Fiction

Our instinctual reaction to parents who leave their children is one of suspicion. ‘Child abandonment’ elicits such images as a swaddled foundling in the woods, a parent in a train station losing hold of her child’s hand and disappearing into the crowd, or an anonymous baby hatch in a hospital. The presumption is that a mother (fathers are usually spared this judgement) abandons her child because of some shortcoming: poverty, selfishness, capriciousness. Eleanor Limprecht was prompted to write this novel by a newspaper headline at the time of the birth of her first child when a baby was abandoned at Dandenong Hospital. It asked, ‘How Could She?’

Towards the end of Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift (1975), at the poet Von Humboldt Fleisher’s funeral on an April day in Chicago, Menasha Klinger, one of three mourners, points to a spring flower and asks Charlie Citrine, the novel’s narrator, to identify it. ‘Search me,’ Citrine replies, ‘I’m a city boy myself. They must be crocuses.’ This exchange has stayed with me for some thirty-five years. I, too, am a city boy, and couldn’t identify a crocus if I saw one.

The writing of a novel, Alex Miller has said, ‘is a kind of journey of the imagination in which there’s the liberty to dream your own dream … There’s always got to be a model located somewhere in fact and reality … But some of your best characters are what you think of as being purely made up, just characters that needed to be there.’  

Kerryn Goldsworthy admires Margaret Atwood’s depth of intellect as revealed in MaddAddam, the concluding sequel to Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood.

It’s the early 1980s in Melbourne. Shelley, aged fourteen, is obsessed with football. Discussions of the game are the one point of mutual interest that allows communication between Shelley and her father in the aftermath of the death of her mother.

After several picture books and novels for early readers, Tasmanian author Julie Hunt moves into fiction for older readers with this lyrical fantasy adventure. Set in an imaginary world, but drawing on Gaelic and Anglo-Saxon folk-tale motifs, Song for a Scarlet Runner is a charming introduction to fantasy for young readers.

The Swan Song of Doctor Malloy, a novel about addiction, compulsion, and recovery, is set within a fast-moving thriller. Traversing the worlds of health research, drug cartels, world politics, and corporations, it is a conspiracy novel that manages to stay just within the realms of credibility due to the specialist knowledge the author brings to the tale.

Cass Lehman keeps to herself – her mother and grandmother tell other residents of sleepy Jewel Bay that she is agoraphobic. Her real reason for staying in her house for the past nine years is that she has a terrifying kind of ‘retrocognition’: if Cass passes over a place where someone has died, she experiences their death. And death, as it turns out, is everywhere: on the street, at newly renovated pharmacies, and in teenagers’ trysting spots. The daughter and granddaughter of women who also have paranormal gifts, Cass has long believed she, and others, will be safer if she remains a recluse. But now, ‘on the wrong side of twenty-five’, she wants to experience more of life.