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.
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.
Body Friend is a lyrical and nuanced exploration of a young woman’s rehabilitation following surgery for an unnamed chronic disease. While the physical aspects of her recuperation are the focus of the narrative, it’s her inner journey that’s integral.
Fluidity of style is echoed in the principal theme of the book – the relationship between the body and the self. Constantly in flux, one forever competing for mastery of the other, this volatility is symbolised in two close friendships the protagonist forms during the months following her hospitalisation. She first meets Frida in the hydrotherapy pool where she’s assigned to take remedial classes. Increasingly drawn to Frida’s apparent determination to conquer the weaknesses of the body through swimming, she becomes obsessed by trying to match her ability as they visit various pools in the months after therapy.
Sylvia, the other woman with whom she forms a friendship, urges her to take a different approach. Rest and surrender, she believes, are the ways to gain peace of body and mind. As both relationships become increasingly significant to the protagonist and her dependency on both women escalates, her sense of self becomes fragmented. Trying to negotiate the mind/body nexus effectively for herself drives the final part of the book. Her realisation that ‘with others, we become alternative versions of ourselves’, is an indication that her capacity to be self-determining is improving.
My one reservation about this book is that the subtleties of style and narration make the protagonist somewhat of a remote figure. As a reader I felt little empathy for any of the characters, although I am in awe of the polished prose.
Reviewed by Anne Green
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Katherine Brabon’s first novel, The Memory Artist, won The Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award in 2016. It was shortlisted in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and longlisted in the Indie Book Awards. Her second novel, The Shut Ins, won the People’s Choice Award at the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards in 2022. It was shortlisted for the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, and longlisted for the Voss Prize and the ALS Gold Medal.
Her work has appeared in Vogue, Australian Book Review, The Australian Financial Review, The Saturday Paper, Island, Meanjin, The Lifted Brow, The Age/Sydney Morning Herald, and she is a regular contributor to Melbourne’s Lindsay magazine. She has been a resident at Château de Lavigny Switzerland, Art Omi New York, the UNESCO Cities of Literature International Residency in Ljubljana, and received the Varuna Writer’s House Eleanor Dark Fellowship.
Her third novel Body Friend will be published by Ultimo Press in 2023.
Katherine lives and works in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia, on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation.
Mia Jacob grew up on a commune in Massachusetts with a love of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s writing and The Scarlet Letterin particular. The first half of The Invisible Hour deals with Mia and her mother, Ivy, and their time in ‘the Community’ and their battles with its leader (and Ivy’s husband), Joel Davis. The second half is a magical realist time travel where Mia meets Hawthorne before he’s written that book … which Mia found in her first venture into a library, with its dedication to her. It’s convoluted but it works.
Ivy flees to the commune from Boston after falling pregnant with Mia. Initially life is free, but Joel’s intrusive, overbearing rules begin to chafe at her, and Mia too, as she grows older. Both are keen readers, but books are forbidden. When the Community sells produce in town, Ivy shows Mia the library and suggests she go there. Mia finds a friendly librarian, Sarah, as well as Hawthorne’s book.
Mia has plans for her and her mother to escape. Before they can enact them, though, Ivy is killed in a farm accident. Mia must escape Joel and turns to Sarah for help. Sarah and her partner, Constance, become Mia’s new family. She finishes school and attends university … but Joel still stalks her, wanting to take her back to the Community.
The Scarlet Lettermirrors Ivy’s life and is the talisman allowing Mia to travel back to 1837. She meets Hawthorne, who’s immediately attracted to her. He feels a failure and Mia convinces him of his future success. Joel manages to follow her, though. She must overcome her fear to free herself. Her journey is an awakening on multiple levels.
Reviewed by Bob Moore
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alice Hoffman has become one of the most distinguished novelists. She has published over thirty novels, three books of short fiction, and eight books for children and young adults. Her novel, Here on Earth, an Oprah’s Book Club choice, was a modern reworking of some of the themes of Emily Bronte’s masterpiece Wuthering Heights. Practical Magic was made into a Warner Brothers film starring Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman. Her novel, At Risk, which concerns a family dealing with AIDS, can be found on the reading lists of many universities, colleges and secondary schools. Hoffman’s advance from Local Girls, a collection of inter-related fictions about love and loss on Long Island, was donated to help create the Hoffman Breast Center at Mt. Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, MA. Hoffman has written a number of novels for young adults, including Aquamarine, Green Angel, and Green Witch. In 2007 Little Brown published the teen novel Incantation, a story about hidden Jews during the Spanish Inquisition, which Publishers Weekly chose as one of the best books of the year.
Hoffman’s work has been published in more than twenty translations and more than one hundred foreign editions. Her novels have received mention as notable books of the year by The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, The Los Angeles Times, Library Journal, and People Magazine. She has also worked as a screenwriter and is the author of the original screenplay “Independence Day,” a film starring Kathleen Quinlan and Diane Wiest. Her teen novel Aquamarine was made into a film starring Emma Roberts. Her short fiction and non-fiction have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe Magazine, Kenyon Review, The Los Angeles Times, Architectural Digest, Harvard Review, Ploughshares and other magazines.
Described as ‘auto-fiction’, (fictionalised autobiography) this novel is set in the 1990s. We follow an unnamed narrator from her regional Victorian town, known as Tidy Town, where she has failed her degree, to inner-city Melbourne, where she plans to become an artist.
Her move between share houses, squats, friends’ couches and park benches illustrate her financial precariousness. Time is elastic and endless, with days rolling into each other. The narrator and her eclectic group of acquaintances – yoga instructors, sculptors, performance artists, musicians – attend parties and exhibitions, take drugs, get drunk, scrawl graffiti and fail to pay rent. The narrator learns to play the saxophone and busks to supplement her dole payments.
Where I Sleptis as much a portrait of a vanished Melbourne as it is of the narrator’s artistic journey. Gentrification has not yet altered the inner-city landscape, social media is not yet invented and there is a heroin epidemic. The artistic bohemian life is not glamorised in any way. The poetic writing clearly evokes the squalor of the share houses and squats, from bathroom drains plugged with hair, ants crawling across piles of dirty dishes, and junkies stealing from housemates.
The narrator’s quest for an artistic life means she is often on the margins, socially and financially, but she is determined to never return to Tidy Town.
Reviewed by Melinda Woledge
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Libby Angel is an Australian poet and novelist. She won the 2018 Barbara Jefferis Award for her debut novel, The Trapeze Act.
Where I Slept, by award-winning poet and author Libby Angel, is a sharp and sobering piece of autofiction that follows a struggling, unnamed poet/artist living on the margins in 1990s Melbourne. The narrator is commanding in her bluntness, kindness and quirkiness. Ultimately, however, Where I Slept is a bittersweet read. When, on the last page, the narrator writes ‘Happy’ on a wall, you may wonder instead if it should read ‘Fantasy’. Where I Slept is worth reading to meet the narrator and to gain an insight into a very real part of life.
Her poetry has appeared in a number of Australian journals. Where I Slept, a work of autofiction, is her second novel.
The approach this book takes to characterisation and narration is unique. This is essentially an attempt to draw Paul Cezanne’s wife, Hortense, out of the background – from being a passive sitter to active protagonist. In a novel twist, though, Hortense narrates this story while speaking to the writer (and note that this is not the author). Additionally, the writer needs to explain her past history to her daughter and so writes another story in which she invents an art-related name for herself.
The writer is in a Paris hotel room. The long-dead Hortense is beside her, telling her about her life. Writer and subject shadow each other through Paris, but this is curtailed as the COVID-19 lockdowns are enforced. The writer’s daughter, Rebecca, back in Australia, arranges return flights for her mother. Meanwhile, the writer is ill with the virus.
The writer has secrets in her past that she tries to reveal. She takes the narration in this part and develops her own character as the story unfolds.
O’Keeffe references Poetics of Space, a book relating to how space affects thinking. This is evoked in the hotel room in lockdown, the box holding the writer’s secret, but most importantly, from the red chair in which Hortense sits. Above all The Sitter is an overarching metanarrative explaining the process by which a writer inhabits a character and vice versa.
Reviewed by Bob Moore
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Angela O’Keeffe grew up with nine siblings on a farm in the Lockyer Valley, Queensland. She completed a Master of Arts in Writing at UTS, and her first novel, Night Blue, was shortlisted for the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing and the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. She was awarded the 2023 Varuna Eleanor Dark Fellowship.
UQP is pleased to announce that the 2023 recipient of the UQP Quentin Bryce Award is Angela O’Keeffe’s superb, thoughtful novel The Sitter, which will be published in August 2023. The Sitter was recently described as ‘spellbinding … an elegant mosaic that interrogates power, female relationships, and the purpose of art.’
This award, which recognises The Honourable Dame Quentin Bryce, is for a book on UQP’s list each year that celebrates women’s lives and/or promotes gender equality. Angela O’Keeffe will receive $5000 in prize money.
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