With a special tenth anniversay edition of Charlotte Wood's brilliant and award-winning book The Natural Way of Things being published this month, and a special edition of Max Porter's Grief Is the Thing with Feathers coming in October, we thought it would be fun to revisit some of our favourite reads from 2015!
🦘 Australian literature
The Natural Way of Things
Charlotte Wood
Two women awaken from a drugged sleep to find themselves imprisoned in an abandoned property in the middle of a desert.
Multi-award-winning novel The Natural Way of Things is a gripping, starkly imaginative exploration of contemporary misogyny and corporate control, and of what it means to hunt and be hunted. Most of all, it is the story of two friends, their sisterly love and courage.
With extraordinary echoes of The Handmaid's Tale and Lord of the Flies, it is a compulsively readable, scarifying and deeply moving contemporary novel. It confirms Charlotte Wood's position as one of our most thoughtful, provocative and fearless truth-tellers, as she unflinchingly reveals us and our world to ourselves.
Ghost River
Tony Birch
This stunning, prize-winning novel, set alongside the Yarra River, is heartbreaking and uplifting in equal measure.
The river is a place of history and secrets. For Ren and Sonny, two unlikely friends, it’s a place of freedom and adventure. For a group of storytelling vagrants, it’s a refuge. And for the isolated daughter of a cult reverend, it’s an escape.
Each time they visit, another secret slips into its ancient waters. But change and trouble are coming – to the river and to the lives of those who love it. Who will have the courage to fight and what will be the cost?
Island Home
Tim Winton
The natural world, in Tim Winton’s novels, is as much a living presence as any character, and what is true of his work is true of his life. From boyhood, his relationship with sea, scrub and swamp has been as vital as blood relations. The country has seeped into him, with its rhythms, its dangers and its strange sustenance.
This is the story of how that relationship came to be, and also a passionate exhortation for all of us to feel the ground beneath our feet. Much more so than any political idea, the physical entity of Australia defines us, in ways we too often forget.
Wise, rhapsodic, exalted, Island Home is a beautiful, evocative, sometimes provocative, investigation of how the land makes us who we are.
Salt Creek
Lucy Treloar
Salt Creek, 1855, lies at the far reaches of the remote, beautiful and inhospitable coastal region, the Coorong, in the new province of South Australia. The area, just opened to graziers willing to chance their luck, becomes home to Stanton Finch and his large family, including fifteen-year-old Hester Finch.
Once wealthy political activists, the Finch family has fallen on hard times. Cut adrift from the polite society they were raised to be part of, Hester and her siblings make connections where they can: with the few travellers that pass along the nearby stock route – among them a young artist, Charles – and the Ngarrindjeri people they have dispossessed.
Stanton’s attempts to tame the harsh landscape bring ruin to the Ngarrindjeri people’s homes and livelihoods, and unleash a chain of events that will tear the family asunder. As Hester witnesses the destruction of the Ngarrindjeri’s subtle culture and the ideals that her family once held so close, she begins to wonder what civilization is. Was it for this life and this world that she was educated?
📖 Other Australian books turning ten this year include:
One Life by Kate Grenville, The Secrets of Midwives by Sally Hepworth, Something for the Pain by Gerald Murnane, Black Rock White City by A.S. Patric, Close Your Eyes by Michael Robotham and Resurrection Bay by Emma Viskic.
️🌎 International literature
A God in Ruins
Kate Atkinson
A God in Ruins relates the life of Teddy Todd – would-be poet, heroic World War II bomber pilot, husband, father, and grandfather – as he navigates the perils and progress of the 20th century. For all Teddy endures in battle, his greatest challenge will be to face living in a future he never expected to have. This gripping, often deliriously funny yet emotionally devastating book looks at war and the effect it has, not only on those who live through it, but on the lives of the subsequent generations. It is also about the infinite magic of fiction.
Those who loved the bestselling Life After Life will recognise Teddy as Ursula Todd’s adored younger brother – but for those who have not read it, A God in Ruins stands fully on its own. Few will dispute that it proves once again that Kate Atkinson is one of the most exceptional novelists of our age.
Before the Coffee Gets Cold
Toshikazu Kawaguchi, translated by Geoffrey Trousselot
In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time.
In Before the Coffee Gets Cold, we meet four visitors, each of whom is hoping to make use of the café’s time-travelling offer, in order to confront the man who left them, receive a letter from their husband whose memory has been taken by early onset Alzheimer’s, to see their sister one last time, and to meet the daughter they never got the chance to know.
Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s beautiful, moving story explores the age-old question: what would you change if you could travel back in time? More importantly, who would you want to meet, maybe for one last time?
A Little Life
Hanya Yanagihara
When four graduates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they’re broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their centre of gravity.
Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he’ll not only be unable to overcome – but that will define his life for ever.
Grief Is the Thing with Feathers (10th anniversary edition)
Max Porter
Marking ten years of a contemporary classic, this hardback features unseen artwork throughout and a cover based on a facsimile of the author's own first edition.
In a London flat, two young boys face the unbearable sadness of their mother's sudden death. Their father, a Ted Hughes scholar and scruffy romantic, imagines a future of well-meaning visitors and emptiness.
In this moment of despair they are visited by Crow – antagonist, trickster, healer, babysitter. This sentimental bird is drawn to the grieving family and threatens to stay until they no longer need him.
As weeks turn to months and the pain of loss gives way to memories, the little unit of three starts to heal.
Available from 21st October.
📖 Other international books turning ten this year include:
SPQR by Mary Beard, Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Purity by Jonathan Franzen, Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff, The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins, The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro, The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson, The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen, M Train by Patti Smith, The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf.
Find more special anniversary editions of your favourite books here!
