Best books: What Australia’s top writers are reading
New and upcoming releases, hand-picked by our top literary critics, for when there’s not much else to do.
“Books,” to paraphrase Stephen King, “are a form of portable magic”, the author whisking the reader away into another world. The folds of this imagination vary. Some books are salves, comforts enjoyed on a warm afternoon. Others interrogate. They place reality under a microscope and designate you the scientist, asking you to observe humanity in full, ugly resolution.
Since the emergence of the pandemic, this portable magic has been in ever-growing demand. If 2018 seemed to be littered with eulogies for leisure reading, research shows that lockdown has birthed a new generation of readers. A study conducted by GlobalWebIndex (GWI) has found that, of 15,271 international respondents, 20 per cent of Australians and 26 per cent of New Zealanders are reading more books in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Another study by The Conversation of over 860 participants narrowed in on two distinctive reading habits since lockdown: reading for “exploration”, and “re-reading for safety”.
Put simply, books are cures for the present predicament — escapism, the antidote to physical entrapment; and can bring with them familiarity, a balm for uncertainty.
So what best to read in the age of so-called bibliotherapy?
Who better to ask than Australia’s most acclaimed writers and literature editors.
The Australian’s former chief literary critic Geordie Williamson, now the publisher of Pan Macmillan’s Picador imprint, has also found himself enamoured with a series of works that, if we’re to apply the exploration-safety dichotomy, fall firmly into the camp of adventure.
“Tony Birch writes short stories better than pretty much anyone else at work in Australia today,” Geordie shares. “His subjects in Dark as Last Night are those on the margins of our society, yet his treatment of their lives is characterised by humour, warmth and respect.
He’s an Indigenous activist and universal artist rolled into one serious man.”
Geordie also names Richard Powers’ new novel, Bewilderment, as a particular favourite. The book, he tells us, “sees the American author operating at the height of his powers”.
“His account of a father‘s increasingly desperate efforts to connect with a gifted yet autistically removed son, traumatised by the too-early death of his mother and coming into mature awareness of our ecological predicament, manages to face down plantery despair while wielding hope like a torch.”
And if you haven’t yet acquainted yourself with Finnish-Australian Maria Takolander’s poetry, including her new volume, Trigger Warning, Geordie says that lockdown is the time to dive in deep.
“They’re exquisite in terms of language, but dark in implication,” he says, “especially those poems dealing with the illness of her partner, scholar David McCooey. None of them land exactly where you expect them to.”
For historian and author Gideon Haigh, this has not been the time for lighthearted, frivolous reading (“in my case anyway,” he jokes). “In the last couple of weeks, I‘ve read two very remarkable slants on the German experience of World War II, by soldiers who served in the Wehrmacht.”
“Horst Kruger’s The Broken House is a memoir of Nazism before, during and after the war — the account of his surrendering to American GIs is like nothing I have ever read on the subject of soldiering,” Haigh tells us. “Gert Ledig’s The Stalin Front, written in the 1950s and based on his experiences around Leningrad, is visceral and cinematic — virtually plot-less, but characters no more exactly identified than The Sergeant, The Captain and The Major feel vividly real.”
Fan of Jane Harper’s The Dry? Cheryl Akle, literary crusader and founder of the homegrown 500,000-strong online community Better Reading, cites Matt Nable’s “tightly-wound thriller” Still as one for lovers of the evocative.
“Abuse and corruption are major themes explored here,” she says, and Nable takes his time building the tension towards its explosive end.”
Good Indian Daughter by Ruhi Lee and The Other Side of Beautiful by Kim Lock round out Cheryl’s list of lockdown reads. “Good Indian Daughter is a brutally honest yet brilliantly funny memoir for anyone who’s ever felt like a let-down,” she says.
“It is not a rejection of culture or family, but rather an exploration of how Ruhi can pass the privilege of all this on to her daughter — without the pain.” If you’re feeling a little broken, or like you want to hit the road, Lock’s debut work is “exquisite, tender and … perfect”. “Combining self-discovery and second chances, it’s perfect for readers of Brooke Davis’ Lost & Found, and Graeme Simsion’s The Rosie Project,” Cheryl says.
And Caroline Overington, The Australian’s literary editor, like the others, isn’t spending her time in lockdown revisiting the classics.
Instead, she’s set her sights firmly on the future, reading the most exciting new and upcoming releases on the Australian horizon — “finding gems for booklovers,” she calls it.
Below, discover Caroline’s favourite reads of the moment. Consider her recommendations — as well as those of Gideon, Geordie and Cheryl — the building blocks for your own personal lockdown reading guide.
Libertie by Kaitlyn Greenidge (Allen & Unwin)
“It begins with the prising of the lid off a timber coffin, inside which is a man, curled into a foetal position. It ends with the agonised birth of twins, blood pouring down their mother’s legs as she screams into the night. The central character, Libertie, was born free in Brooklyn before the civil war. Her mother works as a doctor and believes that her daughter should follow her into the profession. Libertie has a different idea, and her story takes you from the US during a period of immense hatred and upheaval, to Haiti where Black Americans are trying to build a new society. It is about the desire of one black woman to be educated, to fall in love — and to be free.”
In Moonland by Miles Allinson (Scribe)
“This book with the funky 1970s cover is set partly in my old hometown, Melbourne. It’s about a young man who needs to know the truth of his father’s apparent murder-suicide. The blurb on the back says: “A parent’s love for a child is bottomless … but a child’s love for a parent is different.” And that’s so true. It’s completely different. Because we — the parents — don’t know what we’re doing when we have children, but they think we do. There are three generations of one family in this book, and they all love, and break down, in different ways. But what is a family, if it’s not trying to hold people together in some kind of shared history that makes some kind of sense to the people who were there?”
Tongerlongeter by Henry Reynolds and Nicholas Clements (New South)
“This is a deeply unsettling book: Tongerlongeter was the leader of the Oyster Bay nation in southeast Tasmania in the 1820s. He mounted resistance to European settlement, and he and his men are said to have killed hundreds of European arrivals during the most violent frontier war in the nation’s history. He lost his arm before he finally agreed to surrender. One of the authors, Henry Reynolds, grew up in Tasmania; he is today one of Australia’s best-known historians. The other, Nicholas Clements, is an eighth generation Tasmanian, who completed his PhD on early contact between Aboriginal people and European arrivals. There are copious notes, a fat index, a compelling narrative, and plenty of clippings from age-old newspapers, the reading of which is terrifying.”
Today A Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket by Hilma Wolitzer (Bloomsbury)
“This is a slim, pretty book of short stories, most of them from the 1970s. The writer is now in her 90s. She compiled the book with her daughter, Meg, also a writer. And oh, it’s warm, and funny, and spellbinding and tender. One story concerns a man who travels interstate for his mother’s funeral, and while he’s away, he’s arrested for indecent exposure in the car park. He is taken to prison, and we see things from his young wife’s perspective, as she hurries to his side. It’s about love. Trauma. Compassion. There’s another story about the response of lonely housewives to the “sex maniac” crawling through their neighbourhood. It starts like this: “Everybody said there was a sex maniac loose in the complex and I thought – it’s about time.” It’s brilliant.”
The Love Songs of W. E. B Du Bois by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers (HarperCollins Australia)
“This book is the size of a house brick, which suits me because I just love big American books. Jeffers is a poet, and essayist, and she teaches creative writing in Oklahoma. This is her debut, and it‘s ambitious, in that it’s named for the famed African-American historian, sociologist, and civil-rights leader, W. E. B Du Bois, and it’s about race, and slavery in the Deep South. It’s also about female trauma, and cruelty; and it’s about addiction. I’ve been carrying it around the house, following the sun as it dips into various rooms, on my veranda, into my garden, completely absorbed. You can hear the echo of Toni Morrison’s Beloved. You can feel To Kill A Mockingbird. It’s 800 pages. You’ll savour every word.”
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