By Cameron Woodhead and Steven Carroll
FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Beam of Light
John Kinsella, Transit Lounge, $32.99
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An ibis wading through an iridescent oil slick adorns the cover of John Kinsella’s latest short fiction collection. It’s an unnervingly beautiful image of despoliation that captures the uncanniness these 29 stories often summon to mind.
Fiction’s expanded canvas feels artistically necessary for Kinsella, who has nothing left to prove as a poet. His uncompromising recent verse novel, Cellnight, might well signpost a road toward drama, should he choose it, though he’s in full flower as a short-story writer here. Beam of Light achieves a winnowing, an intensification that sometimes eluded the author in his previous collection, Pushing Back.
From the layered betrayals undermining the precarious family in the title story to the stranger danger and domestic inversion of Starting Out, narrated by a (likely neurodivergent) teen orphan, this is as aesthetically mature and significant a volume as David Malouf’s Antipodes.
I’m Not Really Here
Gary Lonesborough, Allen & Unwin, $19.99
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The importance of being represented in contemporary literature is never more crucial than in YA fiction. Teenagers are still working out who they are, and you can’t be what you can’t see.
Gary Lonesborough came to attention with his big-hearted novel The Boy from the Mish, which followed two Aboriginal boys falling in love in a remote community. I’m Not Really Here introduces Jonah, a boy struggling with grief and memory after his mother’s death, plus the dislocation of moving to the town of Patience with his dad, where he’ll have to make a new set of friends. When he develops a crush on Harley, a fit popular kid on the local footy team, Jonah struggles too with his body image, though his insecurity can’t overshadow the warmth and honesty that will light his way.
There’s an earned optimism in Lonesborough’s fiction, and the inflections of queer and First Nations experiences distinguish themes that most adolescent readers will take to heart.
The Singer Sisters
Sarah Seltzer, Piatkus, $32.99
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Two generations of a Jewish folk-rock dynasty collide in Sarah Seltzer’s The Singer Sisters. Judie and Sylvia Zingerman move from Massachusetts to Greenwich Village in New York in the 1960s, becoming renowned as The Singer Sisters (alongside the many other Jewish musical icons of the time, from Bob Dylan to Carole King). When Judie falls for fellow Jewish singer Dave Cantor, she suddenly abandons her career.
Decades later, her daughter Emma shoots to stardom on the alt-rock scene in LA, partly by discovering unfinished songs her mother wrote and finishing them in her own style. Friction between mother and daughter rises, as long-buried secrets surface from the heady days of sex drugs and rock’n’roll in the ’60s, and Emma learns the price of her own fame.
Seltzer folds a distinctly Jewish style of domestic tragicomedy into a popular music novel with a feminist lens. It should appeal as an escape for fans of either genre, even if the second half feels rushed and not nearly as sharp as it should be.
A Town called Treachery
Mitch Jennings, HarperCollins, $34.99
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The post-pandemic tsunami of small-town Australian crime fiction continues to sweep all before it. Sports journalist Mitch Jennings has a decent crack in A Town Called Treachery.
The novel features an unlikely investigative duo – a neglected kid from a troubled home, Matty Finnerty, and a boozehound journalist, Stuart Dryden, who’d rather be at the pub than chasing the story of his career. When Matty’s favourite teacher is found dead at a local beach, suspicion falls on his dad Robbie and the townsfolk make sure they’re not welcome any more. Armed with a disposable Kodak, Matty does what he can – the police don’t seem interested in finding the killer – though his superior sleuthing skills will need the help of a heroic adult to amount to much.
Jennings writes great dialogue, and the coming-of-age/detective fiction crossover is appealing. It might form the backbone of a decent screenplay, but it’s far too long and shaggy and haphazardly paced as a novel.
NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Unconventional Women
Sarah Gilbert, MUP $39.99
It’s appropriate that I write this in my workroom in a former nun’s cell at the old Abbotsford Convent, for Sarah Gilbert’s tale of seven young women who became nuns in the 1950s and ’60s takes us behind convent walls and demystifies the mystery of the nun.
The convent to which they went, Servants of the Blessed Sacrament in Melbourne, did not allow the sisters to go outside other than to see a doctor and was dedicated entirely to the contemplative life.
In a combination of oral history and historical commentary, Gilbert traces what drew these women to this life, its effects on them – both good and bad – and the paths they chose upon leaving. Some stories, such as Marie’s – an unmarried mother who felt her life come back to her through faith – are deeply moving. All their memories and observations, highly nuanced, provide intriguing reading.
People Power
George Williams & David Hume, UNSW Press, $49.99
Of the 45 referendums put to the Australian people, only eight succeeded – all with bipartisan support. This updated history and analysis by two lawyers well-versed in constitutional law traces events from Federation until the Voice. It can have some dry legalese sections, but the case studies themselves are a keyhole onto the times.
The 1951 attempt by Menzies to ban the Communist Party looked a certainty only weeks out from the vote; by polling day, the 73 per cent vote in favour had evaporated and it was lost, with much of the press concluding in eerily familiar language that the government had mismanaged what was a heated, personal campaign.
The counter-point is the success of the 1967 referendum to amend the constitution in relation to the Indigenous population, which was supported by both parties. A timely study that addresses the question of why yes, like sorry, is so often the hardest word.
Henry V
Dan Jones, Head of Zeus, $34.99
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Churchill called Henry V “a gleam of splendour in the dark, troubled story of medieval England”, Shakespeare mythologised him and Olivier mobilised him during WWII.
Dan Jones, bestselling veteran medieval chronicler clearly admires the hero of Agincourt, but also finds him a conundrum: warrior, a reputed “tearaway, womanising drunk”, responsible for the massacre of French prisoners of war – yet also, apparently, literary, artistic and musical. Jones says that the only way to get some idea of who Henry was is to understand him as Prince Hal in the years that preceded his 11-year reign.
While acknowledging the limited source material available, he plunges in, writing in the present tense in a style that has a melodramatic immediacy and, at times, a romping novelistic air. This is fun, popular history.
A Periodic Tale
Dr Karl Kruszelnicki, ABC Books, $44.99
Popular media science figure Dr Karl may well – as he says in this engaging memoir – live in a random universe along with the rest of us (“random” is a keyword throughout the text), but those random episodes that constitute his life, nonetheless, fall into place here like a well-structured story.
His father, a Polish Catholic who spoke multiple languages, and his mother, a Polish Jew, managed to survive the war and sailed for Australia when he was two, setting in train what is essentially a post-war migrant tale, Karl constantly feeling like an outsider at his catholic school. At an early age, science called, as did taxi driving (being beaten up), working as a rock roadie and film-making, as well as love and family. He covers events both light and exceedingly dark, but all with an admirably calm, detached ironic style.
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