Australian fiction to pick up this month
Southern Aurora by Mark Brandi
We always listen out for the train when we're down in the cutting because sometimes they come quicker than you expect. There aren't as many trains as there used to be. Mostly just the freight ones, like the one that nearly killed us on the bus ... The best train is the Southern Aurora. It goes all the way from Melbourne to Sydney, and from Sydney to Melbourne. It stops in Mittigunda because we're pretty much exactly halfway between.
Jimmy is a kid growing up fast on the poorest street in town. He tries to do everything right and look out for his mum and his younger brother. His older brother is in jail, so it's up to Jimmy to hold things together. But small-town life is unforgiving if you're from the other side of the tracks. If only his mum didn't drink so much. If only his best friend understood. If only he could stop his mum's boyfriend from getting angry. Jimmy soon learns that even when you get things right, everything can still go wrong.
Why We Are Here by Briohny Doyle
After her partner and father die in quick succession, BB moves to a glamorous, condemned beachside apartment at the edge of a glittering city so memory-saturated it might be a mirage. Her plan? To rediscover the person she was before finding, and losing, the love of her life. To heal she'll party like it's 1999, walk her motley dog, Baby, and surrender to the simple joys of life alone by the sea.
When a neighbour mistakes her for a dog trainer, and enlists her in correcting the murderous tendencies of his Doberman, BB feels close to a meaningful new life. Harnessing the tenets of Cesar Millan the dog whisperer, and other less canine-centric canons, she helps local dogs and their wealthy, oblivious owners to distinguish between the things they can and cannot change. She even takes tentative steps towards new intimacies-with safely unavailable Franz, and sultry, free-spirited Vera. But life in Balboa Bay is increasingly surreal.
On a Bright Hillside in Paradise by Annette Higgs
Told from five different points of view, each one revealing a little more of the story, On a Bright Hillside in Paradise, tells the story of a family of convict descendants in the back-blocks of Tasmania, on a farm in a place called Paradise. They lead hard-scrabble lives. The drama begins when strangers arrive, Christian Brethren evangelists who hold big revival meetings in local barns.
It tackles big questions of faith and family but is always grounded in the dreams and strivings of its beautifully drawn characters. Higgs takes lives that history might have judged as small and imbues them with immense dignity and complex and compelling inner lives. Avoiding the myth of the ‘frontier pioneer’ On a Bright Hillside in Paradise instead shows how these convict descendants wanted nothing more than to retreat to the bush to heal from their trauma, developing a deep love of the landscape in the process.
Restless Dolly Maunder by Kate Grenville
Dolly Maunder was born at the end of the nineteenth century, when society's long-locked doors were finally starting to creak ajar for women. Born into a poor farming family in country New South Wales but clever, energetic and determined, she spent her restless life pushing at those doors. Most women like Dolly have more or less disappeared from view, remembered only in a family photo album as a remote figure in impossible clothes, and maybe for a lemon-pudding recipe. Restless Dolly Maunder brings one of them to life as a person we can recognise and whose struggles we can empathise with.
Grenville uses family memories and research to imagine her way into the life of her grandmother. This is the story of a woman born into a world of limits and obstacles who was – though at a cost – to make a life for herself.
The Scope of Permissibility by Zeynab Gamieldien
A stunning debut novel that follows the intertwined lives of three friends as they navigate the complexities of university life, adherence to their faith, and the transition into adulthood.
Bound together by their shared beliefs and alienation from wider Australian society, Sara, Abida and Naeem are drawn to their university's Muslim Students' Association. Within its walls, Sara and Naeem begin a covert relationship, while Abida campaigns for the group's presidency. But Abida's ambitions for leadership threatens both her longstanding friendship with Sara and the increasingly fragile relationship between Sara and Naeem. As tensions rise and loyalties falter, the three must balance the demands of love, faith and ambition, with each decision they make having the potential to change their lives forever.
Mistakes and Other Lovers by Amy Lovat
El O'Reilly is exceptionally good at making mistakes. Mistakes like: falling in love with the charismatic youth pastor, Mace, while engaged to her high school boyfriend; breaking up with her fiancé the night before Valentine's Day; walking out on her family; dropping out of uni with no plan B; ghosting her old friends; kissing her new friends; sleepless nights with beers and bongs and boys and girls.
But when Mace proposes to someone else, El's world finally breaks. Will she go back to the safe love she's always known, will Mace realise that she's the one, or will El forge her own path into the unknown? Mistakes and Other Lovers explores the pressure, pain and freedom of being on the cusp of adulthood and realising things aren't what you thought they'd be.
Roseghetto by Kirsty Jagger
Shayla is on a newspaper assignment when she returns to the public housing estate where she grew up and finds it demolished. The locals have been evicted, their homes erased, their stories too. Standing among the rubble of Rosemeadow, Shayla is assailed by her memories of living there. The bad secret Daddy asked her to keep. Mummy rekindling a dangerous romance. Making friends with ‘the gutter kids’.
Surrounded by poverty, confronted by domestic violence, Shayla found her escape in reading. Now it’s time to tell the stories of Rosemeadow, including her own. Roseghetto is an unforgettable and moving coming-of-age story, an account of breaking the cycle of violence and poverty.
The Art of Breaking Ice by Rachael Mead
In 1960, when the legendary icebreaker Magga Dan set sail for Antarctica, it contained a secret. Hiding on board was Nel Law, wife of expedition leader Phillip Law. She would make history by becoming the first Australian woman to set foot on the icy continent, but it was her art that would change everything.
Though a talented artist, Nel has always been defined by her role as 'the explorer's wife', but in the clear expanse of the Southern Ocean, her true self is finally allowed to emerge. Despite misogyny from the all-male crew and increasing resentment from her mercurial husband, Nel's art begins to flourish. Her new friend, a gentle ornithologist, encourages her to explore, but as the ship ploughs on towards Antarctica, rumours swirl, threatening her marriage and the tenuous peace between the controlling Phillip and his crew. In the clear, white light of the south, Nel will be forced to confront the truth of herself and of the man she has dedicated her life to.
