and the summer that changes his life.
Ned lives on his family orchard with his father and sister. His two older brothers are fighting in World War II, and their absence hangs heavily over the family, whose grief and fear is unspoken but ever-present. Ned's secret dream is to own a small boat, and he spends his days hunting rabbits, hoping to sell the pelts in town.
One day, while out hunting, Ned accidentally captures a quoll. It's injured, and he should probably kill it, but there's something about the wild strength and beauty of this creature, its teeth "needling the air", that captivates the teenager.
At 226 pages, this is a short book. But what Arnott manages to achieve in this slim volume is extraordinary – there is pain, grief, love and kindness, an exploration of violence and masculinity, a celebration of the natural world, and a reckoning with Australia's colonial history.
Limberlost features some of the most beautiful prose I've read this year — and if the ending doesn't make you cry, you're made of tougher stuff than me. CN
This is an edited version of the original review from October.
Trespasses by Louise Kennedy
Bloomsbury
Is there any bad Irish fiction? I mean, really, what a year for it. It's hard to settle on one example, given the inventive pulse of violence and island life in Audrey Magee's The Colony (one of my favourite books of the year); the recognition of wrongness and responsibility in Claire Keegan's Booker Prize nominee Small Things Like These; and the burning drive of religious zealotry in the seventh century in Emma Donoghue's Haven.
But for the purposes of this guide, I've decided to settle on Louise Kennedy's powerful debut, Trespasses, partly because of the shared concerns with the books mentioned above: ordinary lives, disrupted by sectarian violence; tragic, harsh lives, described with exactitude and poetry.
Set on the edges of Belfast in 1975, Trespasses is about Cushla, a Catholic schoolteacher living and working in a Protestant area of the city, where even her name gives her away. She's a woman who cares, shows compassion, helps the boy in her class whose clothes always smell damp because his mam dare not put washing out on the line, because it will get dog-shit hurled at it. The small acts of violence only herald large acts, which the reader, fearful, can foresee.
Amidst this day-to-day tension, Cushla also finds pleasure in the woman she becomes with her older, married, Protestant lover. But we suspect this relationship is doomed, and wonder what will become of both her and her country.
Trespasses is an exquisite, painful portrayal of one ordinary life that makes it feel huge and extraordinary, and emblematic of Ireland at the time. KE
Mothertongues by Ceridwen Dovey and Eliza Bell
Hamish Hamilton (Penguin)
How do you write about the messiness and absurdity of motherhood in a way that's true to the experience in all its multifaceted ways?
Ceridwen Dovey, a South African and Australian social anthropologist and author, and Eliza Bell, a US-born Australia-based writer and actor, don't even try in this collaboration: They embrace the chaos. They write that motherhood is "a narrative that is comfortable being, at times, incoherent" — and they unashamedly embody this incoherence by drawing inspiration from Bertolt Brecht and the Theatre of the Absurd (while exposing its patriarchal roots).
There's no single thread in this genre-defying book: Instead, you'll encounter "Odysseia", an everywoman undergoing the epic and mundane journey of motherhood; a text message exchange between the AI helpers Siri and Alexa, who share their experiences of pregnancy, birth and early motherhood; lists of the contents of mothers' handbags; a breastfeeding diary; and to-do lists that capture the mental load of motherhood.
While you're reading Mothertongues, you can also listen to the accompanying soundtrack by musician Keppie Coutts.
This book is wild and untamed, and so is motherhood. On a similar theme, I'd recommend We've Got This: Stories by Disabled Parents, edited by Eliza Hull. These books aren't just for parents but for everyone, as we all come from somewhere! SL
Solo Dance by Li Kotomi
World Editions
I first read Li Kotomi's debut, Solo Dance, when it was released in Japan in 2018, and was arrested by its opening: "Death. Dying."
Born in Taiwan, Kotomi began writing in Japanese as an adult, producing work that explores linguistic, sexual and cultural identity.
Solo Dance, which won Japan's Gunzo New Writers' Prize, concerns the shy and bookish Yingmei Zhao, who in the fourth grade falls in love with her classmate, Shi Danchen. Unable to live freely in Taiwan as a queer woman, Zhao decides to move to Japan, adopting a new name to fit in: Chō Norie. Dating online, she adopts further pseudonyms, reflecting both her Chinese and Japanese selves.
Japan may be a "queer desert," but its literature – particularly Dazai Osamu, author of the cult classic No Longer Human, and Haruki Murakami – provides a point of connection; Zhao longs to read them in their original language.
When violent events from her past return to upset her life in Japan, Zhao begins to travel, finding solace in the people she meets – a lesbian in San Francisco, a mysterious woman in Beijing (which she travels to via Xi'an).
In Sydney, she is surprised to find the whole city "dyed in a rainbow hue" during Mardi Gras, and to meet a gay couple who identify her as Taiwanese after spotting the book she is reading: Chen Xue's Book of Evil Women.
Poignant, aching, Kotomi's novel of selfhood and queer longing evinces a deep sense of pathos. It is endearing, beautiful, and beguiling. DF
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