The Fragments
Toni Jordan
Text Publishing, 2018
ISBN: 9781925773132
$29.99
336 pp

Many authors turn out
variations of the same book with each new offering, or a continuation of a
well-practised style and flavour. Toni Jordan is not one of these. The Fragments is fresh and very different from all her previous novels in its structure, style and story. (more…)

 A Superior Spectre
Angela Meyer
ISBN: 9781925183917
$29.99
370 pp
Ventura/Simon & Schuster 2018

A sensitive and susceptible reader could turn a ghostly shade when reading this book. It is otherworldly in more ways than it initially appears.

Angela Meyer has produced a work that on superficial reading is entertaining and intriguing but allows for contemplation of and rumination on deeper issues. (more…)

Lifel1k3
Jay Kristoff
ISBN: 9781760295691
$19.99
398 pp
Allen & Unwin 2018

This is a modern novel set, like so many others, in a dystopian, post-apocalyptic world. It is inhabited by a large cast, both human and non-human. However, Lifel1k3 is not about analysing the causes of wars and other violence or even about how people survive these. This novel is about questions of identity, memory, being/not being; and relationship (more…)

He Is Mine and I Have No Other
Rebecca O’Connor
ISBN: 9781786892591
$25
230 pp
Canongate 2018

A teenage girl (fifteen years old) in rural Ireland at the close of the twentieth century, Lani struggles to make sense of the people and the world around her and how it all relates to her. Fairly standard fare for a novel about – and for – young adults.

Rebecca O’Connor has crafted a fine work with rounded, believable characters. Lani tells her story in her own words and describes vicissitudes of dealing with parents, girls at school, rules, expectations and the boy she decides is hers, even before she has properly met him.

“He used to walk by our house every day at the same time, up past Molly’s house to the cemetery.” (more…)

Bonesland
Brendan Lawley
ISBN: 9781925603583
$19.99
309 pp
Text Publishing 2018

To an older, white male living in a ‘genteel’ suburb of Melbourne (Australia), some other suburbs and some rural towns can look and sound like a foreign country. Bonesland unfolds in such a ‘foreign’ setting.

Most of the characters are teenagers, in themselves members of a foreign group to this reader. The narrator, a sixteen-year-old white boy, ‘suffers’ from a form of OCD and may be somewhere on the autism spectrum or have mild Asperger’s. He has an older brother and a collection of disparate friends. One of these, Jimmy, mostly talks like an American rapper. Throw into this an older boy who relentlessly bullies Bones and an African-American female exchange student, and Brendan Lawley creates a potent first novel. (more…)

28
Christopher Lappas
Ilura Press 2017
ISBN: 9781921325304
$28.00
336 pp

One of the highest praises I can offer for a debut novel is, when I have finished reading it, to immediately hope that the author writes another one.

28 is the central character of this complex work and she is an enigma – to herself, to the narrator, Scribe, and to the reader. However, Christopher Lappas treats us to three other important and strong characters: Scribe himself, Scribe’s young son Andre and Scribe’s X. (more…)

Ida
Alison Evans
Echo Publishing, 2017
ISBN: 9781760404383
$19.99
244 pp

There have been many novels about people with multiple personalities or split ones. This book is very different from any I’ve read – one character, one personality, multiple existences.

Alison Evans breaks new ground: as an author and in the creation of the characters who inhabit this gripping book. Alison identifies as genderqueer – she doesn’t identify as male or female and eschews the female and male third person personal pronouns, using ‘they’ instead. One of the characters in Ida’s world, Daisy, reflects this. (more…)

Convergent Diversity

When I was growing up in the 1950s and ’60s, there were only two genders and those who didn’t fit comfortably within either one or the other were labelled as ‘poofters’ or ‘lesbos’. There was no room for subtlety. I am so glad that we are moving away from that binary disrespect, because disrespect it was. (more…)

We cannot predict or properly imagine what our society will look and feel like when we stop trying to regard all people as the same and, instead, see each person as a human being: a unique expression of humanity.

Some of you reading the above will immediately protest that I am denying the equality of all people. I am not arguing for or against treating any other person as my equal. We use the word ‘equality’ too loosely, and it is wrong to treat every person equally in a society that cares about the welfare, health and happiness of all the people who are part of that society. (more…)

The Dry
Jane Harper
ISBN: 9781925481372
$17
342 pp
Pan Macmillan 2016

A novel needs strong characters. These are usually human, sometimes animal. They are rarely the condition of the weather or a whole town.

In The Dry, Jane Harper manages to make of both the relentlessly hot drought and the oppressive rural Australian town two palpable characters that potently influence the thoughts and behaviours of the other, human, characters. The weather and the town are both portrayed as malevolent organisms. (more…)