Welcome to ABC Arts' monthly book column. Each month, we present a shortlist of new releases read and recommended by The Bookshelf's Kate Evans and The Book Show's Claire Nichols and Sarah L'Estrange — alongside recommendations from freelance writer and critic Declan Fry.
All four read voraciously and widely, and the only guidelines we give them are: make it a new release; make it something you think is great.
The resulting list features an unputdownable mystery inspired by the wildly popular Teacher's Pet podcast; a darkly comic coming-of-age novel about two teenage misfits who unwittingly instigate a moral panic; a "marvellous" and overdue biography of one of Australia's most influential 20th-century writers; a searing WWI tale of a city in flames told from the perspective of four real historical characters (including our own Miles Franklin); and a groundbreaking essay collection showcasing Indigenous voices from around the world.
Clarke by Holly Throsby
Allen & Unwin
It's a hot morning in 1991, when police turn up at Barney Clarke's door with a warrant. The cops want to search his backyard for the body of a missing woman, Ginny Lawson, who disappeared from the house six years earlier.
Poor Barney is a tenant, with no idea of the history of the house he is renting. But with the help of his kind neighbour Leonie he learns about Ginny – a quiet woman with a controlling husband and a devoted son, a mother who apparently (according to her husband) chose to walk away from her family.
Author Holly Throsby takes inspiration from the popular 2018 true crime podcast The Teacher's Pet, which investigated the disappearance of Lynette Dawson. But rather than dwell on her fictional missing woman and possible killer, Throsby's focus is squarely on neighbours Barney and Leonie, who are both carrying secrets of their own.
The meticulous editor Barney wears a wedding ring – but his wife is nowhere to be seen. Meanwhile travel agent Leonie – the emotional heart of the story – is caring for her four-year-old nephew Joe, whose mother is also absent.
The scenes shared by Leonie and Joe are the most touching in the book. Leonie is a tender and loving aunty, doing her best to protect Joe from the possible horror that could be uncovered in the backyard next door, as well as the pain of his own mother's disappearance. Leonie lacks confidence in herself, but Throsby's shifting perspectives allow us to see her as Barney does – generous, beautiful and instrumental in the happiness of the people around her.
With a propulsive triple-mystery and characters you'll care about, Clarke is a book you'll read in one sitting, and still be thinking about weeks later. CN
Now Is Not the Time to Panic by Kevin Wilson
Text
This novel is set over a summer in 90s Tennessee, during which the main characters — 16-year-olds Frankie and Zeke — meet at a pool; however, it's not a classic 'summer read'. Instead, the story follows these two loner teenagers as they unexpectedly create a (pre-internet) viral art movement that attracts media attention, hysteria and even causes a number of people to die.
Now Is Not the Time to Panic is American author Kevin Wilson's sixth work of fiction (including two collections of short stories) and he's known for the use of uncanny and weird scenarios in his writing. Here, the weird scenario is the unlikely repercussions of the private doodlings by these teens.
After meeting at the pool, Frankie and Zeke develop an awkward romance and spend every day together. While they have marathon kissing sessions, their bigger passion is for a poster they create featuring Zeke's artwork and Frankie's indelible words: The edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers. We are fugitives, and the law is skinny with hunger for us.
Using a forgotten photocopier in Frankie's garage, they secretly make hundreds of copies and plaster the town of Coalfield with the posters. Media outlets and townspeople speculate on the origins of the posters and unaccountably land on the theory that it's the work of a satanic cult. As the novel's title suggests, panic ensues; vigilantes keep watch over the town and Frankie and Zeke are caught between pride in their work and anxiety about its ripple effects.
We also meet Frankie 20 years after the "panic", as she reflects on the impact of this uneasy but life-changing time and contemplates what it would mean to finally go public.
Now Is Not the Time to Panic is a tender and humorous coming-of-age novel that explores the trials, pain and wonder of adolescence and artistic pursuit. It's also a homage to the sickly sweet Pop-Tart (Frankie consumes many, so it's a good idea to bring your toothbrush). SL
Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life by Brigitta Olubas
Hachette
There is a line trotted out every few years or so about Australia lacking great critics. Peddlers of this slack-jawed assertion – and there is no shortage – perhaps fail to account for Shirley Hazzard, whose review of Patrick White's The Eye of the Storm opens wittily, "Great literature is like moral leadership: everyone deplores the lack of it, but there is a tendency to prefer it from the safely dead."
Hazzard lived a full life: childhood in Depression-era Sydney; youth in postwar Hong Kong, New Zealand, and London; New York, where she worked at the United Nations and later became a regular contributor to The New Yorker; and her time in Naples and Capri.
Brigitta Olubas's biography, the first of Hazzard, is thus a welcome and overdue intervention.
Olubas writes with style and wit; parentheses are employed to comic effect – and no small amount of savoir faire – when she observes, of a lunch between Hazzard, Edward Hirsch and Michael Collier, "For Shirley, the opportunity to talk about, to recite, poetry with poets was a precious combination (also, to have two younger men to talk to)." Wicked.
Hazzard's relationship with Australia was fractious. As Olubas writes of her last novel, The Great Fire, which won both a National Book Award (leading to a verbal sparring match with Stephen King) and the Miles Franklin: "one of the Miles Franklin judges was concerned that the portrayal of Australians was 'so unflattering that people might criticise the judges for their choice'".
During her 1984 Boyer Lectures, Hazzard opined:
"Australia is not an innocent country. This nation's short recorded history is shadowed, into the present day, by the fate of its native peoples, by forms of unyielding prejudice, by a strain of derision and unexamined violence, and by a persistent current of misogyny."
Although some critics in Australia held that this was perhaps unwarranted coming from someone who had not lived in the country for decades, the same could not be said of the substance of Hazzard's charges.
In her diary, reacting to some of the dismissive Australian reviews of her work, Hazzard noted "the need to regard an utterance from the heart as an opportunity to stick the knife in".
Hazzard had a knife or two of her own: Of Clive James's Unreliable Memoirs she wrote to Murray Bail, "My toes will never uncurl. If Australians think being sick into innumerable glove boxes shows virility, how can they object when they are taken up on it?" Regarding the art historian Robert Hughes, she told Elizabeth Harrower: "When I wrote on Australia in the New Yorker, he wrote me an ineffable letter saying he liked the article so much he 'wished he had written it' (assumption that he could)."
She developed friendships with many of our great authors, including Patrick White (spiky, particularly on White's end – he castigated her for living a "charmed life" – though both held the other's work in great respect); Elizabeth Harrower (enviably cordial, for the most part); Murray Bail (longtime correspondent; they disagreed on the subject of art, and much else besides – he was partial to modernism, which Hazzard deplored); and David Malouf, "an important if rather distant association" (Olubas writes of Malouf recollecting how at Hazzard's book signing "she stayed for hours, chatting ten or more minutes with each person in the line").
Hazzard also developed productive associations with New Yorker editor and writer William Maxwell, Graham Greene, Donald Keene, Saul Bellow, and Muriel Spark – although of this last, the index quietly clues us in: "falling out with, 192; […] friendship established with, 190-91".
Olubas's biography is one which evinces all the grace and elan of Hazzard herself. It is a tender piece of work and a marvellous achievement. DF
Salonika Burning by Gail Jones
Text
In Australian writer Gail Jones's Salonika Burning, the Greek port city of the same name (aka Thessaloniki) is all "blaze and disintegration" from the very first page, consumed by the doubled conflagration of a terrible fire and World War I.
But from those opening pages, Jones also makes that spectacle a problem: the problem is that it might be glorious; the problem is art.
The writer confronts us, and her characters, with the contradiction embedded in the event: "No one would have said it aloud: How strangely beautiful, a city burning."
In 1917, this cosmopolitan city was full not just of its civilian occupants, but was also crisscrossed by Allied soldiers, and ringed by camps and hospitals. It was a gateway to the Eastern Front.
Jones brings this site of destruction and ashes into focus through the experiences of four characters, two Australian and two English. Olive is driving an ambulance, working herself to exhaustion, a long way from a life of tennis and privilege in Sydney. Englishwoman Grace is a surgeon at the Scottish Women's Hospital — a suffragette enterprise – saving lives and watching young men breathe in their last cigarette or bleed to death in front of her.
Stanley is also English, plodding along beside his donkeys, dragging the wounded to safety, sketching still-living flesh all the while. And Stella is working in the kitchens (although she's not very good at it) and sending jingoistic reports home to Australian newspapers under a pseudonym.
All four characters are shaped by grief, and by the beauty and horror of this ruined landscape. All four are trying to negotiate a barrage of death and mundaneness, not to mention daily battalions of malarial mosquitoes.
All four are fictional versions of real people: well-known artists and writers and creators for whom this was just one moment in their storied lives. (You might just recognise Stella Miles Franklin.)
This novel is nuanced and complex, beautifully written, and gently savage as it navigates grief, memory, a burning city and a collection of war workers whose jobs were care and solace rather than killing. KE
Galang 02 by Powerhouse-galang collective
Garru Editions/Powerhouse
Galang – a Wiradjuri word meaning 'belonging' – is an Indigenous-led think tank, collective and sovereign space. The collective advocates for a rethinking of museums and archives, which have often been employed as Trojan horses in the colonial-imperialist enterprise.
Galang's work embodies what I have elsewhere termed "First Nations transnationalism": making global connections between Indigenous peoples, strengthening decolonial resistance, and sharing knowledge, particularly with regard to how information is produced, shared and stored.
As in Galang 01, the first volume, Galang 02 showcases artists, activists and academics from across the globe – Ainu, Meriam/Torres Strait Islander, Sámi, Boonwurrung, Baniwa, Wiradjuri, Tolai, Bundjalung, Sāmoan, and Bunun/Atayal/Kanakanavu (three of Taiwan's 16 Indigenous groups).
Gail Mabo reflects on her artistic practice, which incorporates Dutch etching paper and bamboo, representing the islands and currents of the Torres Strait.
A trip along the Murray River by Dr Brook Garru Andrew and others yields a meditation on how trees converse and interact; the insertion of text alongside images of canoe/ring/scar trees creates, in the reader, a sense of walking alongside the authors as they converse, of seeing and communing with them.
An email exchange between Ainu artist Mayunkiki and academic Kanoko Tamura, translated by Keith Spencer, examines how Ainu in Japan deal with indifference or exoticism – or face cliches that often stand in for the same ("Up until we met, you thought you'd never met an Ainu person before, right?" the artist asks Tamura). It leads to Mayunkiki's reflections on language and terms of address, authenticity and food, as she observes how "over-idealisation of Ainu serves to ease the majority culture's guilt for their treatment of minorities".
Meanwhile, Sámi scholar Dr Liisa-Rávná Finbog reflects on sovereignty and love, and considers gender diversity and sexual fluidity within Indigenous world views and social structures.
Part of what is so lovely to see, in both of the Galang publications, is how they embody their politics: in each volume, language – which here includes Japanese and Brazilian Portuguese, among others – appears in the original, as well as in English. In form and structure, an ethics of decolonisation and cultural respect shines through. DF
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