Seventy-year-old Sophia Bertilak was a famous photographer. Her most famous photograph, the photo that launched her career, was an accident. When Sophia was 17, she was given a camera for her birthday and went to the woods, photographing everything. One photo was of a man and a young girl. A girl who had been missing for three years. A girl who was never seen again after the photo. The other shot was taken from above a pipe in the ground. When the photo was developed, it revealed an eye looking back from beneath the earth.
In the present day, Sophia is the victim of what the police believe to be a tragic accident. Living on her own, back on the farmstead she grew up on, it appears that she has been consumed by her two pet pigs.
Cooper Allen is a forensic veterinarian who is tasked with the investigation and autopsy of the pigs. Although the police believe it to be an accident, Cooper becomes infatuated with Sophie. Against the wishes of the police, she starts to investigate Sophie’s life. Strange evidence suggests that Sophia’s death may not have been an accident after all.
I admit to being lost and confused a few times, but perseverance is rewarded with an ending that is hard to see coming. The structure of the narrative is well written, with emails and voicemails used to progress the story and flesh out the characters. Buchanan creates an eerie miasma that shrouds the story, pervading Consumed with a sense of suspense and confusion.
Greg Buchanan is a BAFTA-longlisted writer for interactive and screen. His debut novel Sixteen Horses was selected for BBC Two’s Between the Covers and Waterstones Thriller of the Month. He is a best selling author of novels, video games and more.
After her breakout YA success with These Violent Delights, Chloe Gong has delivered her first adult urban fantasy novel.
Immortal Longings is set in San-Er, a gritty, overpopulated metropolis where citizens are offered a yearly chance for fame and fortune – they can sign up to a Hunger Games-esque battle to the death. The two main characters, Calla Tuolemi and Anton Makusa, both have separate, conflicting motives to fight in the games, but they still team up to navigate their new sea of deadly enemies.
The heart of Immortal Longings is the sci-fi element of body jumping. This is a pretty common practice in San-Er, which leads to some really interesting world-building setups. Like ‘How do you treat your birth body when you know it could be invaded at any second?’ Or ‘How do you perceive gender if you are constantly swapping your physical form?’
Chloe Gong takes advantage of this fascinating concept and uses it both to develop the world and strengthen the characters.
Anton and Calla are based on the Shakespearean personas in Anthony and Cleopatra, so their relationship is layered and full of rivalry. Each character is prickly and unwilling to back down, so it is fun reading when their personalities clash. Also, the twisting, turning plot was a highlight of the book for me. It felt like every chapter introduced a new game-changing revelation. The action was well written and fast paced, but still easy to follow. The only issues I ran into were the massive info-dumps of history and lore that took up whole pages. This narrative choice felt a little clunky to me.
For fans of Chloe Gong and epic, Shakespearean drama, this latest offering is an absolute winner!
Reviewed by Rachel Denham-White
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chloe Gong is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the critically acclaimed Secret Shanghai novels, as well as the Flesh and False Gods trilogy. Her books have been published in over twenty countries and have been featured in the New York Times, PEOPLE, Forbes and more. She is a recent graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, where she double-majored in English and International Relations. Born in Shanghai and raised in Auckland, New Zealand, Chloe is now located in New York City, pretending to be a real adult.
If tales from left field are your thing, The Terrible Event is a collection of eight short stories made just for you. They’re odd – like quirkiness on steroids – and yet the basis of each story is founded in the everyday.
The lead story is a take down of a bureaucratic solution to memorialising a catastrophe – commemoration by committee. The ‘terrible event’ in question isn’t named and it seems the reader could insert their own preferred crisis into the story. The event is not important; it’s the response to it that matters, and this response is dulled by bureaucracy. ‘Mr Cheerio’ attacks from a different direction altogether. Flatmates protest against those who vilify the homeless. There’s a subtle subtext contrasting attention-seeking with altruism.
‘Bugs’ is the story that will linger. Mark finds his old Bugs Bunny toy, pulling its string to listen to its voice. As it loses some of its phrases, Mark loses corresponding features from his own life. This is a descent into madness triggered by a childhood toy, where Mark’s son, Ben, needs to be the responsible adult.
Office work is given a Kafkaesque twist in ‘The Holes’. ‘Andrew’ is a five-page single sentence on jealousy. ‘The Mattress’ is another monologue, given as an excuse for injuring a workmate. ‘A History of Walking’ covers life’s steps – with a neat wordplay to finish.
The longer final story, ‘Keith’, revolves around roadside memorials. A study using the fictitious death of ‘Keith’ seeks to know how traffic reacts around these memorials. As locals adopt Keith’s memorial, matters get out of hand.
These are truly weird, truly wonderful stories from an original mind.
Reviewed by Bob Moore
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Cohen is the author of the novels Fear of Tennis and Disappearing off the Face of the Earth and the short-story collection The Hunter and Other Stories of Men, which won the 2019 Russell Prize for Humour Writing. His stories have appeared in The Big Issue, Griffith Review, Meanjin, Overland, and elsewhere. He lives in Brisbane, Australia.
Alison Goodman is well known for her YA fiction but this is her first novel for a more adult readership. Set in 1812, it introduces non-identical twins Lady Augusta and Lady Julia Colebrook. The former is the more outspoken and independent of the two, while her sister is more conciliatory and less inclined to argue and disagree. They are both unmarried at the age of 42, so are dismissed as old spinsters by most of the ‘Ton’, including their younger brother, Lord Duffield, who has inherited the title and estate.
Lady Augusta, known as Gus, has begun to have some success extracting women from perilous situations. After retrieving some incriminating letters from a scoundrel using them for blackmail, Gus is asked to try to remove a woman from her husband’s house. She is being kept a prisoner because she has not produced an heir. He is planning to get rid of her rather than go through the very expensive and publicly humiliating process of divorce.
The second case involves freeing a 12-year-old who has been abducted from a brothel. Her value to the owners is that her services can extract a high price by providing a Virgin Cure for those with the pox. The third and final case involves removing a titled lady from a mental asylum where she has been committed by her guardian, her brother, because she will not marry, preferring to live with her female ‘friend’, Elizabeth.
The action in kicks off straight away in The Benevolent Society of Ill-Mannered Ladies with character development revealed along the way. Julia develops more backbone and Gus finds herself invested in helping others. There is a touch of romance and some subplots but the strong messages throughout are about the way women were treated quite legitimately in 19th century England.
Reviewed by Lynne Babbage
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alison is the author of eight novels and her most recent release, The Benevolent Society of Ill-Mannered Ladies, is an adventure/mystery set in the Regency era. It is the first book in The Ill-Mannered Ladies series.
Her award winning Lady Helen dark fantasy trilogy has been described as ‘Buffy meets Pride and Prejudice’. The first book in the series, The Dark Days Club, was a 2017 CBCA Notable Book for Older Readers, a 2017 Bank Street Library Best Book and an NPR Best Book of 2016. The second book, The Dark Days Pact, won the 2016 Aurealis Award for Best YA Novel. The third and final novel in the series, The Dark Days Deceit, was an Aurealis Award finalist.
Alison is also the author of the New York Times bestselling fantasy duology EON and EONA. Her award winning debut novel, Singing the Dogstar Blues, was first published in 1998 and is still in print, and her very adult thriller, A New Kind of Death, was a Davitt Award finalist under its original title Killing the Rabbit.
Alison can dance a mean contra-dance, has a wardrobe full of historically accurate Regency clothes and will travel a long way for a good High Tea. She lives in Melbourne, Australia and was recently awarded her PhD at the University of Queensland so can now call herself Dr Al.
And for those who may be interested, the mysterious woman on the website home page (and headers) giving extreme side-eye and excellent red lip is Alison on her wedding day.
This intense and unusual novel traces the personal crisis of Ch’anzu (zie/hir, gender neutral pronouns which can be used regardless of gender identity) after zie loses both hir wife and job on one day. ‘Swaddled in confusion,’ Ch’anzu flees hir personal disaster by taking a job in a compound of African refugees located in Wagga Wagga. Though Ch’anzu is also Afrocentric, zie is not welcome: ‘In Serengotti, the world is small and hearts are big, but they shrink against strangers and outcasts.’
Ch’anzu’s task is to use hir coding skills to design a ‘community health app’. Ch’anzu throws hirself into creating a ‘choose your own adventure’ game when zie recognises the power of story in Serengotti: this is a place where terrible pasts forever threaten to write terrible futures, as exemplified by a girl muted by the horrors of war and a boy soldier who, having finally found safety, can only make ‘his own circle of violence’.
Serengottiis ultimately driven by Ch’anzu’s search for meaning and intimacy in an unpredictable world where human passions see bodies pile up both within and without Serengotti. The novel’s bold use of the second person, present tense fuels narrative tension by powerfully evoking Ch’anzu’s almost manic, playful and often poetic mindscape. The troubling intimacy zie shares with hir twin, Tex, the warped dynamics of hir broken marriage, and the genuine maternal love of hir aunt, make Ch’anzu realise that hir own compulsion to nurture is dangerous in a world full of people without ‘soni’ (shame).
Serengotti is a striking and original novel that explores how loves of all kinds can give life – or take it away.
Reviewed by Helen Gildfind
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Eugen M. Bacon, MA, MSc, PhD, is an African Australian author of several novels and fiction collections. She’s a twice World Fantasy Award finalist, a British Fantasy Award finalist, a Foreword Book of the Year silver award winner, and was announced in the honor list of the 2022 Otherwise Fellowships for ‘doing exciting work in gender and speculative fiction’.
Danged Black Thing by Transit Lounge Publishing was a finalist in the BSFA, Foreword, Aurealis and Australian Shadows Awards, and made the Otherwise Award Honor List as a ‘sharp collection of Afro-Surrealist work’. Eugen’s creative work has appeared worldwide, including in Award Winning Australian Writing, Fantasy Magazine, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction.
Terrence Baily has spent six years in prison for breaking and entering. However, the police believe he is also responsible for the disappearance and probable murder of several missing girls. Days before his release is due, he receives a visitor. The only visitor in six years. After this visit the police find a message scrawled on the interview table. It reads, ‘Bring Rachel Krall to me. Do whatever it takes to find her. It’s time …’ After this meeting his visitor, a popular social media influencer, disappears filming her own abduction.
The police believe that Baily has been working with a partner while he has been incarcerated, and they have kidnapped the influencer. Fearing that she will become another victim, they call in Rachel Krall to talk to Baily. Baily is a listener of Krall’s true crime podcast as are many of his fellow inmates.
Goldin explores themes such as fake identities and popularity in the age of social media. Maddison, the influencer who visits Baily, has thousands and thousands of followers, but when the police try to find information about her, they find nothing. Her social media account is a fabrication. Influencers will go to any extremes to maintain and expand their follower base. Could Maddison’s abduction be just another fabrication to multiply her followers?
The narrative is told from multiple perspectives. Dark Corners also switches from the main storyline to an episode of Krall’s podcast, covering events from the main story. This format works well, helping the reader stay on track, because there are multiple dead bodies floating around.
An enjoyable although slightly predictable novel.
Reviewed by Neale Lucas
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Megan Goldin worked as a correspondent for Reuters and other media outlets, where she covered war, peace, international terrorism, and financial meltdowns in the Middle East and Asia. She is the author of three internationally bestselling thrillers: Stay Awake, The Night Swimand The Escape Room. She is now based in Melbourne, where she raises three sons and is a foster mum to Labrador puppies learning to be guide dogs.
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