What Australian books are you reading?

I've discovered some new crime writers, Candice Fox and Katherine Kovacic. Fox's Crimson Lake and Redemption Point are set in Cairns, which makes a change from all those outback drought books, and Kovac's Painting in the Shadows is set in Melbourne, at a gallery very much like the NGV in St Kilda Road. I recommend all three.

The Returns by Philip Salom, shortlisted for the Miles Franklin. Set in Melbourne. Also, on the side, I'm re-reading Shane Maloney's Sucked In, a Murray Whelan story; very apposite at the moment, factional shenanigans never go out of style!

>1 pamelad: I just finished reading The Portrait of Molly Dean by Katherine Kovacic and loved it. Great storytelling and moving from the 1930's to 1999 was a really clever way to reveal the story.

You Must be Layla by Yassmin Abdel-Magied - YA novel with a muslim Australian protagonist.

I've just finished reading Cafe Scheherazade by Arnold Zable, which I very much enjoyed. I've written a review and posted two published reviews if you are interested.

I was given a bag of romance stories! Not my usual genre but I enjoyed the change - just finished Bridie's Choice by Karly Lane.

I just finished Sydney Noir from the Akashic Noir series, a brilliant collection of short Australian crime/noir short stories by Sydney based authors

Resurrection Bay by Emma Viskic is set partly in Melbourne, which is why I read it. Caleb Zelic, a detective, discovers his childhood friend Gary, a cop, tortured and murdered by a sadistic knife-wielding killer. Caleb, who has been deaf since a childhood bout of meningitis, works with a partner, Frannie, an alcoholic ex-cop. In their investigation of Gary's death they encounter corrupt police and multiple murders. Everyone connected to Gary, Caleb and Frannie is in danger, and Caleb barely escapes with his life.

I didn't much like the graphic descriptions of wounded bodies and torture but there are many positive reviews, and the book has won prizes, so many other people enjoyed it.

>1 pamelad: I have almost finished Painting in the Shadows and I am enjoying it. I have The Shifting Landscape waiting.

Consolation by Garry Disher

Paul Hirschfield is the only police constable in the fictional town of Tiverton, in South Australia somewhere between Adelaide and Broken Hill. The author was born in Burra, a little town just like Tiverton, so he knows the place and the people well. A big part of Hirsch's job is checking on isolated people in the bush: the old man looking after his wife who suffers from dementia; the single mother whose car has been repossessed; the caretakers of a big, understaffed sheep station. He's a kind man, making an effort to become part of the community.

Hirsch likes to know what's going on around Tiverton so he can prevent small crimes from escalating. He's investigating a snowdropper who is stealing old ladies' underwear from clotheslines and, with the cooperation of the old ladies, has set a trap. He's the one people come to when they're worried about a child's welfare, the one who investigates environmental complaints, who follows up suspicions of fraud. He's chasing a group of Irish scammers who are gypping old people for roof repairs.

I really enjoyed this book. Disher is my favourite Australian crime writer, and as soon as I saw he had a new book out, I bought it. That was yesterday, and I finished it the same day.

I just finished All the Green Year by Don Charlwood and rather enjoyed it, having never read it as an adolescent. I wrote a brief review, since there were surprisingly none on Libarything, despite the number of copies held in member's collections, and the vintage of the book...

I have just started People of the River by Grace Karskens.
Very early chapters but most enjoyable. I am a fan of her works.

I am also reading Trust by Chris Hammer, the third book in the Martin Scarsden crime story.

>9 mrspenny: Glad you liked Painting in the Shadows. I thought Scrublands was all over the place, so didn't keep going with the series. Is Chris Hammer improving with each book?

Will look out for Grace Karskens.

>11 Bushwhacked: I read this last year and enjoyed it. Also read two others by Don Charlwood: Journeys into Night about being a fighter pilot in Bomber Command; The Long Farewell about people migrating to Australia in the 1800s, particularly the sea voyage.

>2 dajashby: Enjoyed The Returns. Thanks for the recommendation. Planning to read >3 emgcat: The Portrait of Molly Dean.

Just read about Untapped: the Australian Literary Heritage Project, untapped.org.au, which is digitising out-of-print Australian books and making them available to borrow and to buy. The authors are paid, and out of work arts workers are employed for proof reading.

I'm planning to start with Frank Hardy's The Unlucky Australians.

The website also mentions The Ligature Collection, another source of previously out-of-print books that will be made available for borrowing. https://www.ligatu.re/

The Wife and the Widow by Christian White is a very readable crime novel set on an island in Bass Strait, which is busy with tourists in summer, deserted by all but the locals in the off-season. The widow has come to the island to find out what happened to her husband. The significance of the wife is revealed gradually. Their stories are told in alternating chapters.

There's not much of a sense of place, which is disappointing in an Australian book. The island is imaginary.

I am reading The Schoolgirl Strangler by Katherine Kovacic.
It is nonfiction and based several murders and a serial killer in Melbourne in 1930s.
I have read the author's previous works of fiction and nonfiction and enjoy her writing style particularly her nonfiction.
Thanks to Pam for introducing Kovacic's works as she was previously an unknown author to me.
I am reading it side by side with Stalking Claremont by Bret Christian. It is the story of the Claremont serial killer who was convicted and sentenced recently.
It highlights how the advances in detection and evidence are assisted by scientific methods as compared earlier investigative practice.

Just finished The Land Girls by Victoria Purman, a great author. The characters are so real they feel like friends. No wonder they made a movie out of this book!

Abbey's/ Galaxy in Sydney has 20% off for Aussie authors for Australia Day.

I'm reading Black and Blue: A Memoir of Racism and Resilience by Veronica Gorrie.

I recently read and enjoyed Garry Disher's latest, The Way It is Now.

I got hit by a book bullet and borrowed A Brief History of Montmaray but I don't know if I'll get around to it in time. The author is Australian though the setting is not.

>14 pamelad: I am so glad you mentioned Untapped (project) and ligatu.re (publishers) - I was too busy a couple of years ago to notice them, but I am delighted to be aware of them now. I wonder if you've read any more from Untapped?

I've been making my way through the Glass and Steele series by C.J. Archer but have stalled on book 3 because none of my libraries (not even the Australian ones) have any more of her books. It's set in the early twentieth century (I think) and the protagonists discover that some people have innate magic but conceal it from the world.

I also recently read The Benevolent Society of Ill-Mannered Ladies by Alison Goodman which is set in Victorian times but highlights how few rights women of the time had, though it's lighthearted with a bit of romance.

>22 humouress: I am not familiar with C.J. Archer but did a quick search of indy reads. They are available as audiobooks on that platform.

I have the indyreads platform through my local library which is Wollongong City Library.
Hope that helps.

>23 mrspenny: Thanks. I’ll check and see if they have indyreads.

>21 moonflowerdragon: Thank you for the reminder. I'm considering two by Thea Astley, The Well-Dressed Explorer and The Acolyte, both of which won the Miles Franklin and are available on Libby.

>22 humouress: I read this one and thought it had potential but that it was a bit too preachy. I'll look out for Alison Goodman's next book in the series in the hope that she's got that out of her system.

Last year I powered through The Dry and Force of Nature by Jane Harper and have just acquired the third in the Aaron Falk series Exiles which I will most likely take to Thailand next month as one of my holiday books

Cheers

>22 humouress: I read C.J. Archer's Glass and Steele through hoopla in recent months.

I just finished Melbourne and Mars: My mysterious life on two planets by Joseph Fraser. It's part of the Colonial Australian Popular fiction series and was first published in 1889. It's a political science fiction novel and Mars is an altruistic socialist utopia. Reviewed on the book's page.

I started Exiles by Jane Harper on my way to Thailand last week and finished it before we landed. It was an excellent follow up to her previous Aaron Falk books

Cheers

I've just re-read the first of the Glass & Steele books and - good news! - borrowed the fourth in the series because one of my libraries has acquired it. I still have to check out the indy reads, thanks for the tip. Too many TBR books, too little time ...

I’m presently reading the recent biography of Bee Miles by Rose Ellis. Bee was very famous in Sydney in the 1950s & 60s. The details of her early life are fascinating.

I've just started Sabriel by Garth Nix.

I've just bought Sanctuary, Garry Disher's latest. No touchstone because there are so many books with that name and life is short.

Other Australian books I've read this year are: Becoming Kirrali Lewis by Jane Harrison; The Visitors by Jane Harrison; Love and Virtue by Diana Reid; Abomination by Ashley Goldberg.

Becoming Kirrali Lewis by Jane Harrison

I borrowed this from the library without realising that it was a YA book, but decided to read it anyway. Harrison is an Australian indigenous writer and this is a coming of age novel, set in 1985 with flashbacks to the sixties. Kirrali Lewis was adopted and brought up in a small country town in Victoria where she was the only Aboriginal person. She's never met another indigenous person, or encountered any overt racism, but that changes on her first day at Melbourne University, where she is enrolled to study law.

Over the course of the book Kirrali becomes involved in the Aboriginal community, starts to explore her heritage and traces her birth parents. The content is interesting, but it's more a sequence of teachable moments than a work of literature. I could see it as a set text at about year nine.

The Visitors by Jane Harrison

This novel began as an idea more than a decade and a half ago. Its first iteration was as a play, "The Visitors", which was developed during a 2011 writing residency at the Indigenous studies Centre at Monash University, on Wurundjeri country.....The play was workshopped at the 2013 Yellamundie Festival on Gadigal country, which .........allowed me to connect with representatives from the local community............

The novel was written on Wadawurrung country, where I live. This book is a reimagining of the events of late January 1788 from the First Nations' perspective, but many of the details were drawn from accounts by members of the first fleet and historical accounts of the first contact.

Lawrence, who is nineteen and will be a man when he completes the last stages of his initiation, is the first to see the ships on the horizon. The Messengers are sent to the neighbouring mobs, and a meeting of the Elders is called. They travel to Warrane, on the Bay, where Gary, a senior Warrane Elder, chairs the meeting. This is a strange blending of the historical and contemporary: the Elders are dressed in suits and ties, to mark the dignity of the occasion; Lawrence and the Elders have English names that were common in the thirties and forties; the meeting is run along the lines of the awful meetings we're familiar with from our own jobs. The purpose of the meeting is to decide what to do about the ships. Should the Elders welcome these people to the country according to tradition, or should they declare war?

Interspersed through the action are descriptions of the country, and descriptions of of Aboriginal culture and practices. It's well worth reading.

Love and Virtue by Diana Reid

Michaela and Eve are first year students, living at Foundation College and attending lectures at Sydney University. Michaela's father died when she was a child and her mother has supported them ever since, so there isn't a lot of money to spare and Michaela, who is from Canberra, is grateful to have won a scholarship to Foundation, which pays her accommodation and board. Eve, in the room next door, also has a scholarship but its value to her is the prestige, because she's certainly not short of cash. Most of the other characters come from backgrounds like Eve's: expensive private schools, family mansions on the harbour, magnificent beach houses, holidays in Europe. The girls live at Foundation and the boys live at St Thomas's. (Less privileged students live at home with their parents and do not feature in this story, which is a problem to me.) They're away from the scrutiny of their parents and are doing a lot of socialising, drinking and sex. It's the combination of booze, sex and naivete that causes the drama that ensues, helped along by the misogynistic culture of the men's colleges and private schools, and the competitive drinking of O Week.

Michaela is initially madly impressed by Eve, who is two years older and always the centre of attention, and she thinks they have a close friendship so she confides in her, which could be a mistake. Is Eve the caring person she makes herself out to be?

Overall, this is a pretty good book with a few iffy bits including an affair between Michaela and a philosophy lecturer. The relationship doesn't ring true. The central theme is the issue of consent, which is seen quite differently by Michaela and Eve. Michaela is trying to puzzle things out. Unlike Eve, she accepts that making mistakes is part of being human.

Abomination by Ashley Goldberg

Told in alternating chapters from the perspectives of Ezra, a non-observant Jew, and his school-friend Yonatan, who is frum (strictly follows religious observances). They last met twenty years ago at Ezra's Bar Mitzvah. Up until then they had been close, but Rabbi Hirsch from the yeshiva both boys attended had been accused of molesting his primary school students, so Ezra's father had withdrawn Ezra from the school. Yonatan and his family were far more enmeshed in the Orthodox community where his father was an important and well-respected rabbi, and the community closed ranks. Hirsch's superiors spirited him out of the country so that he would not have to stand trial.

Yonatan is now a rabbi, married to the daughter of a highly regarded Talmudic scholar. He believed that, as much as possible, a Yehudi should live as their European ancestors did. On Shabbat, a fur-trimmed shtreimel on your head, your feet stockinged and a long black bekishe hanging past your knees. Ezra is a lawyer, working for a government department, where he subjugates his own values in order to implement the policies of a government he does not agree with.

It has been twenty years since Hirsch was accused of child abuse, but he has finally been extradited from Israel and is back in Melbourne to stand trial. Avraham Kliger, the brother of one of the victims, took the case to the police, and has spent years campaigning for Hirsch's prosecution. As a result he and his family were banished from the community. Yonatan is now questioning his beliefs and Ezra is falling apart. They meet again at a rally organised by Kliger.

This was really interesting, with lots of information about Orthodox Jewish beliefs and practices. The author drew on the reports from the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, which was set up by Julia Gillard's Labor Government, as a result of the activism of people like Manny Waks, Kliger's real-life counterpart. Waks, who was abused by two members of staff at the Melbourne Yeshiva Centre, was once a member of the Chabad-Lubavitch Orthodox Jewish Hasidic community in Melbourne. He and his family were ostracised for making the abuse public.

Abomination won the Debut Fiction Award at the 72nd National Jewish Book Awards, a US award. It's quite a Melbourne book though, set in inner-city Carlton and the south-eastern suburbs where the Hasidic community lives.

Melbourne's eruv, one of the largest in the world thanks to urban sprawl, was ''built'' in 1997, enclosing St Kilda East and Caulfield within a continuous wire boundary. Later it was expanded to include Bentleigh, Carnegie and Moorabbin. The Council of Orthodox Synagogues is responsible for maintaining the eruv, and it is funded by a levy on synagogue members. https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/cable-loop-lets-melbournes-orthodox-...

I've just finished Lirael by Garth Nix which is the sequel to >32 humouress: Sabriel. I'm pretty sure I'll be continuing with the series - especially as book 2 ends in the middle of a mission (though not a cliff hanger, thankfully).

Australian literature might be big in the news this week. This morning, I am reading in the first volume of Henry Handel Richardson’s trilogy The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, Australia Felix. HHR is compared to George Eliot, and not just because she took a male pen name. TFORM truly has a Middlemarch-ian solidity, it is immensely THERE, like a mountain.

Australian literature in general rings my bell. I greatly admire Xavier Herbert’s Capricornia (and I suspect the fact that Alexis Wright named a novel Carpentaria is not coincidental). I recently finished Henry Lawson’s classic short story / sketch collection While the Billy Boils. I need to read more Patrick White, I loved his collection of short novels The Cockatoos. Among Australian poets, I am a huge fan of Shaw Neilson, A.D. Hope, and Kenneth Slessor.

Over a very short period I devoured six of Chris Hammer's books

Scrublands, Silver and Trust - the Martin Scarsden trilogy and then

Treasure & Dirt, The Tilt and The Seven his series featuring Nell Buchanan and Ivan Lucic

I was drawn to Scrublands as the promo for the Stan series kept popping up on my FB feed - then I saw the book on the shelves at Lifeline Booklover's Lane. (by chance it was a signed copy) so I then acquired and read the next two from the same source. When I noticed that one of the main characters in the new series was lifted straight from the old I went hunting in Booklover's Lane again and picked up two of the three (once again finding a signed copy in the mix) and then found the third somewhere.

I believe a new one is coming out this or next month but Mr Hammer is studiously avoiding me as his tours take him places I am not. He is a Canberra local but his appearance here is when I'm in the UK.

Cheers

>34 humouress: I read Sabriel myself last year and loved it. I had the Oz 25th anniversary edition but gave it to a friend as I bought the Daphne Press edition. Daphne Press have done nice editions of the first three so I have their books 2 (Lirael) and 3 (Abhorsen) sitting on the shelf awaiting my attention :)

I have finally got around to Jane Harper's The Dry, Chris Hammer's Scrublands & Patricia Wolf's Outback, all of which I enjoyed. These join Garry Disher's Bitter Wash Road, Michael Trant's Wild Dogs & Adrian Hyland's Canticle Creek for excellent Aussie reading in the last year or so. Frank Chalmers' Conviction & Greg Woodland's The Night Whistler were great reads, too. Not to mention Geoffrey McGeachin's Charlie Berlin & Simon Rowell's Zoe Mayer series. Greg Barron's first book, Camp Leichhardt, also made me want to try his later novels. It seems I have a bit of a theme going here :0)

I powered through The Valley by Chris Hammer a couple of weeks ago, having found it at a local bookstore just after my birthday.

Still loving the series

Cheers

>39 Macbeth: Happy birthday!

>40 humouress:
Thanks - I had a surprisingly good haul this birthday

Cheers

Revisited TAG Hungerford's The Ridge and the River... a fictionalised memoir of the author's second world war experience first published in a the '50's. I've written a Library Thing review, if anyone is interested.

I read Garry Disher's latest. Like the Wyatt books, Sanctuary is written from the perspective of a criminal, but unlike Wyatt she's a young woman and is not as short on human sympathy. Not bad, but I prefer the police procedurals.

While in Sydney I borrowed a few (physical) books from the library, among them The Amber Legacy by Tony Shillitoe but I didn't have time to finish it. It's a fantasy but it has a fair amount of Australian flora and fauna scattered through it (at least as far as I got) including a dingo familiar.

I just finished The Trauma Cleaner!

I very much enjoy fossicking through the distinctive yellow covered offerings of Text Classics which offer paperback reprints of Australian novels, and also some non-fiction titles. I’ve just finished reading their reprint of To the Wild Sky by Ivan Southall, the Children’s Book Council of Australia ‘Book of the Year’ in 1968. Southall is an interesting writer whose name will be instantly recognisable to readers of a certain age, but alas, probably completely unknown amongst young readers today, and more’s the pity.

This novel is a children’s survival story, with the protagonists on the cusp of, or in their early teens. The children are thrust unexpectedly into a hostile environment and most of the novel explores the psychology of each child as they come to grips with the challenges that face them, including the most fundamental questions of life and death. The story ending leaves you hanging… so much so that some years later Southall wrote a sequel A City Out of Sight, a copy of which may be a bit harder to source.

Though the books target market was originally children, it’s perfectly readable for adults and recommended.

about ¾ of the way through Christopher Koch's 2007 book 'The Memory Room' and thoroughly enjoying it.

Boots on the Ground by Leigh Neville an Australian Military Analyst

So far a pleasant read, with quotes from think tanks and military commentators of all sorts of countries (not just the big ones)

I do like the line from an Australian General - "A tank is like a dinner jacket: you don't need them very often, but when you do nothing else will do"

Cheers