INEZ BARANAY Ghosts Like Us. Reviewed by Isobel Blackthorn
Ghosts Like Us is a poetic, ambiguous and subversive exploration of the nature of history and remembering. ‘the air of the present moment here’ … This puzzling opening line embodies the essence of a fine literary work: a little obscure for some, fresh air for...
LUCY TRELOAR Salt Creek. Reviewed by Michelle McLaren
Inspired by family history and written in wonderfully fluid prose, Salt Creek brings to life the harsh beauty and the racially troubled past of the Coorong. In the Author’s Note at the end of this debut novel Lucy Treloar reveals that although the events that...
PATRICK LENTON A Man Made Entirely of Bats. Reviewed by Ashley Kalagian Blunt
Patrick Lenton’s playful collection of absurdist, pun-filled, mostly superhero-themed stories and flash fiction is crafted with technicolour vividness. Reading Lenton is like eating a box of chocolates with familiar flavours in unfamiliar combinations, like tangerine...
MIKE JONES The Scrimshaw Marionette: The Transgressions Cycle Book Two. Reviewed by Lou Murphy
This gritty gothic horror novel of hardship and brutality contains a vile mystery that only time can solve. The Scrimshaw Marionette begins with a prologue set in 1881 on Flukesplade Island, a remote whaling station in the Tasman Sea and an unforgiving environment...
KIM KELLY Wild Chicory. Reviewed by Kylie Mason
The author of big historical novels like Black Diamonds and Paper Daisies turns to the novella form in Wild Chicory for a very personal story. What does it take to move your family halfway around the world? Who tells the stories of ordinary people? Brigid is nine...
MILES ALLINSON Fever of Animals. Reviewed by Joshua Barnes
Weird, audacious, paradoxical and strange – this novel of a writer’s search for a missing painter offers much to think about. In the first pages of Swann’s Way, Marcel Proust describes the tendency of his narrator – also named Marcel – to fall asleep while reading in...
MIKE JONES The Mothers: The Transgressions Cycle Book One. Reviewed by Lou Murphy
The Mothers is a gripping, cinematically detailed horror story following a fearless 19th-century heroine as she journeys from England to Van Diemen’s Land. Liverpool, England 1880. Rosanna is a young woman whose mother had died during childbirth....
GREGORY DAY Archipelago of Souls. Reviewed by Annette Marfording
Post-traumatic stress is at the heart of Gregory Day’s lyrical and profound fourth novel. Wesley Cress has spent the Second World War as a soldier under British command on the Greek island of Crete, home of the ancient Minoan civilisation. After his return to...
SUSAN JOHNSON The Landing. Reviewed by Robyne Young
This novel artfully articulates the search for the perfect self, the perfect emotional and sexual mate, and the perfect life. In the opening sentence of her new novel, The Landing, Susan Johnson pays homage to one of the greatest writers on love and matrimony, Jane...
JOHN KINSELLA Crow’s Breath. Reviewed by Michelle McLaren
One of Australia’s foremost poets brings inventiveness and economy to this clever collection of microfictions. Crow’s Breath, John Kinsella’s new collection of short stories, opens with an uncommonly wise eight-year-old walking home from the school bus stop when his...
MURRAY MIDDLETON When There’s Nowhere Else to Run. Reviewed by Michael Jongen
This powerful collection dissects love, death, sex and alienation in modern Australia. 2015 Vogel Award winner Murray Middleton has written something close to a great contemporary Australian novel in this terse collection of stories. Losers, victims and spectators...
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