By Cameron Woodhead and Fiona Capp
FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Wuhan: A Documentary Novel
Liao Yiwu, Polity, $67.99
Compulsory reading on understanding the early response to COVID-19.
Poet and dissident Liao Yiwu has long been an outspoken critic of the Chinese government. Imprisoned and tortured for a poem on the Tiananmen Square massacre, Liao subsequently fled his homeland. His literary reputation in exile continues to grow with a documentary novel about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. Blending fact and fiction, Wuhan tells the story of Kcriss, a citizen reporter who travels to Wuhan when social media rumours of an unexplained outbreak of pneumonia begin to circulate. There, he finds a job in a funeral home, where he bears witness first-hand to the disparity between official figures and the reality on the ground. Wuhan is an episodic novel, weaving close examination with imaginative speculation. With compelling force, it links the unchecked spread of the deadly virus to an older plague: authoritarian propaganda. It’s compulsory reading for anyone who wants to understand the black comic absurdity of the initial response to COVID-19, the courage of Chinese citizens determined to speak for truth, and the tragic price they can pay for it.
The Hitchhiker
Gabriel Bergmoser, HarperCollins, $34.99
This thriller is swift, dark and has an unguessable twist.Credit:
This horror-tinged thriller from Gabriel Bergmoser (The Hunted, The Inheritance) plays the cat-and-mouse game with such virtuosic dexterity it’s hypnotising, like watching someone perform an elaborate new trick with a yoyo. Mixing stranger danger and remote road-trip tropes, the novel has Paul, a daggy middle-aged man, still in shock from the brutality of his marriage breakdown, driving into the unknown to escape the past. He picks up a hitchhiker, nervous teenager Jesse, who seems to be on the run from someone or something. Psychological tension mounts, and as a third figure enters the picture, a freedom drive through the rugged desolation of the Australian outback turns into a chilling race to stay alive. For those who like their thrillers swift and dark with an unguessable twist, Bergmoser is fast becoming a go-to author in Australian popular fiction.
Liars
James O’Loghlin, Echo, $32.99
An Aussie murder mystery with appealing characters.
If I had a dollar for every time I’ve written “small-town secrets” in this column, I’d be richer than Croesus. (Second prize goes to “everyone has something to hide”.) James O’Loghlin’s Liars is an Aussie murder mystery that cleaves to genre in a way that makes such phrases inevitable. Barb is a handywoman in the coastal community of Bullford Point, NSW. Joe grew up there, but moved to Sydney, became a drug addict and spent time in jail, after his high-school girlfriend Sally was murdered. On returning to his hometown sober, Joe takes a kindly job offer from Barb, and it isn’t long until another murder occurs. The cops believe Joe is the prime suspect; Barb doesn’t and starts an amateur investigation to clear him. She’s led to uncover a tangled web involving property developers and true-crime podcasts and missing evidence from Sally’s murder that might shine light on the case. Liars distinguishes itself through appealing characters, not plot or style.
The Oxenbridge King
Christine Paice, Fourth Estate, $34.99
A time-travelling magical realist novel with plenty of whimsy.
Inspired by the 2012 discovery of Richard III’s remains in a car park, Christine Paice’s time-travelling magical realist novel The Oxenbridge King will test your tolerance for whimsy. It also features a talking raven spirit guide, a monk trapped underground for centuries who becomes an angel, and Molly Stern, a British woman living in the afterglow of the London Olympics who is trying to get back on the horse after experiencing a double blow of grief and heartbreak. When Molly makes a consoling visit to her aunt and uncle in Oxenbridge, her story becomes entwined with the angel’s and with Richard III’s quest for peace in the afterlife. Paice, a poet, clearly has a gift for cadence and rhythm and the novel flows effortlessly, but Molly’s arc has an unearned feelgood quality that makes the bizarre narrative entanglements she encounters feel decorative. Plaice is an original literary talent, and that will carry some readers through. Personally, I’d like to see what she can achieve in a less idiosyncratic novel.
NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
The Tree Collectors
Amy Stewart, Text, $49.99
A delightful collection of stories of those who bring trees into others’ lives.
For Beth Edward, collecting live dinosaurs is not a computer-generated fantasy. In her garden she has 100 magnolias and another 50 in pots, primeval trees that were around when T-Rex stomped the earth. Joey Santore shared his arboreal passion with his neighbourhood by surreptitiously planting native trees on median strips. Reagan Wytsalucy has reconnected with her Native American heritage by restoring Navajo peach orchards that were destroyed when the Navajo people were forced off their land in the 1860s. Dean Nicolle became enchanted by eucalypts as a boy and now has an arboretum near Adelaide of 10,000 eucalypts, the world’s largest collection. Collecting trees can also be a virtual habit, as shown by those who catalogue them in a particular location. These delightful, quirky, moving stories testify to a powerful urge to bring the wild wisdom of trees back into our lives.
London
Tanya Dalziell, The Miegunyah Press, $30
Tanya Dalziell redresses the oversight of writer Joan London’s work.
While her work has earned accolades and an enthusiastic readership, Joan London’s short stories and novels have largely slipped under the radar of literary scholarship. Redressing this oversight, Tanya Dalziell’s nuanced critical guide argues that one of the reasons London’s work has been neglected is that it is “not interested at all in national mythmaking but instead is attuned to ethical interconnectedness”. There is also a concern with quiet transformation and an open-endedness in her storytelling that defies neat categorisation. In London’s novel The Good Parents, for instance, there is no definitive answer to the question of what constitutes goodness but rather a sense that it is ever-evolving. This moment-by-moment responsiveness is also expressed by the poet and polio-sufferer, Sullivan, in The Golden Age, who envisions a new kind of poetry founded in the breath.
Telling Lives
Ed., Chris Wallace, NLA Publishing, $34.99
A thought-provoking collection of essays by biographers.
“Can one know the inner life of another person?” asked Samuel Johnson pondering the limitations of biography. Only by conjecture was his reply. Ray Monk, the celebrated biographer of Ludwig Wittgenstein, begs to disagree. The interior world can be captured by accumulated outward details and through the subject’s own words. He clinches his argument with Wittgenstein’s view that, as language is a shared medium, “the private can’t be prior to the public”. Frances Spalding, biographer of Vanessa Bell, puts the challenge this way: “How do we reconcile the private individual with the performative nature of public life?” The biographers in this thought-provoking collection of essays do not shy away from the hard questions of their craft while acknowledging, as does Romantics chronicler Richard Holmes, that “None of us can ever know the last word about the human heart”.
My Roman Year
Andre Aciman, Faber & Faber, $34.99
Aciman’s book is vivid with character, incident and atmosphere.
Five minutes after setting foot on Italian soil, Andre Aciman was already thinking of America. “We were not once-and-for-all people. We were elsewhere people.” His Jewish family, of Turkish and Italian origin, had been forced out of Egypt, and he wasn’t warming to Rome. It didn’t help that his uncle Claude, from whom they were renting an apartment, had an explosive temper and that their street in the working-class district felt ugly, dirty and sad. Aciman evidently kept a detailed diary, has amazing recall or used his novelist’s imagination to fill in the gaps because his account is dense and vivid with character, incident and atmosphere. He spent most of his year reading, browsing bookshops or wandering the narrow, cobbled streets getting lost and hoping to find himself. Slowly the city casts its spell on him and only when he is due to leave can he admit he’s fallen in love.
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