This novel is an extraordinary achievement. The plot is simple enough: an unnamed Australian narrator is at Cambridge working on a doctoral thesis about his Vietnamese roots. His partner, Lauren, and daughter, Edith, have travelled with him and the narrative swings from the deep theoretical basis of his research work to the quotidian chores of childminding. The result is an outstanding blend of history, law, literary theory and philosophy that explores the meaning of ‘home’: the Vietnam the family left behind.
The narrator glows with intelligence, but choosing to have him narrate in a calm, self-effacing voice avoids the trap lesser writers might have fallen into: trumpeting that rhetoric into a shouty polemic. The narrator’s accessible language means that the reader isn’t left behind. (At times I felt as if I was back in a tutorial on literary theory, listening to the smartest person in the room discussing Jacques Derrida and post-structuralism in a way that we could all understand.)
There are many overlapping layers.
At the core of the novel is the narrator’s research into his grandfather. He’s a contrarian. Devoutly Catholic in a predominantly Buddhist country. On the wrong side of the war in the 70s. Choosing not to flee the country afterwards, knowing he would be held as a political prisoner. Then remaining silent after his release to join his family, who are now living in France. The grandson narrator wonders whether this defiance relates to the sense of loss of the grandfather’s ‘home’.
There are many overlapping layers. There’s the interplay between different colonised populations and their respective colonisers. Despite the greatest Vietnamese diaspora being in the USA, when the family flee the country, they move to France. Their coloniser and root cause of the conflict that destroyed their ‘home’. The narrator’s father moved to Australia, and now the narrator is studying at the seat of learning tied to our coloniser. Mirroring the arrival of Vietnamese boat people, the narrator is helping ‘S’, a refugee stranded on Manus Island.
There are also seemingly random moments. Nothing is random, however. Everything has been expertly, subtly planned. When the narrator and Lauren meet, their first conversations are about Milton. There’s no mention of Paradise Lost. Dao lets the reader join the dots. Milton’s work could be a two-word explanation of this book. The narrator’s relationship with Lauren and Edith is not unlike his grandfather’s and grandmother’s: both men are ‘imprisoned’ – the narrator by his studies and the grandfather quite literally. The women are left to survive on their own in unfamiliar surroundings.
Lauren does have agency, however, and plays an important role in developing the narrator’s thesis. She argues that concentrating his research solely on his grandfather is patriarchal as it erases the grandmother’s story and her struggle to survive with seven children. Anam does not, nor cannot, exist. It is home and yet not-home: a place defined by loss; an imagined conflation of a particular time-space coordinate, together with strategic remembering and selective forgetting. Not quite nostalgia and certainly not utopia.
Anam is necessarily a slow read – there are weighty issues to absorb. It will benefit from rereading. Any university unit on any aspect of literary theory without this text in its reading list is doing its students a disservice. Dao’s prodigious talent is on display and shining so much brighter for being rendered so humbly.
Candidly honest, agonisingly sad at times, yet still bringing the life of a Greek Island alive and dancing off its pages, Aphrodite’s Breath is unusual in more than one way.
Susan Johnson, novelist and journalist, aged 62, accepts a redundancy from a Brisbane newspaper and invites Barbara, her 85-year-old mother, to spend a year with her on the island of Kythera, so they were no teenage backpackers.
This was no sudden whim by Susan as she had made several trips there and was looking forward to editing her latest novel and writing this memoir while living on the island with her mother. Anyone organising to leave their life in Australia for a year, and renting a house on Kythera, could expect hiccups in arrangements, but throw in the mother-daughter relationship, and sparks were soon flying. Several times Susan is reduced to lonely tears because she found her mother did not love Kythera as she did.
Guilt and shame followed an outburst against her mother, who found the house they had rented ‘not fit to live in, and freezing’, but Susan eventually found a different house for them which suited her mother better. It was a glorious Greek spring, Barbara even danced at various village festivals, and she returned to Brisbane with her son and his wife who came to visit. This had not been the idyllic island sojourn that Susan had planned, and even when isolated by COVID-19, first in London, and again on the island, her absent mother remained ‘the watchmaker who set my heart ticking’.
In dark times ahead for Susan, finally back in Australia, she found an account Barbara had written about her time on the island, claiming it was ‘a year well spent’. That is included as an epilogue to Susan’s memoir about mother-daughter relationships, but mostly, she claims, about love.
Reviewed by Jennifer Somerville
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
I was born in Brisbane but moved to Sydney at the age of three months, which is where I spent my childhood. My late father, John, was a Queenslander and my mother, Barbara, was from Sydney. I grew up around Sydney’s North Shore (St.Ives) and moved to Queensland with my family (to a pineapple farm) where I finished my last years of high school. I attended Nambour High (the same year as the Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, but I don’t remember him, and I am sure he does not remember me). My last two years were spent at Clayfield College.
I’ve written 10 books: eight novels; a memoir, A Better Woman; and a non-fiction book, an essay, ‘On Beauty’, published by Melbourne University Press. Several of my books have been published in the UK, the US, and in European translation (French, Polish) as well as in Australia.
It’s London 1847, and Tom Rutherford is on shore leave from his life on the sea. One day as he is enjoying his second passion, painting, he meets Catherine Ogilvie. They strike up a friendship and both are drawn to each other through their love of painting.
Tom is swept into Catherine’s life of privilege. He becomes her tutor and, in turn, Catherine introduces him to art galleries and society. Tom is torn between the life he’s had since a young boy, and his love for Catherine. Through the book their story unfolds into beautiful love, but they face so many societal obstacles.
There is much to love in this debut novel. Tom is a wonderful character. His descriptions of his life on the sea are vivid and captivating. Discussion on art and its meaning are equally interesting, and even their two contrasting artistic styles add much to the novel.
The first half of Where Light Meets Wateris very descriptive, and although the story is interesting, the language doesn’t flow well and you really have to concentrate and stick with it. But you are rewarded with a delightful love story if you do. The second half moves more quickly.
Overall, I enjoyed the character development, the insights into art, and life as a sailor. The emotional element of this novel is strong enough to really hook you in and be invested in Tom and Catherine and art and life. Art lovers will enjoy this novel.
Melbourne/Naarm is my beloved home, but I was born and raised in Aotearoa New Zealand, and though my accent has slipped somewhat I am undeniably a Kiwi at heart. I have also lived in Berlin, where for a time my German became quite proficient (now sadly rusty).
My poetry and short fiction has been published in literary journals including Meanjin, Going Down Swinging, Etchings, Wet Ink, Pendulum and Poetry NZ, and I’ve written for global publishers including BBC Travel and Lonely Planet.
In recent years I have been fortunate to receive a Varuna Fellowship for Writers and a Glenfern Fellowship to assist my writing. In 2019 I was shortlisted for the Michael Gifkins Prize for an Unpublished Novel.
I am represented by Melanie Ostell Literary.
As a freelance editor and writer I work with both print- and web-based clients, ranging from government and not-for-profits to trade publishers, and am most comfortable with travel, arts, literary and social justice content. I worked in-house as a book editor and then a senior editor before jumping ship to go solo.
When a child disappears from her bassinet while her mother is in the shower, Detective Sergeant Kate Miles is assigned to the case. Miles is adamant that she is fit and able to return to duty after a three-month break for maternity leave. Her station chief, while not thoroughly convinced, assigns her to the case. But seemingly waits for her to crack from the pressure. Pressure not just from the case itself.
Her partner assumed her role while she was on leave, and is eager to take her position full time. He is argumentative and difficult to work with, disagreeing with Miles on numerous points. Her father, a former chief inspector himself, is embroiled in a corruption scandal which threatens to take Miles down with him. The media have already got wind of the story and are circling like sharks. Her husband is an architect struggling with both finding work and caring for their newborn child.
This is a follow-up to McKenzie’s The Torrent featuring DS Miles. It’s not essential to have read the first book. But after having read Taken you might find yourself wanting to track it down.
This is not your standard crime novel. Attention is given to Miles’ family and the strain her work is putting on it. Her husband desperately needs her help with the baby, but what is Miles to do when working on a missing child case where every minute is crucial and could be the difference between life and death?
Thoroughly enjoyable and well written, with twists and misdirection, Taken also explores the theme of toxic male behaviour and domestic violence.
Dinuka McKenzie is an Australian writer. Her debut crime fiction manuscript The Torrent won the 2020 Banjo Prize for fiction and was published by HarperCollins Australia in February 2022. Her then unpublished manuscript Taken was longlisted for the 2020 Richell Prize and was published in 2023.
When not writing, Dinuka works in the environmental sector and volunteers as part of the team behind the Writers’ Unleashed Festival. She lives in Southern Sydney on Dharawal Country with her husband, two kids and their pet chicken.
HAPPYHEAD • Josh Silver When Seb goes on a radical retreat designed to solve the national crisis of teenage unhappiness, he is determined to change. But as he befriends engimatic Finn, Seb starts to question the challenges they must undergo. The deeper into the programme the boys get, the more disturbing the assessments become.
VERDICT: ‘HappyHead is truly a page-turner. I’ve never fallen deeply into a novel so fast, especially coming to its climax … ’ Reviewed by Lilyana, Year 10, St Ursula’s College, Kingsgrove, NSW
• Age Guide 12+
ONE MORE MOUNTAIN: A PARVANA STORY • Deborah Ellis
This novel is set in contemporary Afghanistan. It features Parvana and Shauzia as they continue their mission to protect women and girls from their dire reality under the rules re-imposed by the Taliban.
VERDICT: ‘Breathtaking. Passionate. Compelling. Truthful. Words that most accurately and intricately depict the contents of One More Mountain …’ Reviewed by Sofia, Year 11, St Ursula’s College, Kingsgrove, NSW
• Age Guide 11+
SILVER IN THE BONE: BOOK 1 • Alexandra Bracken Tamsin Lark is a Hollower. Breaking into the ancient crypts of dark sorceresses in search of the treasures inside. Now, rumours are swirling about a powerful ring from Arthurian legend. A ring that could free her brother, Cabell from a curse. As word spreads, greedy Hollowers start circling, and Tamsin is forced into an alliance with her rival Emrys. Together, they expose a deadly secret.
VERDICT: ‘The novel was so well written that I fell in love with the characters, and I became empathetic to their situation …’ Reviewed by Olivia, Year 9, St Ursula’s College, Kingsgrove, NSW
• Age Guide 12+
I was born in Brisbane but moved to Sydney at the age of three months, which is where I spent my childhood. My late father, John, was a Queenslander and my mother, Barbara, was from Sydney. I grew up around Sydney’s North Shore (St.Ives) and moved to Queensland with my family (to a pineapple farm) where I finished my last years of high school. I attended Nambour High (the same year as the Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, but I don’t remember him, and I am sure he does not remember me). My last two years were spent at Clayfield College.
Melbourne/Naarm is my beloved home, but I was born and raised in Aotearoa New Zealand, and though my accent has slipped somewhat I am undeniably a Kiwi at heart. I have also lived in Berlin, where for a time my German became quite proficient (now sadly rusty).
Dinuka McKenzie is an Australian writer. Her debut crime fiction manuscript The Torrent won the 2020 Banjo Prize for fiction and was published by HarperCollins Australia in February 2022. Her then unpublished manuscript Taken was longlisted for the 2020 Richell Prize and was published in 2023.
