Come Writers & Critics

An inmate’s memoir, a stunning debut, and more from literary editor Caroline Overington’s wrap of news from the world of books

Jennifer Trevelyan, author of A Beautiful Family, a stunning coming-of-age debut

Occasionally a book comes into the office and it’s so good, I want to tell everyone about it.

Jennifer Trevelyan’s debut, A Beautiful Family, is that good.

I’ve been telling everyone: you simply must read it.

It’s about a family on a seaside holiday. The little sister tells the tale. She thinks she’s going to solve a mystery, with a new friend she makes while exploring the village. She ends up discovering so much about love and life and loss, via her parents and her big sister.

If you grew up in the 1980s, with Walkmans, and one mix-tape, and sunburn, and fibro holiday houses with barbecues, it is going to feel so real.

It’s spooky, too. My heart was thumping hard as I read it.

A Beautiful Family by Jennifer Trevelyan

I spoke to Jennifer over Zoom, because the story of how she got published is so cool. She was writing away for years, not thinking anything was good enough to show anyone in the book world.

“I was in my early 40s, and I remember saying to myself, I am going to be so angry with myself if I get to my 50s, and I haven’t pursued this dream of being published,” she said.

“I have always wanted to write. And I did a creative writing course and got good feedback, so I really wanted to give it a proper go.”

Still, she kept the manuscript for A Beautiful Family in her bottom drawer for three years before she decided to dust it off and send it to an agent.

She chose Felicity Blunt (fun facts: she’s Emily Blunt’s sister, and Stanley Tucci’s gorgeous wife) because Felicity had mentioned, online, that she was looking for a story that would transport her to “the other side of the world”.

The book went to auction, and sold for a fine sum, and now it’s out, and it will soon be a film, too.

Jennifer says she recognises herself in the young sister, “except that she’s more courageous than I ever would be. I always believed I would have an adventure when I was a kid, probably because I was massive book reader, and I was reading about these kids having adventures, but I never had one like this. And I didn’t want anything too awful to happen to her, so ...”

No spoilers!

The book ends with some threads still dangling, which is intentional, because “it’s narrated by a 10-year-old, who wouldn’t necessarily understand what might happen next.”

It may also mean that a sequel is possible, of course.

It’s a thrilling book, and I really think you’ll love it.

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No Time For Makeup by Elizabeth Green

“I’m a reader of books, a recent writer of one, and a follower of the stories in the literary section of The Weekend ­Australian.”

So began a lovely letter from Elizabeth Green, who was writing to say that she has recently completed her memoir, about being a flying doctor, and a paediatrician.

Of course I wanted to read it, and I’m so pleased I did.

Elizabeth pitched her story to various publishers, but didn’t get a bite.

“I am a nobody,” she says, “but I am also a somebody who, against the odds of my time, became a flying doctor with the Royal Flying Doctor Service.”

I don’t think that makes her a nobody!

I was enchanted from the first page, where she recalls being aboard a Bible Society plane as an eight-year-old, with her father (he was a priest) when a call came over the radio: “A man has fallen into a camp fire … he’s burned bad.”

He was in pain, and Elizabeth would later learn that “pain was a good thing if you were burned. It meant your skin was alive. No pain indicated that your skin was burned through all its layers, even the nerves.”

Elizabeth was raised in the outback, and in rural and ­regional Australia. As a baby, she lived in Yarrabah in far north Queensland, her bassinet “shaded by a canopy of mango trees … rocked to sleep by Ruby, a 14-year-old girl from a remote community” while her parents, both of them aged just 22, worked in the local school and general store.

By primary school, she had moved to the Kimberley, and she can still remember “red dirt and spinifex, bulbous boab trunks and termite mounds … the billabong water against the sides of the tinny, the yellow eyeballs of the crocodiles” that lurked in the mud.

She recalls a 4000km road trip from Perth to Kununurra in 1965 on dirt highways, with her father making a fist against the windscreen to protect the glass from flying stones, opening car windows for air-conditioning and endless rounds of “10 green bottles” to kill the time.

She walked to school on “roads strewn with sheets of corrugated iron” and her pockets “bulged with marbles” that clicked against her lunch money. She lived in a home where water once dripped brown from the kitchen tap after a crocodile had dragged a cow into the town’s water supply.

Elizabeth went to medical school in Melbourne in 1977, having applied because “I found bugs interesting. Not creepy crawly ones; the microscopic bacteria.” In time, she joined the Royal Flying Doctor Service, and she has brilliant stories to tell. Sad stories, too, about the ­patients who didn’t make it, despite the best efforts of everyone.

I enjoyed reading about her wedding, which took place after “a lot of fly-in, fly-out dates” with fellow doctor Stephen Langford. They were married at her father’s church on a “stinker” of a day. She wore a “fluffy, flouncy” dress from a bridal boutique. The couple had their honeymoon at a hotel on Collins Street in Melbourne’s CBD, and a group of strangers, returning from a big night, created a human arch with their arms to mark their entry into married life. The couple are still together. Elizabeth still has the VHS tape recording of the nuptials, but no player to play it back on.

There is a great deal more in the book, including some wonderful 1980s snaps, and I was pleased to read all of it. No Time For Makeup is published by Exisle, and you’ll find more details online.

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Today’s pages: please don’t miss Cheng Lei’s beautiful essay on page 13. It’s about the books that sustained her, while she was being held in prison in China. She returned to her family here in Australia in 2023, and her memoir is lyrical, passionate, and thoughtful, and you simply must read it. But start with the essay. You’ll see straight away how gifted she is. Also today, Charles Wooley on a rollicking seafaring tale; Cheryl Akle’s famous Notable Books; and Cadance Bell takes a look at Bearcat, a novel based on Anne Hamilton-Byrne’s cult, The Family. So much good stuff. Enjoy.