Our reviewers on the best (mostly Australian) books they've pulled from the shelf in the past few months.
Reviewed by Lucy Munro
It was a day like any other in November 1983 when a toddler was kidnapped from his Brisbane foster home by his biological father. An academic prodigy, successful businessman and unlikely abductor, Michael Shelley had recently experienced a religious reawakening of sorts, and his new destiny was waging war against what he regarded as a godforsaken country.
This extraordinary memoir by Lech Blaine tells the tale of the Shelley children, who were removed from the care of their parents and placed in the raucous and sports-obsessed home of working-class publicans. You see, Blaine’s parents, Lenore and Tom, happened to be the foster parents of three of the four Shelley children.
Australian Gospel is the accumulation of thousands of hours of interviews that attempt to make sense of the “biblical shitshow” that was Blaine’s childhood. It interrogates Australia’s class system, the lottery of life and the lengths people will go to for the ones they love. Think Trent Dalton in the style of Helen Garner. I tore through it.
Reviewed by Helen Anderson
Not since reading Cormac McCarthy’s harrowing 2006 masterpiece, The Road, have I felt so unnerved by a novel. The terrain is familiar: a man and a child try to survive the aftermath of an apocalypse. But where The Road focused on these survivors of an unnamed event, the entire blasted world in Tim Winton’s Juice is fully, terrifyingly realised – the hardships, the chaos, the accumulation of tragedy – and it’s clearly the consequence of irreversible global heating and environmental collapse. Worse, the damnation was fully understood by the generations who destroyed the world.
The unnamed narrator and his widowed mother are isolated homesteaders living on blackened, infernal plains. There are no rivers left, no wildlife; only the vegetables they grow underground with solar power – the “juice” of the title. Like the heat, each has a secret life they cannot escape.
We know all this detail because, like Scheherazade, our narrator bids for survival by spinning out the story of the end of the world. Read in perhaps the last decade before a climate tipping point, it’s a shocking fable.
Reviewed by Lucy Munro
In 1986, the narrator arrives in Melbourne to study the writing of Virginia Woolf. Moving into a flat in bohemian St Kilda, she surrounds herself with students, artists, lovers and “beautiful, radical ideas”. But as so often happens in coming-of-age stories, things soon begin to unravel, and our narrator is left grappling with the moral complexities of life mimicking art.
What gripped me most was the innovative structure of this book, which weaves fiction, memoir, journalling, poetry and essay. It’s the kind of experiment that might seem confused or contrived in the hands of a different author, but two-time Miles Franklin winner de Kretser dips between genres with grace and elegant prose that sparkles across the page.
“I was discovering that I no longer wanted to write novels that read like novels,” the narrator writes. “Instead of shapeliness and disguise, I wanted a form that allowed for formlessness and mess. It occurred to me that one way to find that form might be to tell the truth.”
If you’re looking for a literary work that challenges your thinking, read this.
Reviewed by Jaclyn Crupi
Woo Woo follows Sabine, a conceptual artist who is about to open a major exhibition of her work. She is already feeling raw and anxious and has not yet
written her all-important artist’s statement, when the ghost of her art muse appears to her.
Sabine accepts this spectral presence as a mentor. But when a stalker materialises and starts sending increasingly threatening letters, she fights back.
All of this makes for the kind of reading where you cannot look away and it’s easy to forget to breathe. Baxter holds you so close to the page.
Her debut novel, New Animal, showed us a new way to think about the body processing grief. In this book, Baxter masterfully ratchets up the tension and unease in one of the most interesting representations of how an artist feels just before releasing art into the world.
Creative work is so often solitary, and the idea of it and its creator being judged can be debilitating. Woo Woo comes from a place of deep female rage; it’s so gratifying to see it turned into a fecund work of art.
Reviewed by Frankie Davis, age 13
It seems like a dream come true. Six teenagers alone in a shopping centre, with access to everything they’ve ever wanted.
It’s fun for the first few days, with all they can eat, and all the freedom of life without adults. But with no internet or contact with the outside world, things quickly become real. Tensions rise – oh, and there’s a baby to look after. They try to escape but realise they’re stuck.
This book was so much fun to read, with engaging characters and a relatable setting, including familiar shops, labels and characters. The suspense of this strange situation made me churn through the pages; I was curious to know why they’d been locked in, and how they’d break out.
I loved Royals and can’t wait to read the sequel, out in May next year. I would recommend it to anyone aged 13+, because it does include some swear words.
Reviewed by Jaclyn Crupi
This is the story of a grief-stricken family stuck in their all-consuming sadness. They’re simply getting through the days as best they can in a world that has turned monochrome.
When they decide to adopt a rabbit during the pandemic, the transformative power of a pet is on full display. Colour starts to seep in again.
It’s more complicated than that, of course, but Melanie Cheng’s ability to afford her characters empathy and compassion has us and them seeing the beauty and wonder in the minutiae of everyday life as they emerge from the grey.
This is a slight, quiet novel about grief, deep disappointment and the ways we can rediscover ourselves and those we love, even when the worst thing imaginable happens. It asks questions about the possibilities of forgiveness and how we test the limits of love.
The Burrow is a deceptive book in some ways. You could miss its profundity, its tenderness and its beauty in the restrained, sometimes cool form and prose style. But it’s there for the reader, if they just care to feel it.
