Bringing new sounds to the desert
17 January 2019
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A group of six friends converge on the fabled island of Jamaica to compete in a marathon relay swim across treacherous water. Most have known each other since school, scions of wealth, breeding and privilege and members of the upper echelon of supposedly classless Sydney.
The odd man out is new money Jeremy Hutchison (Hut), who's tolerated by the group because of the fortune he's made, but never really accepted.
It is a group of people on the edge of crisis, none more so than Hut, who is guarding a terrible truth. As the sleazy charms of Jamaica insinuate themselves onto the group, things fall apart in predictable and surprising ways, and the secrets of the past must be addressed.
Malcolm Knox is the author of two previous novels, Summerland and A Private Man. Formerly literary editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, Malcolm broke the Norma Khouri hoax, for which he was awarded a Walkley Award.
He is also the author of Secrets of the Jury Room.
He lives in Sydney.
No recent Australian novelist has probed the nation's masculinity more acridly, yet sympathetically, than Malcolm Knox. Nor has any contemporary writer more subtly dissected the role of sport in male self-definition and self-deception.
Jamaica: A novel (Allen & Unwin), 'dedicated to the facts that got out of the way of a good story', explores the desires and expectations of rich men whose excesses find more flagrant and damaging expression when they rampage abroad. Knox is perhaps the foremost analyst of the nihilism that is disturbingly familiar in Australian life.
In wartime Berlin, where foreign accents are a source of suspicion and where busybodies report the names of neighbours’ dinner guests to the Gestapo, embattled zookeeper Vera forms an unlikely bond with a forced labourer brought in to replace the staff members drafted into the war effort.
The Zookeeper's War is a powerful novel of a marriage, and of a city collapsing. It confronts not only the brutality of war but the possibility of heroism - and delivers an ending that is both shocking and deeply moving.
Steven Conte was born in 1966 and raised in Guyra in rural New South Wales. After six years of boarding school he lived and worked in Europe, and his first published short stories drew on his experiences as a traveller.
He has lived in Sydney and Canberra and most recently in Melbourne.
Bank teller, waiter, barman, cleaner, life model, public servant, taxi driver, receptionist, university tutor, editor and book reviewer are some of the jobs with which he has supported his writing.
Judges noted Stephen Conte's The Zookeeper's War as a striking first novel that is imbued with the melancholy of a collapsing world—Nazi Germany in the last years of the Second World War. Vera, married to the keeper of the Berlin Zoo, struggles each day to survive Allied air raids and betrayal by neighbours.
All around are frightened people, some tenacious, some treacherous. While Conte's research is formidable, it is the breadth of his historical imagination that enriches this novel.
As characters negotiate intricate and destructive moral choices, the narrative drive is sustained to the satisfyingly uncertain ending.
In the Flinders Ranges, a Kuyani man presents a cake of ochre to a European doctor, in earnest proof that the threatened ochre mine is ‘as important as the bible is to Christians’. As netted bags are exchanged for cloth south of Port Darwin, a surveyor’s linguistic hobby draws him close to Djerimanga people, near enough to become the unwitting candidate for a blood debt.
Ochre and Rust takes nine Aboriginal and colonial artefacts from their museum shelves, and positions them at the centre of these gripping, poignant tales set in the heart of Australia's frontier zone.
Philip Jones is a curator and historian, based at the South Australian Museum.
He has published widely on the history of anthropology and collecting, and on the ethnography and history of the Aboriginal people of the eastern Lake Eyre region. He has also made detailed surveys of European collections of Aboriginal material, and has curated several exhibitions which have travelled to Europe, North America and Asia, including Australia: The Land, The People (2005–2006) and Boomerang (1996–2002) and the accompanying book Boomerang: Behind an Australian Icon.
The author sets himself the difficult task of extrapolating the implications of cultural contact between European and Aboriginal people through the examination of objects, most now in Australian museums. These disparate objects include a cake of red ochre, Aboriginal shields and Daisy Bates’ travelling suit.
The book is written with elegance, simplicity and outstanding clarity. The insights drawn are through a true historian’s eye and the work illuminates larger debates about encounters between the first Australians and the European settlers.
Zarah Ghahramani was born in Tehran in 1981, two years after Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran to establish the Islamic Republic. Her life changed suddenly in 2001 when, after having taken part in student demonstrations, she was arrested and charged with ‘inciting crimes against the people of the Islamic Republic of Iran’.
My Life As a Traitor is a beautifully written memoir of Zarah’s life in Iran, revealing the human face behind the turmoil of the modern Middle East. Her descriptions of Persian culture, contemporary Iranian society, and radical Islamist politics are eye-opening, as is her account of the growing voice of dissent in Iran. But it is the story of Zarah’s struggle to survive the nightmare world of Iran’s oppressive regime that makes My Life As a Traitor an unforgettable testimony to the strength of the human spirit.
Zarah Ghahramani was born in Tehran in 1981, two years after Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran to establish the Islamic Republic.
Her life changed suddenly in 2001 when, after having taken part in student demonstrations, she was arrested (literally snatched off the street by secret police) and charged with ‘inciting crimes against the people of the Islamic Republic of Iran’. While imprisoned in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison she faced brutal interrogation: her head was shaved and she was beaten.
After being released, she was forbidden to return to university and soon realised that she had no future in her native land. Robert Hillman, an Australian writer, met and befriended Zarah in Iran in 2003 and helped her to escape to Australia, where she now has permanent residency.
Robert Hillman’s first novel, A Life of Days, appeared in 1988. Since then, he has had four more novels published, and a number of works of non-fiction, including a memoir, The Boy in the Green Suit, which won the Australian National Biography Award.
His 2008 biography of an Afghani refugee, The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif, became a set text for VCE English students in 2010.
In 2008, Hillman co-authored, with Zarah Ghahramani, My Life as a Traitor, a young Iranian woman's account of the realities behind the turmoil of the modern Middle East.
His biography of blind indigenous singer, Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu was published in 2013.
This is the author’s account of her life in post-revolutionary Iran where she grew up. She was arrested when she was 20 for taking part in student demonstrations and then was imprisoned. It is a moving and beautifully written book, full of small details of life that widens out into a shocking story of political oppression.
The book also contains meditations on Persian culture and accounts of deep and warm family relationships that make it much more than simply a grim account of imprisonment and torture.
A History of Queensland is the first single volume analysis of Queensland’s past, stretching from the time of earliest human habitation up to the present. It encompasses pre-contact Aboriginal history, the years of convictism, free settlement and subsequent urban and rural growth.
It reveals Queensland as a sprawling, harsh, diverse and conflictual place, where the struggles of race, ethnicity, class, generation and gender have been particularly pronounced, and political and environmental encounters have remained intense. It is a colourful, surprising and at times disturbing saga, a perplexing and diverting mixture of ferocity, endurance and optimism.
Raymond Evans is an Adjunct Professor with the Centre for Public Culture and Ideas, School of Humanities at Griffith University, and Honorary Reader with the Australian Studies Centre and the School of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics at the University of Queensland.
Evans has been involved in writing Australian content for Cambridge University Press’ History books on Australian Development to 1901, Popular Culture, World War One and Rights and Freedoms.
This is an ambitious but economical history of Queensland, from the ancient past to 2005. It is excellent piece of work – history delivered with a broad and confident brush, and beautifully written. The early colonial history is extraordinarily well-documented and will usefully introduce this era to a wider audience.
The author is persuasive that some of the early colonial brutality in Queensland contributed to the national psyche. The rather prosaic title underplays the liveliness of this outstanding history.
An almanac combining a comprehensive survey of modern culture with an annotated index of who-was-who and what-was-what, Cultural Amnesia is Clive's unique take on the places and the faces that shaped the 20th-century. From Charles de Gaulle to Thomas Mann, from Hitler to Wittgenstein, from Argentina to Australia, this varied and unfailingly absorbing book is both story and history, both public memoir and personal record – and provides an essential field-guide to the vast movements of taste, intellect, politics and delusion that helped to prepare the times we live in now.
Clive James is the author of more than 20 books. As well as essays, he has published collections of literary and television criticism, travel writing, verse and novels, plus three volumes of autobiography.
In 1992 he was made a Member of the Order of Australia and in 2003 he was awarded the Philip Hodgins memorial medal for literature.
This book presents Clive James’ accounts of the lives, thoughts and legacies of an astonishing, and idiosyncratic, cast of characters, including Sir Thomas Browne, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Margaret Thatcher and Beatrix Potter. It is a glorious collision of style and substance. There is no attempt at objectivity; this is a chronicle of the author’s almost visceral connection with his own adventures in learning. This leads to great clarity of insight in many cases. Many chapters are crafted with extraordinary precision and invention, which are two of the hallmarks of literature.
Napoleon Bonaparte's rise to power was neither inevitable nor smooth; it was full of mistakes, wrong turns and pitfalls. During his formative years his identity was constantly shifting, his character ambiguous and his intentions often ill-defined. He was, however, highly ambitious, and it was this ruthless drive that advanced his career.
This book examines the extraordinary evolution of Napoleon's character and the means by which at the age of thirty he became head of the most powerful country in Europe and skilfully fashioned the image of himself that laid the foundation of the legend that endures to this day.
Philip Dwyer studied in Perth, Berlin and Paris, where he was a student of France's pre-eminent Napoleonic scholar, Jean Tulard. He has published widely on the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras, and is the editor of Napoleon and Europe, the author of Talleyrand, and has co-edited Napoleon and His Empire: Europe, 1804-1814.
He is currently a Senior Lecturer in Modern European History and is Director of the Centre for the History of Violence at the University of Newcastle, Australia.
This is a wonderfully engaging history of Napoleon’s first 30 years. It gives fascinating accounts of the murky world of Corsican politics, and also of Napoleon’s complex relationship with his wife Josephine.
The modern resonances of this book are remarkable. The challenges facing Napoleon in the Middle East echo through to today. As well, given Dwyer’s view, Napoleon may well have been the first of the modern politicians to use the media consciously to create an heroic image.
The book is meticulously researched, well written and is a work of significant merit.
Little is known of the wife of England's greatest playwright. In play after play Shakespeare presents the finding of a worthy wife as a triumphant denouement, yet scholars persist in believing that his own wife was resented and even hated by him.
Here Germaine Greer strives to re-embed the story of their marriage in its social context and presents new hypotheses about the life of the farmer's daughter who married our greatest poet. This is a daring, insightful book that asks new questions, opens new fields of investigation and research, and rights the wrongs done to Ann Shakespeare.
Germaine Greer gained her PhD from the University of Cambridge in 1967 with a thesis on Shakespeare's early comedies and has taught Shakespeare at universities in Australia, Britain and the US.
In 1986 she was invited to contribute the volume on Shakespeare to the prestigious Past Masters series.
In 1989 she set up her own publishing imprint, Stump Cross Books, and went on to publish scholarly editions of Katherine Philips, Anne Wharton and Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea.
She lives on three acres in north-west Essex, with two dogs, thirteen geese and a fluctuating number of doves.
This book sets out to rehabilitate Ann Hathaway’s history, long dismissed as a minor detail in Shakespeare’s life.
As an examination of life in Stratford in the 16th century it is superb, the detail extraordinary and the style engrossing. It is a work of considerable scholarship -- the amount of detail the author has recovered from tomb stones and forgotten records is impressive – as well as displaying great mastery of prose. Shakespeare’s plays are brilliantly used to shed light on his domestic relationships. The argument is lively and engaging.
Seen as the last 'hot' frontline of the Cold War, the ten-year struggle in the rice paddies and jungles of South Vietnam unleashed devastating firepower on the Vietnamese nation and visited terrible harm on civilians and soldiers. Yet the Australian forces applied tactics that were very different from those of the Americans. Guided by their commanders' experience of jungle combat, Australian troops operated with stealth, deception and restraint in pursuing a 'better war'.
Drawing on hundreds of accounts by soldiers, politicians, aid workers, entertainers and Vietnamese citizens, Paul Ham reconstructs the full history of our longest military campaign.
Paul Ham is the author of the highly acclaimed Kokoda (2004), Hiroshima Nagasaki (2011) Sandakan (2012), 1914 (2014) and Passchendaele (2016). A former Sunday Times correspondent, he holds a Master’s degree in Economic History from the London School of Economics and lives in Paris and Sydney with his family.
Vietnam won the New South Wales Premier’s Prize for Australian History. Kokoda was shortlisted for the Walkley Award for Non-Fiction and the New South Wales Premier’s Prize for Non-Fiction.
This history of Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam war is an extraordinary piece of work. It uncovers the often disturbing story of the political context of Australia’s participation in Vietnam.
The book is both an articulate and objective account of the Australian experience, but has a power that is much more than the sum of its parts.
The book presents a meticulous history and also resonates on an emotional level through its depth and searing honesty
17 January 2019
Maya de Jong, an eighteen-year-old country girl from the West, comes to live in Melbourne and starts an affair with her boss, the enigmatic Maynard Flynn, whose wife is dying of cancer.
When Maya's parents, Toni and Jacob, arrive to stay with her, they are told by her housemate that Maya has gone away and no one knows where she is. As Toni and Jacob wait and search for Maya in Melbourne, everything in their lives is brought into question.
They recall the yearning and dreams, the betrayals and choices of their pasts - choices with unexpected and irrevocable consequences. With Maya's disappearance, the lives of all those close to her come into focus, to reveal the complexity of the ties that bind us to one another, to parents, children, siblings, friends and lovers.
Pacy and enthralling, The Good Parents is at once a vision of contemporary Australia and a story as old as fairy tales: that of a runaway girl.
Joan London is the author of two prize-winning collections of stories, Sister Ships, which won the Age Book of the Year in 1986, and Letter to Constantine, which won the Steele Rudd Award in 1994 and the West Australian Premier’s Award for Fiction. These stories have been published in one volume as The New Dark Age.
Her first novel, Gilgamesh, was published in 2001, won the Age Book of the Year for Fiction and was long listed for the Orange Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
Her second novel, The Good Parents, was published in 2008 and won the Christina Stead Prize for fiction in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards.
Joan London’s books have all been published internationally to critical acclaim.
From the winner of the Man Booker Prize comes the bestselling, universally lauded novel of desire and its denial from acclaimed writer Richard Flanagan.
It is 1839. A young Aboriginal girl, Mathinna, is running through the long wet grass of an island at the end of the world to get help for her dying father, an Aboriginal chieftain. Twenty years later, on an island at the centre of the world, the most famous novelist of the day, Charles Dickens, realises he is about to abandon his wife, risk his name and forever after be altered because of his inability any longer to control his intense passion.
Connecting the two events are the most celebrated explorer of the age, Sir John Franklin – then governor of Van Diemen's Land – and his wife, Lady Jane, who adopt Mathinna, seen as one of the last of a dying race, as an experiment. Lady Jane believes the distance between savagery and civilisation is the learned capacity to control wanting. The experiment fails, Sir John disappears into the blue ice of the Arctic seeking the Northwest Passage, and a decade later Lady Jane enlists Dickens's aid to put an end to the scandalous suggestions that Sir John's expedition ended in cannibalism.
Dickens becomes ever more entranced in the story of men entombed in ice, recognising in its terrible image his own frozen inner life. He produces and stars in a play inspired by Franklin's fate to give story to his central belief that discipline and will can conquer desire. And yet the play will bring him to the point where he is no longer able to control his own passion and the consequences it brings.
Inspired by historical events, Wanting is a novel about art, love, and the way in which life is finally determined never by reason, but only ever by wanting.
Richard Flanagan was born in Longford, Tasmania, in 1961. His six novels are published in forty-two countries and have received numerous honours, including the 2014 Man Booker Prize for The Narrow Road to the Deep North.
Murray Bail’s The Pages is a beguiling meditation on friendship and love, on men and women, on landscape and the difficulties of thought itself, by one of Australia’s greatest novelists, the author of the much-loved Eucalyptus.
Murray Bail was born in Adelaide in 1941. He has won numerous awards, including the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award for Eucalyptus. His novel, The Pages, was published in 2008 to great acclaim.
The Boat takes us from a tourist in Tehran to a teenage hit man in Colombia; from an aging New York artist to a boy coming of age in a small Victorian fishing town; from the city of Hiroshima just before the bomb is dropped to the haunting waste of the South China Sea in the wake of another war. Each story uncovers a raw human truth. Each story is as absorbing and fully realised as a novel. Together, they make up a collection of astonishing diversity and achievement.
Nam Le’s first book, The Boat, received the Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Award, the Melbourne Prize (Best Writing Award) the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award among other honours. It was selected as a New York Times Notable Book and Editor’s Choice, the best debut of 2008 by the Australian Book Review and New York Magazine, and a book of the year by The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, The Herald Sun, The Monthly, and numerous sources around the world.
The Boat has been translated into thirteen languages and its stories widely anthologised.
Nam Le's collection of fiction, The Boat, which comprises short and long stories, artfully arrayed, is one of the most impressive debuts of recent years.
The range of subjects and settings astonishes, as does the assurance and control with which the author immerses us in the stories that he makes from them.
While the span of the fiction is cosmopolitan, each story is intensely attuned to the local circumstances that deform and enable the lives of these varied characters, animated as they are by love and despair.
As shown especially in the final and title story, Nam Le combines almost reckless artistic boldness with highly disciplined craft.
Renowned book conservator Hannah Heath makes her way to Bosnia to work on restoring a Jewish prayer book recovered from the smouldering ruins of war-torn Sarajevo – to discover its secrets and piece together the story of its miraculous survival. But the trip will also set in motion a series of events that threaten to rock Hannah’s orderly life, including her encounter with Ozren Karamen, the young librarian who risked his life to save the book.
As meticulously researched as all of Brooks’s previous work, ‘People of the Book’ is a gripping and moving novel about war, art, love and survival.
Geraldine Brooks is the author of three novels, the Pulitzer Prize-winning March and the international bestsellers People of the Book and Year of Wonders. She has also written the acclaimed non fiction works Nine Parts of Desire and Foreign Correspondence.
Born and raised in Australia, she lives on Martha’s Vineyard with her husband, Tony Horwitz, and their two sons.
Physical and mental, sexual and literary, constructive and destructive. Coming of age in a small town peopled with big characters, fourteen-year-old Robbie Burns finds his new teacher Miss Peach the most unforgettable of all – his memories of her will haunt him for the rest of his life.
Everything I Knew challenges our determination to believe in the innocence of childhood and adolescence, and yet again shows Peter Goldsworthy to be a master of shifting tone. There is no novel quite like it in Australian literature.
Peter Goldsworthy studied medicine at the University of Adelaide and worked for several years in alcohol and drug rehabilitation. Since then he has divided his time between general practice and writing.
He has won major literary awards, across many genres: poetry, short story, novels, theatre, and opera libretti. Goldsworthy’s novels have sold over 400,000 copies in Australia, and have been translated into many languages.
His first novel, Maestro, was voted by members of the Australian Society of Authors as one of the Top 40 Australian books of all time. Five of his novels have been adapted for stage and screen.
A child is imprisoned in a house by her reclusive religious parents. Hester has never seen the outside world; her companions are Cat, Spoon, Door, Handle, Broom, and they all speak to her. Her imagination is informed by one book, an illustrated child's bible, and its imagery forms the sole basis for her capacity to make poetic connection.
One day Hester takes a brave Alice in Wonderland trip into the forbidden outside (at the behest of Handle - 'turn me turn me'), and this overwhelming encounter with light and sky and sunshine is a marvel to her. From this moment on, Hester learns the concept of the secret, and not telling, and the world becomes something that fills her with feeling as if she is a vessel, empty and bottomless for need of it.
Sofie Laguna’s second novel for adults, The Eye of the Sheep—shortlisted for the Stella Prize—won the 2015 Miles Franklin Literary Award. Her first novel for adults, One Foot Wrong, was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award.
Sofie’s many books for young people have been published in the US, the UK and in translation throughout Europe and Asia. She has been shortlisted for the Queensland Premier’s Award, and her books have been named Honour Books and Notable Books by the Children’s Book Council of Australia.
Sofie lives in Melbourne with her husband, illustrator Marc McBride, and their two young sons.
A superb book about Don Watson's journeys around America. Featured as one of Newsweek’s 50 ‘What to Read Now and Why’ titles.
Only in America – the most powerful democracy on earth, home to the best and worst of everything – are the most extreme contradictions possible. In a series of journeys acclaimed author Don Watson set out to explore the nation that has influenced him more than any other.
Travelling by rail gave Watson a unique and seductive means of peering into the United States, a way to experience life with its citizens: long days with the American landscape and American towns and American history unfolding on the outside, while inside a tiny particle of the American people talked among themselves.
Watson's experiences are profoundly affecting: he witnesses the terrible aftermath of Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast; explores the savage history of the Deep South, the heartland of the Civil War; and journeys to the remarkable wilderness of Yellowstone National Park. Yet it is through the people he meets that Watson discovers the incomparable genius of America, its optimism, sophistication and riches – and also its darker side, its disavowal of failure and uncertainty.
Beautifully written, with gentle power and sly humour, American Journeys investigates the meaning of the United States: its confidence, its religion, its heroes, its violence, and its material obsessions. The things that make America great are also its greatest flaws.
Don Watson's Recollections of a Bleeding Heart: Paul Keating Prime Minister won the Age Book of the Year and Non-Fiction Prizes, the Brisbane Courier Mail Book of the Year, the National Biography Award and the Australian Literary Studies Association's Book of the Year.
His Quarterly Essay, Rabbit Syndrome: Australia and America won the Alfred Deakin Essay Prize. Death Sentence, his best-selling book about the decay of public language won the Australian Booksellers Association Book of the Year. Watson's Dictionary of Weasel Words was also a bestseller.
American Journeys won the Age Non-Fiction and Book of the Year Awards. It also won the inaugural Indie Award for Non-Fiction and the Walkley Award for Non-Fiction.
Almost half of the convicts who came to Australia came to Van Diemen’s Land. There they found a land of bounty and a penal society, a kangaroo economy and a new way of life.
In this book, James Boyce shows how the convicts were changed by the natural world they encountered. Escaping authority, they soon settled away from the towns, dressing in kangaroo skin and living off the land. Behind the official attempt to create a Little England was another story of adaptation, in which the poor, the exiled and the criminal made a new home in a strange land.
This is their story, the story of Van Diemen’s Land.
James Boyce is the author of Born Bad (2014), 1835 (2011) and Van Diemen's Land (2008).
Van Diemen’s Land, won the Tasmania Book Prize and the Colin Roderick Award and was shortlisted for the NSW, Victorian and Queensland premiers’ literary awards, as well as the Prime Minister’s award. Tim Flannery described it as “a brilliant book and a must-read for anyone interested in how land shapes people.”
1835, won the Age Book of the Year Award and was shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Literary Award, the Western Australian Premier's Book Award, the Adelaide Festival Award for Literature and the Victorian Premier's Literary Award. The Sunday Age described it as “A first-class piece of historical writing”. James Boyce wrote the Tasmania chapter for First Australians, the companion book to the acclaimed SBS TV series.
He has a PhD from the University of Tasmania, where he is an honorary research associate of the School of Geography and Environmental Studies.
Elizabeth Jolley was a fine writer. Her publishing career began in her fifties in Australia, but as Brian Dibble demonstrates her writing developed through the decades in England and Scotland, from her family of origin, in boarding schools and hospital wards, and into her independent adult life.
The array of wild characters in her fiction—misfits and those on the edge of society—can also be found in the remarkable life of Elizabeth Jolley.
This is a lyrical and readable biography, one that presents a world of family and pleasures, but always infused somewhere with an unexpended sadness.
Brian Dibble, who in 1972 founded what is now Communication and Cultural Studies at Curtin University, is Curtin’s Emeritus Professor of Comparative Literature. He has published articles on Elizabeth Jolley’s work and written/edited a dozen books, including his own poetry and prose and two edited volumes of William Hart-Smith’s poetry.