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 a witty social critique that unfolds over one hot Sydney summer (and is drawing comparisons to Sally Rooney); a lyrical tale of a teenage boy's coming-of-age in 1940s Tasmania from one of Australia's most exciting authors; a taut mystery about a missing child in 19th century South Australia, that lays bare our national mythologies and complex histories; a "ravishingly good" surrealist novel by one of Romania's leading writers; and a timely collection of queer reflections on horror films.
Seeing Other People by Diana Reid
Ultimo Press
The first line of Seeing Other People — "Breaking a heart can be an act of kindness" — signals that this is no romance novel. Rather, it's a coming-of-age story that puts the selfishness of our time in sharp focus.
The novel follows Diana Reid's popular debut, Love and Virtue, just a year after it came out. Both books deal with themes of unrequited love and navigating social hierarchies, but Seeing Other People has a much lighter scope (Love and Virtue addressed campus rape culture).
This book circles sisters Charlie and Eleanor, who are in their 20s, and canvasses the nature of their friendships and love interests over one hot Sydney summer.
Eleanor is the sensible sister with a good job (business analyst), and when she breaks up with her boyfriend of two years, she feels delicate and unsure of her future. She believes she's a good person but is concerned that this is what others consider her to be, rather than what she is. Charlie, an actor, is the more sensitive younger sister; her misplaced attraction to her charismatic housemate Helen drives the tension of the story, which becomes a contest between the sisters for who behaves the worst.
The book deals with the mismatch between fantasy and reality, and a social scene in which having a clever riposte is more crucial to social currency than authentic engagement. There is also a pervasive critique of privilege and the characters' unavoidable relationships to capitalism.
Friendships are performative and no one is really connecting, because as Charlie points out: "Everyone's just doing their own thing, thinking about themselves."
Comparisons to Sally Rooney abound in coverage of Seeing Other People, but novels exploring young women's relationships to their milieu predate Rooney (read Helen Garner's Monkey Grip for an Australian forerunner). Seeing Other People continues a strong and growing tradition in Australian writing, alongside recent contributions such as Kokomo by Victoria Hannan, The Inland Sea by Madeleine Watts, She Is Haunted by Paige Clark, and Cherry Beach by Laura McPhee-Browne. Reid's witty and insightful social observation is something to relish, too. SL
Limberlost by Robbie Arnott
Text
Robbie Arnott is one of the most exciting authors in Australia right now. He made a splash with his experimental debut Flames, and then earned a place on the 2021 Miles Franklin shortlist with his mythic second novel, The Rain Heron. He completes his literary hat-trick with Limberlost, a stunning 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 dreams of owning a small boat, and each day he goes hunting for rabbits, hoping to sell the pelts in town. His secret dream of sailing is a source of great shame to the deep-feeling teen; with his brothers at war, he feels he should be doing something more selfless, more heroic.
One day while trapping animals, 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 transfixes the teenage boy. He takes the animal in, helps it to heal, and shares his secret with nobody but a local vet and the girl next door.
This is a book about violence and fear, but there's a great tenderness, too. While Ned and his dad struggle to express themselves, they show their love through their actions – by building, working, feeding and caring for the people, animals and environment around them.
This is a short book – just 226 pages – and not a word is wasted. Limberlost is powerful, lyrical and packs a hell of an emotional punch. It's one of the best books I've read this year. CN
Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu
Deep Vellum
If you want to know what great writing looks like today, you need to read Mircea Cărtărescu. Engrossed in the Romanian author's kaleidoscopic novel, Solenoid, I found myself thinking: "Help! Help! Help! Help! Help! Help! This book is ravishingly good!"
Cărtărescu's 675-page mammoth – 900 pages in the original Romanian – is a melange of scalpel-sharp prose, encyclopaedic theorising, and grand, uncontainable loneliness. It's like listening to every Fiona Apple album consecutively: no matter how many times you do it, you cannot stop shaking your head in disbelief and envy.
Fever dream, historical reckoning, surrealist dispatch, philosophical meditation, Solenoid takes place in Communist Romania during the 1970s and 80s. It concerns an unnamed writer who, following the failure of the poem he hopes will seal his fame ("In the cabinet of horrors of our contemporary poetry, this is a new and valuable artefact," one reader remarks) pursues a career as a teacher. At this point, his life suddenly becomes very weird indeed: he falls in with an anti-death sect and discovers an underground world, home to the excluded and disavowed parts of Romania, if not life itself. These events provide the novel's thanatological drive; Solenoid is a story preoccupied both with metaphysics and larvae burrowing inside people's brains.
A big, operatic book in the vein of Pynchon or Kafka, Solenoid is dazzlingly surreal, written in sentences that unfold, in Sean Cotter's translation, like tidal waves. Cărtărescu interrogates the systems that structure our lives, acknowledging the loss of grand narratives and explanatory systems. It's a stocktake of modernity; the proliferation of little universes in a world that has ceased to make sense. As Cărtărescu's narrator opines:
"Isn't the world a terrible place anyway? Don't we already live for a moment on a speck of dust in eternity? Aren't we going mad, packed like hams into our soft sacks of gristle and bones? Don't we endure, day by day and hour by hour, the thought that we are getting older, that our teeth are falling out, that we are going to contract awful diseases and nightmarish infirmities, that we were going to suffer and then disappear and never give the world shape and meaning?"
As those around the narrator transform into insects, and strange figures haunt his paralysed sleep, cities and lovers levitate, languages are invented, anti-death picketers congregate, and the stomachs of starfish are eviscerated, I realise: I have finally found my perfect summer read. DF
The Sun Walks Down by Fiona McFarlane
Allen & Unwin
In 1883, at the edge of a small town in the colony of South Australia, a six-year-old boy named Denny goes missing, a sudden dust storm seeming to obliterate him.
Fiona McFarlane fills all that swirling grit with characters and fear, light and art; Traditional Owners of the land, familiar anxious stories of the lost white child, and less familiar stories of Afghan cameleers, German Lutheran settlers, hapless vicars and Swedish painters.
Denny's mother was hanging out the washing when he vanished. His sisters were attending a wedding, with a mixture of glee and resentment. His father was working his unpromising land, assisted by Billy Rough, a local Aboriginal hired man.
Every character is beautifully drawn, and there are a lot of them: the young woman getting married, Minna, is brimming with sexuality, glowing with it; Cissy, Denny's most capable sister, is bursting with fury and ready to escape into a bigger world; the matriarch of the biggest property in the area is injured, damaged, and dangerously acquisitive; the Swedish painter is confronted by the streaky redness of these new sunsets, so unlike Europe. Billy, who has been taught to play cricket only to learn that he was too good — too much of a threat to whiteness — navigates complex relationships with his Aboriginal community and with the white landowners.
And the policeman who comes to supervise the search for Denny is a dangerous know-it-all, a writer and amateur anthropologist with all the insensitivity of his power and perspective — but he's no fool.
Everyone is mobilised to search for Denny, and we, as readers, follow all their tracks – as they make their way through the bush and into each other's lives, and in and out of suspicion and everyday dramas, conflicts and hope; in and out of national mythologies and complex histories. What has happened to Denny?
This interweaving of stories is skilful, taut, rich, intelligent and mesmerising. KE
It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror
Feminist Press
Growing up in Kalgoorlie, I once built a pet cemetery with my friends. We invited the other kids to inter their animals. Our clarion call? "Bury your pets, bury your past!"
Blame Stephen King. Or me. But whatever you do, don't blame horror films (or novels): they were only the messenger, reflecting the horror that exists outside.
It Came from the Closet, edited by Joe Vallese, examines the horror genre – that endless repository of repressed terrors – as a source of real-life demons and anxieties.
"Fear never produces itself on its own," Zefyr Lisowski writes, remembering growing up and watching Pet Sematary and The Ring. "I was built by scary movies, and those scary movies built how I felt about myself. Girls were punished. The disabled were to be feared. Anything gender-non-conforming was out of the picture."
The 25 essays and memoirs captured here include Addie Tsai on David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers, informed by Tsai's experience of growing up as a twin and experiencing queer desire; Carrow Narby describing a sense of kinship with the The Blob's titular creature, and how the absence of gender identity can be almost impossible to perceive; Carmen Maria Machado tackling the charges of queerbaiting surrounding Megan Fox's character in 2009's Jennifer's Body, alongside our taboos around bisexuality and "the perfect messiness of desire"; and Jen Corrigan's case for Jaws as a queer film ("Is there really anything gayer than three men on a boat?").
In a homophobic and transphobic world, discerning what lies beyond the frame – the closeted and disavowed meanings horror films can convey – is vital. We all have our pet cemeteries. Once upon a time, homophobic doctors feared touching AIDS patients; today, medicine still fails Black, female, and gender non-conforming bodies. The calls are coming, as always, from inside the house. DF
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