Australian Fiction

In the German kingdom of Hessen-Cassel, twelve-year-old Dortchen Wild falls in love with her scholarly neighbour Wilhelm Grimm amid the turbulent lead-up to the Napoleonic Wars. When Wilhelm and his brother Jakob undertake the task of collecting folk and fairy tales to preserve their national heritage, Dortchen becomes a willing source and participant, telling Wilhelm many of the stories that will become the Grimm brothers’ most famous ones. The romance between Dortchen and Wilhelm unfolds gently as Dortchen matures into womanhood. But no fairy tale is complete without a wicked stepmother or an impenetrable briar wood, and so it is with The Wild Girl. Her bright hopes are thwarted both by Wilhelm’s desperate poverty, and by the malevolent shadow of her own father, which soon coalesces into a reality of violence and abuse.

Floodline is the fifth novel by Kathryn Heyman, course director at Allen & Unwin’s Faber Academy. Set in an unspecified area of the United States, it follows a proselytising family, which is on a mission to save the godless inhabitants of Horneville on the eve of their annual gay mardi gras, Hornefest, when the city is devastated by floods.

Privacy is an elusive concept. As Jonathan Franzen notes in his essay ‘Imperial Bedroom’ (2002), it is defined by negativity – freedom from interference, from disturbance, from observation – but resists any positive explanation. Privacy, Genna de Bont’s second novel, explores this slippery idea and uses privacy’s nebulous existence to call into question its relationship with exhibitionism, surveillance, sex, and morality.

While I was reading this compelling but occasionally problematic novel, I started thinking about Oscar Wilde. Pretentious? Moi? The thing is, when I’m torn between opposing views of the same thing, I tend to think of Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol … ‘two men looked out from prison bars, one saw mud, the other stars’. So I found myself in two minds about this book, mainly because, two thirds of the way through, I began to lose sympathy for the main character, Esther Chatwin, wife of a contemporary Australian prime minister (no one we know), a woman none too keen on her role.

In Zero at the Bone, David Whish-Wilson envisions Perth in 1979 at the height of a major gold mining revival stimulated by price increases associated with the end of the gold standard in 1971. Perth is booming, and the culture of greed and excess that will characterise the 1980s is already well entrenched.

For centuries, Japan has magnetised the West’s imagination, evoking both fear and fascination. In the late nineteenth century, when most writers and readers in Europe, North America, and Australia had yet to see this ‘young’, newly accessible country for themselves, literary fantasies on the Madam Butterfly theme became a craze. Then, after Japan invaded its neighbours and defeated the Russian fleet, invasion fiction and drama flourished. Later, stories about geisha and yakuza served the same two purposes, attracting some and frightening others. Many readers are better informed now, yet the ‘Lost in Translation’ genre continues to cater to those who prefer Japan to remain weird and inscrutable, while ‘Last Samurai’ narrativesenable others to fantasise about the virtues of a past, more civilised age. Anime and manga continue to fascinate their fans across the world. There is a nascent revival interest in rakugo; surprisingly, the authors responsible for introducing it to Western readers are Australians.

Kim Kane and Marion Roberts co-write this eerie Melbourne-based thriller seamlessly. In this story that is every parent’s worst nightmare, we see schoolgirls snatched from the middle of their routine, presumed safe, suburban life.

Westerly’s descriptive subtitle (‘the best in writing from the West’) is a modest claim given its national and international reach. A feast of poetry includes offerings by familiar locals like Kevin Gillam, Andrew Lansdown, and Shane McCauley alongside poets such as Kevin Hart and Knute Skinner. There are translations of Xi’an poet, Allen Zhu Jian, by Liang Yujing; and from Russian, by Peter Porter, of poems by Eugene Dubnov. The fiction includes work by Nepali writer Smriti Ravindra, and by Shokoofeh Azar, translated by Persian–English translator Rebecca Stengal, based in France. Hardly surprising, then, that the volume resonates with a sense of diversity and literary substance.

Dark Horse is the latest book from Victorian author Honey Brown. The novel tells of lust and lies between two strangers who come together in an appropriately secluded rural location.