Best books of 2015: Marlon James; Charlotte Wood; Les Murray; Magda Szubanski

Our literary editor surveys a great year for good books and unearths a few hidden gems along the way.

Well read

For reasons I can’t nail down, compiling this year’s summer reading / Christmas gift guide was a more daunting task than usual. It has something to do with a general feeling I have that an above-average number of good books were published in the past 12 months. Add to that the certain knowledge that I haven’t read all or even most of them, and I’m all too conscious of the confines of any list I offer.

Having said that, the following recommendations, as always, are based not solely on books I have read, but also on reviews of books I haven’t read, literary prizes, sales, the thoughts of friends, publishing industry chatter and so on. Even so, this year I have striven to highlight books you may not have heard of. Let’s face it, everyone knows Jonathan Franzen published a new novel this year (Purity) and my opinion (I liked it) probably won’t sway people very far one way or the other, as the author is one people tend to love or hate.

I will still mention well-known books and authors in the following list — Peter FitzSimons (see!) — but I do hope to unearth some rarer nuggets that will surprise and I hope delight you. But I will start as usual with the area that dominates my own reading.

AUSTRALIAN FICTION

Before mentioning specific books, I want to recommend, as I do every year, Black Inc’s Best Australian Stories (edited by Amanda Lohrey), Essays (edited by Geordie Williamson) and Poems (edited by Geoff Page). These three anthologies, reviewed this week by Gregory Day on page 24, are a great one-stop shop to catch up on world-class Australian writing. And a bit like my overall impression of the year, I feel this year’s Bests are extremely strong.

Now, to individual books, and this is what I’m talking about: there were so many first-rate local works of fiction this year that I worry I will leave some out. My top pick, however, is Charlotte Wood’s confronting, confounding novel of mysteriously kidnapped and imprisoned women, The Natural Way of Things. Next week we will run our annual Books of the Year, in which writers and critics choose their favourite reads of 2015, and the early signs are that Wood’s book will be the most mentioned.

Climate change novels are all the rage, and we produced two brilliant ones this year in James Bradley’s Clade and Mireille Juchau’s The World Without Us. If like me you consider “old-fashioned novel” to be a compliment, you will luxuriate in Stephanie Bishop’s The Other Side of the World. Stephen Daisley’s follow-up to the stunning Traitor (2011, read it if you haven’t) is Coming Rain, and it’s a book that has lingered in my mind all year, not least because one of the main characters is a dingo. I like everything Mark Dapin writes, and his novel of military police in Vietnam, R&R, is no exception. Gregory Day’s Archipelago of Souls is another strong story of war and post-war. Geraldine Brooks’s retelling of the King David story, The Secret Chord, appeals as an ideal holiday read. I’m yet to read Tom Keneally’s new novel, Napoleon’s Last Island, but critic Peter Pierce says it’s one of his best, and that’s good enough for me. Keneally turned 80 this year and the occasion was marked by the publication of Stephany Evans Steggall’s biography Interestingly Enough …

When it comes to short stories, Tegan Bennett Daylight’s collection Six Bedrooms confirms her as one of our most promising writers, Elizabeth Harrower’s A Few Days in the Country continues her remarkable literary rejuvenation, and Murray Middleton’s When There is Nowhere Else to Run, which won The Australian /Vogel’s Literary Award, is one of the most assured local debuts of recent times.

All of the aforementioned books received a bit of publicity on their release, but here are a couple of those nuggets I mentioned: AS Patric’s debut novel Black Rock White City and The Life of Houses, the first novel by poet Lisa Gorton. Seek them out.

INTERNATIONAL FICTION

I am sure Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet will dominate the best books lists this year, but I haven’t read any of the novels, the most recent of which is The Story of a Lost Child. It’s not that I don’t want to — I’d love to — but I want to read them back-to-back when I have proper time, so perhaps over the Christmas break. Ditto for Karl Ove Knausgaard’s autobiographical six-novel series My Struggle. I did read the first two a while back — but what I really want to do is start again and read all six in one burst, which will happen soon after I win Lotto and take up permanent residence in a five-star hotel.

The best international novel I read this year was one of the first, The Illuminations, a contemporary story of family and war by the brilliant Scottish writer Andrew O’Hagan. Next best was Submission, Michel Houellebecq’s often hilarious satire of a near-future France in which a Muslim political party comes to power. In a similar vein, Salman Rushdie’s comic vision of the contemporary West and its relationship with Islam, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, is great fun and full of insight. I thought highly of Go Set a Watchman, Harper Lee’s sequel of sorts to To Kill a Mockingbird. David Vann is one of my favourite writers and in Aquarium, with its mother-and-daughter story, he shows another side to himself, one that underscores both his great technical skill and his emotional intelligence. Bob Shacochis’s The Woman Who Lost Her Soul is a big, serious summer read, a novel of pre 9/11 America that recalls Graham Greene, Norman Mailer and Malcolm Lowry. Three foreign novels are very near the top of my to-read list: Marlon James’s Man Booker Prize-winning A Brief History of Seven Killings, Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation, a reimagining of Albert Camus’s The Outsider from an Arab perspective, and Beauty is a Wound by Indonesian writer Eka Kurniawan. I’ve noticed the last popping up on a few best books lists in the international press, with comparisons being made with Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I confess to the American writer Anne Tyler being one of the many gaps in my reading, but the persistent praise for her latest, Booker-shortlisted novel, A Spool of Blue Thread, makes me think I should make a start.

CRIME FICTION

Every year I say I’m going to read my own and not rely on colleague Graeme Blundell, and this year … I did! As flagged last year, I made a start on the Sean Duffy novels of Melbourne-based Irishman Adrian McKinty. I read the first, In the Cold, Cold Ground, and immediately acquired the others for rainy-day reading. I read The Killing Lessons in a sitting. It’s the debut crime fiction of English literary novelist Glen Duncan, writing as Saul Black. It’s a terrific story and, as you might expect, the characterisations are superb. Two American writers also produced powerful debuts: Smith Henderson with Fourth of July Creek, which is a sort of Walden with guns, and William Giralda’s chilling Alaska-set Hold the Dark, which starts with reports of wolves eating children and gets worse, much worse, from there. Of course I am not going to leave you hanging re Mr Blundell. His top three crime novels of 2015 are: McKinty’s latest, Gun Street Girl, Michael Robotham’s Close Your Eyes and Peter Doyle’s The Big Whatever.

BIOGRAPHY

I’ll cover political biography separately, as there have been so many, due to our chop-and-change democracy. The year brought two of the greatest spy novelists into the light: Frederick Forsyth loosens the lid on his work for Britain’s intelligence services in The Outsider: My Life of Intrigue and George Smiley’s creator receives the full biographical treatment in Adam Sisman’s John Le Carre, a work that Max Hastings, no less, has described as “by miles the best biography I have read this year”. It’s not a biography, but this seems the right place to include the enormously enjoyable The Man with the Golden Typewriter: Ian Fleming’s Bond Letters, edited by the author’s nephew Fergus Fleming. This collection of letters to and by Fleming, mainly about the James Bond books, is perfect summer evening reading. You can imagine yourself into Fleming’s Jamaica, sipping a rum perhaps.

While I’m sure it’s not a brisk read, I have seen so many positive reports on Richard Davenport-Hines’s Universal Man: The Seven Lives of John Maynard Keynes that the laws of supply demand I mention it. As it happens I was watching the Eddie McGuire television game show Millionaire Hot Seat recently and was surprised, to say the least, when a contestant was unable to identify Keynes’s profession (she went for architect). Which reminds me, colleague Michael Bodey has just published a biography of McGuire, Eddie: The Rise and Rise of Eddie McGuire, and now he owes me a beer.

MEMOIR

Another strong field. Magda Szubanski’s brave, compassionate — and hilarious — Reckoning may be some sort of masterpiece of the form. Similarly, Richard Glover shows (again) that he is much more than a funny man in the moving memoir of his parents, Flesh Wounds. Glover’s book comes with a cover blurb by Bill Bryson, and though it may be counter-intuitive to read a British travel memoir during the Australian summer, The Road To Little Dribbling is Bryson at his best. Second Half First, Drusilla Modjeska’s meditation on life after 40, is an absorbing memoir from one of our most original writers. Speaking of original, Fiona Wright’s Small Acts of Disappearance: Essays on Hunger is a taut, fascinating work.

Neurologist and author Oliver Sacks died in August, aged 82, three months after publishing On the Move: A Life. Sacks suffered from painful shyness all his life, but here he opens up and, as with all his writing, the results enrich us all. While you are at it, add a copy of Sacks’s posthumous little book of essays, Gratitude. Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, written as a letter to his adolescent son, is a searing examination of American race relations.

I was going to include Gerald Murnane’s Something for the Pain: A Memoir of the Turf under Sport, but I worried non-sporty readers would skip that section and miss one of the books of the year. Yes, this is about Murnane’s lifelong obsession with horseracing (which I share) but it’s so much more than that. It’s a memoir that illuminates his deliberately unusual life and his exquisite fiction.

POETRY

Clive James made the list last year for Poetry Notebook and it’s pleasing to be able to include him 12 months later for his raw, confessional collection Sentenced to Life. Two new collections from poets who sadly are no longer with us also caught my eye, Martin Harrison’s Happiness (reviewed on page 27) and Peter Porter’s just-published Chorale at the Crossing. Les Murray’s verse and photographic ode to his home town, On Bunyah, is a beautifully written and beautifully produced book. The photograph of the toddler Les with chickens is a gem. Robert Adamson’s Net Needle is a gorgeous example of poetry as social history. Sarah Holland-Batt’s globetrotting The Hazards is quite dazzling in its range and interests. I have reviewers queuing up to review Jennifer Maiden’s The Fox Petition, while Tracy Ryan’s Hoard is also popular on the best book lists. Falling and Flying: Poems on Ageing, edited by Judith Beveridge and Susan Ogle, is one I’ve taken home for dipping purposes.

Two significant biographies, Jonathan Bate’s Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life and Robert Crawford’s Young Eliot: From St Louis to The Waste Land, went straight into the ‘‘one day’’ pile. It’s not a book of poetry, but I am going to include here Max Porter’s remarkable Grief is the Thing with Feathers, with its haunting echoes of the lives of Hughes and Sylvia Plath.

POLITICS

This is a bit like the Franzen question. There are people who will rush to read Keating, Kerry O’Brien’s massive biography of Paul Keating, and there are people who will run in the other direction. The same is probably true of Peter Garrett’s Big Blue Sky, though having dipped into it I can say it’s much more than a political biography, and is very well written. I will be reading Paddy Manning’s Born to Rule: The Unauthorised Biography of Malcolm Turnbull, because I feel one should know a bit about the Prime Minister. Greg Sheridan’s When We Were Young and Foolish, a rompish account of his callow encounters with Turnbull, Tony Abbott, Bob Carr, Kevin Rudd and “other reprobates”, is something not all political books are: fun. George Megalogenis is one of the most perceptive political and social analysts we have and I suspect his Australia’s Second Chance: What Our History Tells Us About Our Future will be on many a politician’s holiday reading list. Paul Kelly’s The Dismissal has been a benchmark text since its first publication, but a new edition, written with Troy Bramston, draws on newly available material to shine fresh light on this seminal and still hotly contested moment in our national life. Another work that is sure to stand the test of time is Charles Moore’s authorised biography of Margaret Thatcher. Volume Two, Everything She Wants, begins in 1982, soon after Britain has won the Falklands War, and ends with Thatcher’s historic third election victory in 1987.

HISTORY

The best book review I read this year was Ferdinand Mount in the Times Literary Supplement on Rory Muir’s Wellington: Waterloo and the Fortunes of Peace, 1814-1852. We of course think of Wellington as a soldier (“The truth is that Wellington held hard views because he was a hard man,’’ Mount writes) but the portrait of him here is nuanced, with much discussion of his “unique moral and practical energy as a peacemaker’’, and though no direct comparison is ever made, I found myself thinking unfavourably about modern political leaders. I don’t even have this book, but I do plan to get hold of it and add it to the one day pile (I know I go on a bit about that particular stack, but I’m sure I have a sympathetic audience here).

I loved ancient history at school but I feel my knowledge acquisition ended there, a situation I’m keen to redress, especially as my 10-year-old is fascinated by the topic. So I have carted home both Mary Beard’s SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome and Josiah Ober’s The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece (though I know the other new book I will read first is Robert Harris’s novel of Cicero, Dictator).

As someone who entered the workforce in the early 1980s, I feel an affinity for Frank Bongiorno’s engaging The Eighties: The Decade that Transformed Australia. A flick through the index brought back people, events and places I’d forgotten (some wisely): Australia Card, breakdancing, Bruce Ruxton, John Stone, Air Supply … Bongiorno’s extended discussion of the Asian immigration debate is well worth reading in the present political climate. It wouldn’t be Christmas without a new book from Peter FitzSimons and this year’s is a World War I history, Fromelles & Pozieres: In the Trenches of Hell. And while it’s cheating a bit as the book isn’t out here til next year, I want to flag David Lough’s No More Champagne: Churchill and His Money, because I’ve read reviews of it and it sounds wonderful, detailing the great man’s haphazard relationship with his finances. In 1935 alone, Churchill (pictured above) spent the equivalent of about $100,000 on champagne. Ten torrid years later, he borrowed from Napoleon: “I could not live without champagne. In victory I deserve it. In defeat I need it.’’

FOOD and DRINK

As someone who shares Winnie’s fondness for Pol Roger (though my creditors are not as patient), I will peruse Tyson Stelzer’s The Champagne Guide 2016 just to check out what else is available, bubbles-wise. I also took home copies of the amusing Shakespeare, Not Stirred: Cocktails for Your Everyday Dramas, by scholars Caroline Bicks and Michelle Ephraim, and Clare Burder’s informative Tipsy: The Drinker’s Guide to Wine, Beer, Whisky, Gin, Sake and More. I don’t suppose there would be much of a market for the Non-Drinker’s Guide to such beverages, but there you have it.

I did take home a cookbook this year — a first for me — Ross Robson’s Food + Beer. This is such a practical book: I assumed it would contain beer-infused recipes but, no, it’s all about matching beers with the dishes. I just skip the food part and drink the beer, and have discovered some beauties as a result. I did spot another cookbook that seems like a good companion volume, however, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s Love Your Leftovers. Lest anyone detect a pattern here, I also read and enjoyed, in a cautionary tale way, AA Gill’s stark memoir of his battle with the bottle, Pour Me: A Life.

Jacqui Newling’s Eat Your History: Stories and Recipes from Australian Kitchens combines, as the title suggests, a history of Australian eating habits from 1788 to the 1950s with recipes, most of them unusual. While I could never eat a wallaby’s tail — they need them for balance — I am keen to try the oyster loaves. I also enjoyed browsing Andy Brunning’s Why Does Asparagus Make Your Wee Smell? And 57 Other Curious Food and Drink Questions.

SCIENCE and NATURE

When American writer Sy Montgomery published a piece on octopuses, titled “Deep intellect”, in Orion magazine in October 2011, I thought it was one of the best nature articles I’d read — and I immediately stopped eating these super intelligent suckers. Montgomery has developed that article into a thought-provoking book, The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness. An equally fascinating book that also started out as a magazine article is Thomas Thwaites’s Goat Man: How I Took a Holiday From Being Human. I think this one is not due till early next year, so I’m just putting it on your radar. Thwaites, feeling low, decides to take a break from being a human, makes himself a goat suit and joins a farm herd in Switzerland. The results are eye-opening, as are the accompanying photographs.

As with the Black Inc essays-stories-poems anthologies, I recommend Best Australian Science Writing 2015, edited by Bianca Nogrady. This seems to be the best place to include Karen Hitchcock’s clear-eyed Quarterly Essay on one of the most important social challenges we face, Dear Life: On Caring for the Elderly.

Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks, a sort of love letter to the landscape and language of rural Britain, and Alexandra Harris’s Weatherland, a literary exploration of the English weather, are both quite lovely.

SPORT

Summer means cricket and there’s a lot to choose from this year. Australian cricket is still coming to terms with the on-field death of batsman Phil Hughes 12 months ago. The ramifications of this tragedy are expertly and sensitively explored in Phillip Hughes: The Official Biography by two of our best cricket writers, Peter Lalor and Malcolm Knox. The prolific Knox also has The Keepers, an informative and entertaining study of the men behind the stumps. I’d also like to read Chasing Shadows: The Life and Death of Peter Roebuck by Tim Lane and Elliot Cartledge. I’m sure the various Richie Benaud books will be in a lot of dads’ Christmas stockings: there’s Norman Tasker and Ian Heads’s Richie: The Man Behind the Legend; Remembering Richie: Richie Benaud & Friends, with a foreword by Michael Parkinson; and a compilation titled Richie Benaud: Those Summers of Cricket.

Summer also means the surf, and William Finnegan’s stylish memoir Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life is riding a wave of rave reviews. To mention other sports briefly, there is Legacy, a memoir by soccer star Tim Cahill; Inside, the autobiography of AFL legend Chris Judd; My Story, by record-breaking All Blacks fly half Dan Carter; and Michael Maguire’s A Year to Remember, in which the coach of the South Sydney Rabbitohs details the historic win in last year’s National Rugby League grand final. I don’t follow soccer closely but Leading, by former Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson, is winning a lot of praise. More than a sports book, I gather.

I haven’t seen a copy of Greatest Sporting Moustaches but I have seen that cricketer Merv Hughes is on the cover. He’s a contender, for sure, but there can only be one winner and that is Hawthorn hard man Robert DiPierdomenico.

ENTERTAINMENT

Speaking of moustaches … John Boorman’s 1972 film Deliverance, based on James Dickey’s novel, is one of my favourite movies of the 1970s, so I turned straight to that section of Burt Reynolds’s memoir But Enough About Me, which comes with a foreword by co-star Jon Voight. I was not disappointed. The boyish image of Reynolds (pictured) makes it easy to forget how long he has been around — he turns 80 in February. There are stories here about Spencer Tracy, Bette Davis, Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe, Clint Eastwood and many others.

Sinatra would have turned 100 this year and there were more than a couple of books to mark the occasion. One that seems to be receiving good reviews is James Kaplan’s The Chairman. While on music, my esteemed colleague Iain Shedden recommends Elvis Costello’s Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink.

I mentioned I joined the workforce in the 80s, which means I spent the 70s watching the TV cop shows Homicide and Division Four, which means I’m interested to take a look at Rozzi Bazzani’s Hector, a biography of the pioneering producer Hector Crawford. Anyone who has read the first two volumes of Simon Callow’s life of Orson Welles will be pleased to know the third, Orson Welles: One-Man Band, is now available, and there is more to come. And if you want to get a head start on the two movies everyone will be talking about come Oscar time, check out the film tie-in editions of Bruce Cook’s Trumbo and Patricia Highsmith’s Carol.

LITERARY STUDIES

When the day comes that I have read all of Ferrante and all of Knausgaard and all the others I’ve mentioned, you know what I am going to do? I am going to read Peter Green’s acclaimed new translation of Homer’s The Iliad, that’s what. The reviews have been inspiring. Before that I’d like to read James Shapiro’s 1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear.

CHILDREN’S and YOUNG ADULT

Favourite children’s books this year were Gillian Mears’s The Cat with the Coloured Tail, Trace Balla’s Shine, Jackie French’s Horace the Baker’s Horse, James Proimos’s Apocalypse Bow Wow and two eccentric titles in translation from Gecko Press, Astrid Desbordes’s Tales of an Extraordinary Hamster and Toon Tellegen’s The Day No One Was Angry. Andy Griffiths’s The 65-Storey Treehouse was one of the best yet, and Jeff Kinney also delivered as expected with Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Old School.

I asked regular YA reviewer Joy Lawn for her top five, and she responded with an all-Australian list: Meg McKinlay’s A Single Stone, Lili Wilkinson’s Green Valentine, Gabrielle Williams’s The Guy, the Girl, the Artist and His Ex, Fiona Wood’s Cloudwish and Rosanne Hawke’s The Truth About Peacock Blue. To that list I would add a bit of boy’s own from Louis Nowra, Prince of Afghanistan, about an Australian ­soldier and his dog caught behind enemy lines.

STOCKING FILLERS

Shaun Usher has a mortgage on this spot, and deservedly so. His new one, More Letters of Note, is a follow-up to, well, Letters of Note from 2013. There are some pearls here, including Richard Burton’s letter to Elizabeth Taylor after she dumped him (the first time), Hunter S. Thompson’s expletive-laden shotgun blast (“Your type is a dime a dozen’’ ) to Anthony Burgess, Helen Keller’s thank-you note to the New York Symphony Orchestra and, my favourite, Kurt Vonnegut’s apologetic, uplifting message to a high-school class.

I’m sorry, but I just cannot endorse the colouring books craze. As a publisher said to me a few months ago, “Who knew that all we had to do to sell books was take out all the words.’’ But if I was going to spend time with one it would be Oslo Davies’s This Annoying Life: A Mindless Colouring Book for the Highly Stressed. The illustrations are familiar scenes from domestic life: a sink full of dirty dishes and glasses (not left there by you), an overflowing garbage bin, a shin barked on your car’s tow bar, the impenetrable packaging on everything. Here’s a value-adding tip: after you’ve coloured them in, draw a voice bubble and add a few words, such as *@#%#$^#*! and @()#^#(!

When it comes to stress management, I’d rather read Bertrand Russell’s 1932 essay In Praise of Idleness, which Black Inc division Nero has just republished in an attractive little hardback with an introduction by Hobart-born New York Times bestselling humorist Bradley Trevor Grieve. This is from Russell’s opening paragraph: “I think there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous”. With that in mind, I wish you a peaceful, relaxing, stimulating and labour-light festive season.