Six Australian debuts to read in February
We round-up six exciting new Australian voices to read this month.
You can find even more new Australian fiction by browsing the collection below.
Cherry Beach by Laura McPhee-Browne
Hetty and Ness, best friends since childhood, have left suburban Melbourne for the first time to live abroad in Toronto. Hetty is charming and captivating, the life of the party; Ness is a wallflower, hopelessly in love with her. As winter freezes the lakeside city, the fault lines in their friendship begin to crack wide open. Our reviewer recommended this debut novel for fans of Sally Rooney, describing it as a ‘tender, intimate story that will leave its mark’.
A Couple of Things Before the End by Sean O'Beirne
Sean O'Beirne’s stories are bitingly satirical and original. A woman on a passenger ship in 1958 gets involved with a young, wild Barry Humphries. In 1988, a teenage boy recalls his sexual initiation, out on the tanbark. In 2015, two sisters text in Kmart about how to manage their irascible, isolated mum. Then, in the near future, a racist demagogue talks to the press the day after his electoral triumph. Our reviewer describes this debut as ‘a timely excoriation of the nostalgic myths of Australianness’.
Fauna by Donna Mazza
Set 17 years into a very recognisable future, Fauna is a gripping psychological drama. Longing for another child, Stacey is recruited by a company who offer massive incentives for her to join an experimental programme. As part of the agreement, she and her husband’s embryo will be blended with ‘edited cells’. Just how edited, Stacey doesn’t really know. Nor does she have any idea how much her longed-for new daughter will change her life and that of her family.
No Neat Endings by Dominic Carew
In this debut story collection, Dominic Carew pits his characters against the challenges of modern life. A man observes his brother’s rise to comic stardom with envy and angst. A father faces his fortieth with mortal paranoia. A friend returns from Brazil to become embroiled in a drug-fuelled romp in a share house. It doesn’t work out. No Neat Endings is a thought-provoking exploration of masculinity in crisis.
Wild, Fearless Chests by Mandy Beaumont
Mandy Beaumont’s incendiary and brutally uncompromising stories call attention to the lives of unheard women. These are the stories we have always known, have always heard about and are perhaps just short moments away from. They are yours, ours, mine. They are booming anger. They are wild love. They are the distorted and the decided, the imagined and the wanted. They are the shaking ground beneath our feet.
Shirl by Wayne Marshall
Slightly warped and darkly funny, Shirl will make you rethink what it means to be Australian. In 14 stories, Wayne Marshall takes a range of what-if scenarios to their fabulist and comedic extremes: A lonely yowie emerges from the bush to attend the Desperate and Dateless Ball; mysterious creatures descend from the sky to place a ban on footy. Our reviewer praised the way Marshall ‘flouts expectations of small-town life and contemporary masculinity in ways that are both a challenge and an homage to the classic Australian tall tale’.
