Charlotte Guest’s The Kookaburra follows Diana, a seventy-year-old former academic and essayist living alone in a deteriorating cottage on a Tasmanian island. Her husband Robert died of pancreatic cancer one year earlier, after forty-one years of marriage, and Diana has not adapted to his absence so much as constructed an elaborate system for avoiding it. […]
Fall-Girl is a brittle, self-conscious novel about a nameless Australian woman in London who keeps mistaking male attention for rescue and then narrating the mistake with enough wit to disguise how repetitive the pattern is. The book wants to be sharp about exile, sex, class, art, female humiliation, single motherhood, and romantic self-delusion. Instead, it […]
Bright City is a grimy Melbourne crime-and-addiction novel that tries to turn one meth bender into a mythic descent through the CBD. It wants to be a streetwise confession, a psychosexual trauma novel, a class novel, a city novel, a queer noir, a junkie odyssey, and a hallucinated comedy of urban ruin. Mostly, it is […]
Joan Fleming’s The Fig Book follows a young poet and postgraduate literature student whom the narrative generally identifies only as “she,” although Bob calls her Eartha near the climax. Eartha begins the novel believing that she is finally on the verge of becoming a real adult woman. She has recently become engaged to Bob, the […]
Tracey Lien’s A Great Place to Raise a Family begins in Sydney in December 2005, immediately after the Cronulla riots, and follows the Luu family, a working-class Chinese Australian family of Teochew-Vietnamese background living in the fictional suburb of Mirabong. The central event is apparently simple: the Luus return home from Hungry Jack’s and discover […]
Big Little Truths returns to Pirriwee ten years after the events of Big Little Lies. The old kindergarten parents are now the parents of teenagers, and the central joke of the novel’s epigraph becomes painfully true: little kids, little problems; big kids, big problems. Madeline, Celeste, Jane, Renata and Bonnie are still connected by friendship, […]