Bedtime Story, by Chloe Hooper
Simon & Schuster
Chloe Hooper’s talent for piercing the beating heart of a story is turned inwards in this beautifully rendered and very personal book about how to talk about death with her young children, after discovering their father had an aggressive form of cancer.
Hooper’s tone is pitch-perfect with subject matter that could easily slide into sentimentality as she turns to the canon of children’s literature for wisdom – and assistance. With moody illustrations by Anna Walker, it’s a searching and magical work. – Lucy Clark
Read more: Bedtime Story by Chloe Hooper review – an extraordinary treasure of hope and grief
Homesickness, by Janine Mikosza
Ultimo Press
Janine Mikosza presents her stunning memoir as a long conversation between two warring halves of herself: the memoirist Janine, who wants to understand the violence that happened to her as a child; and the subject Jin, by turns antagonistic, tight-lipped, acerbic and unsure.
The traumatised brain can blur the relationship between reality and memory, and here Mikosza tries to unpick it: revisiting – and literally mapping out – the 14 houses she lived in before she turned 18, some of which have rooms she is thankful to have forgotten. – Steph Harmon
Read more: ‘I didn’t want to make public my suffering’: Janine Mikosza on reinventing the trauma memoir
People Who Lunch, by Sally Olds
Upswell
People Who Lunch comprises intelligent, emotionally honest and chic essays about capital, community and pleasure, and how we broker our relationships to all those. Sally Olds reminds us art is political; leisure time is political; romantic arrangements are political.
She roots her explorations firmly in place – in Flagstaff Gardens; or on Elizabeth Street, once a tributary of Birrarung , where “you can still hear the water gurgling beneath you” – with a laconic curiosity about investment in our social world. This bold debut recently sold in the US: watch this space. – Imogen Dewey
A Brief Affair, by Alex Miller
Allen & Unwin
When academic Frances Egan has a one-night stand in China, I thought Alex Miller was setting up A Brief Affair as a conventional story of middle-aged adultery. But the “Mongolian warrior” cracks open her life in more complex, philosophical ways.
Miller writes confidently about women’s inner lives and examines Frances’s growth against her marriage to a good man, her stultifying career, and her fascination with residents of a former asylum. A wise, atmospheric novel from a master. – Susan Wyndham
Read more: A Brief Affair by Alex Miller review – a moving study of female passion
This Devastating Fever, by Sophie Cunningham
Ultimo Press
Alice is writing a book about Leonard Woolf. Alice has been writing a book about Leonard Woolf for 20 years. This Devastating Fever (which took Sophie Cunningham a similar amount of time to write) is a book about an impossible book, a metafiction of sorts – but it’s also a meditation on how to live in a world that is ending, on the complexities of care and love, and survival, continuing on.
And it’s great fun – bold, cheeky, playfully energetic and utterly distinctive. – Fiona Wright
Read more: Sophie Cunningham on the ‘crazy challenge’ of bringing Leonard and Virginia Woolf to life
Faith, Hope and Carnage, by Nick Cave and Seán O’Hagan
Text Publishing
In the stasis of lockdown, longtime friends Nick Cave (of the Bad Seeds and Grinderman) and Seán O’Hagan began to record their conversations. From those hours of wild and generous talk, O’Hagan has extracted an extraordinary dialogue.
It’s hard to improve upon Rachel Clark’s description of this book: “a lament, a celebration, a howl, a secular prayer”. Faith, Hope and Carnage demands to be heard. Get the audiobook and surrender to Cave’s ferocious eloquence, his creative velocity. – Beejay Silcox
Read more: ‘Songs are little dangerous bombs of truth’: Nick Cave and Seán O’Hagan – an exclusive book extract
Harold Holt, by Ross Walker
Black Inc
I found myself consistently delighted with the nuggets of information Ross Walker unearthed about our 17th prime minister, who I knew shamefully little about before beyond the exceptional circumstances of his death. The good-natured extrovert who loved parties but sought solitude in the sea; who loved ballet and ballroom dancing; the lifelong swimmer who would practice holding his breath while bored in parliament; the kind-hearted man who “argued with a smile”. Walker’s book – “a midway point between biography and narrative nonfiction – history told as a story,” as he puts it – is eminently readable, never getting distracted with breathlessly reciting names and dates in the way some political biographies can. A real treat. – Sian Cain
An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life, by Paul Dalla Rosa
Allen and Unwin
Comme, Paul Dalla Rosa’s breakout work – nominated for the world’s richest short story prize in 2019 – is a tale of despairing desire and suffocating anxiety set in Melbourne’s scariest store. It appears in his first collection alongside nine other stories of claustrophobia: terrible people subjected to the churn of work while blinkered by their own obsessions – fame, wealth, a life-altering rebrand.
With caustic wit, Dalla Rosa performs a kind of surgery on his characters, splitting them wide open to reveal something exciting and vivid, ugly and depraved. – Michael Sun
Read more: An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life by Paul Dalla Rosa review – deftly executed and cringingly funny
Losing Face, by George Haddad
UQP
Losing Face should be a hard read, traversing the big themes of grief, toxic masculinity, identity and sexual assault. But instead it’s gripping, and absolutely full of heart.
Joey and Elaine balance each other perfectly – both are gloriously flawed and full of life. At sentence level, Losing Face is full of evocative imagery, but it’s the characters that really make it a stand out, and the thrill of being invited to snoop on the intimate realities of a family falling apart. – Bec Kavanagh
Read more: Losing Face by George Haddad review – a rich, complex story of consent and coming of age
Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here, by Heather Rose
Allen and Unwin
It would’ve been so easy for Heather Rose to take the events of her life and write a straightforward “trauma memoir” – a genre publishers can’t get enough of. In her hands it would have still been a great book – but instead she has written something truly original.
This is journey through her physical life, yes – true tragedy, ghosts, heroin! – but in tandem is the journey through her spiritual life. You finish feeling so much more open to the world, even braver, after spending such intimate time with Rose. – Bridie Jabour
Read more: Heather Rose on overcoming tragedy and choosing to live a happy life
Seeing Other People, by Diana Reid
Ultimo Press
As witty and compelling as her first novel, Love and Virtue, Diana Reid’s Seeing Other People focuses on two Sydney sisters in their 20s: the older Eleanor, sharp and together, who fiercely values her own intelligence and integrity; and the younger Charlie, beautiful and sensitive, an actor on the rise.
The novel is fascinated by questions of morality, truth and self-perception (or, rather, deception). Vivid with hot beach days and tangled romantic relationships, it’s a great summer read. – Donna Lu
Read more: Diana Reid on Sally Rooney, Love & Virtue and her fast follow-up: ‘Lockdown gave me freedom to fail’
Our Members Be Unlimited, by Sam Wallman
Scribe
The history of unionism is laid out in eye-popping colour in the first longform work by comics journalist and labour activist Sam Wallman – who also details his time working at an Amazon warehouse in Melbourne. It’s confronting seeing just how much the global giant exploits vulnerable people.
Communicating Wallman’s clear-eyed vision for a better world, this is a great starting point to unionism, and a reminder for those more seasoned of why we continue to fight. – Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen
Read more: ‘Pissing while walking is tricky’: inside an Amazon warehouse, a cartoonist tries to unionise
Animals With Human Voices, by Damen O’Brien
Recent Work Press
Brisbane poet Damen O’Brien is an obscenely talented fellow; in the last decade, he’s scooped up nearly every poetry prize in the country. But his debut collection is so much more than the sum of its well-acclaimed parts – it’s a missive from the post-Anthropocene dark.
Our narrators are world-weary jellyfish, apocalyptic goats, God-fearing earthworms and fossil prophets: a creaturely chorus. Is O’Brien’s volume an elegy or a verdict? Both. It’s also a marvel. – Beejay Silcox
We Come With This Place, by Debra Dank
Echo publishing
This book is difficult to pin down. It’s memoir, certainly, retelling Debra Dank’s life – but it goes further back, to her Gudanji/Wakaja parents and ancestors; and then back still to creation stories she generously shares. Dank describes it as “a strange kind of letter, written to my place”; Tara June Winch called it “a jewel of a book”, filled with heaviness and warmth.
To inhabit this vivid place is to be invited into a new understanding of country, culture, family and time. It stuck with me. – Steph Harmon
Read more: We Come With This Place by Debra Dank review – a jewel to rival Australia’s great desert memoirs
Moon Sugar, by Angela Meyer
Transit Lounge
I loved this surreal psychological trip. Angela Meyer is consistently pushing the boundaries of what can be achieved in genre fiction and it’s genuinely exciting to read.
On the surface, Moon Sugar is a book about the possibility of magic, but underneath it’s about truth. Mila and Josh feel so genuinely stuck, and after the last few years, who isn’t looking deep for the things that make you feel alive? Meyer’s latest is life in full, vibrant hyper-colour. – Bec Kavanagh
Read more: Moon Sugar by Angela Meyer review – blending the wonder of fantasy with the thrill of crime fiction
Train Lord, by Oliver Mol
Penguin Random House
Like his alt-lit forebears, Oliver Mol’s writing can often feel like alchemy, constructing brief, glimmering moments of catharsis from the meandering absurdities of life. Train Lord is less a memoir than a collection of these absurdities – chief among them his chronic, year-long migraine, which robbed him of writing, reading, existing in the world.
Surveying the detritus of his life, he becomes a guard for Sydney Trains, surrendering to stasis – and finding within it a tale of brutal self-awareness and surprising joy. – Michael Sun
Read more: Oliver Mol on surviving a 10-month migraine: ‘If I didn’t tell this story it would rot inside me’
Jesustown, by Paul Daley
Allen & Unwin
It’s always a relief when a friend and colleague’s book isn’t terrible, but it is true joy when it is genuinely fantastic. I was gripped by Daley’s colonial novel which follows Patrick Renmark, a white pop historian, as he returns to the mission his grandfather lived on.
The men at the centre of the novel are deeply flawed, and there is no neat redemption. But the excavation of their inner lives along with Australia’s history is compelling, and at times very moving. – Bridie Jabour
Read more: Black-white history: the shared responsibility of writing about colonisation’s bitter legacy
The Sun Walks Down, by Fiona Macfarlane
Allen and Unwin
What I love most about this book is its unabashed passion: how each of its characters is overtaken, at times, by an imagination and longing grand enough to transform everything around them.
Its narrative centres on a child, lost in the landscape – but Fiona Macfarlane uses this old trope to explore the always-hidden but deeply felt inner lives of her townsfolk, and builds a world sensitive, luminous and tinged with magic. – Fiona Wright
Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life, by Brigitta Olubas
Hachette
Australian-born Shirley Hazzard wrote only four novels – The Transit of Venus her literary triumph – as well as short stories and nonfiction. But her output was expansive in ambition, vision and style.
She deserves every page of this insightful biography by Australian scholar Brigitta Olubas, who elegantly reweaves the facts and fictions of Hazzard’s emotional and intellectual life, tracing her determined rise from the doldrums of postwar Sydney to the cultural heights of New York and Italy. – Susan Wyndham
Read more: Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life by Brigitta Olubas review – doyenne of love and devastation
Cold Enough for Snow, by Jessica Au
Giramondo
This slim book about a mother and daughter’s overseas trip feels like a cool tonic. At first glance it doesn’t do much, plot-wise. But these quiet scenes from a journey through Japan weave around subtle and often troubling questions about family, memory, self-expression – and power, both interpersonal and artistic.
The narrator’s relatable anxieties about meaning and the possibility (or not) of mutual understanding are alloyed by the limpid beauty of Jessica Au’s writing. A novella of weather, texture and light – delicate and enigmatic. – Imogen Dewey
Read more: Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au review – a graceful novella about how we pay attention
All That’s Left Unsaid, by Tracey Lien
HarperCollins
Sydney-born, New York-based Tracey Lien uses 1990s Cabramatta as the setting for her compelling, complex debut novel, which follows a cadet journalist as she investigates her teenage brother’s murder in a busy restaurant.
The impacts of the model minority myth and the ripple effects of intergenerational trauma are central, and Lien inhabits multiple character perspectives with empathy and intelligence. This masterful storytelling cuts to the heart of the Vietnamese diaspora community, still in mourning half a century later. – Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen
Collective Movements
Monash University
Collective Movements is a First Nations anthology, a dialogue and a history of creative practices in south-east Australia. Collecting together different threads, from ILBIJERRI and Kaiela Arts to this mob, it weaves tactile, political transmissions with physical, geographical and historical movements.
Like much Black publishing, Collective Movements is not intended to be easily categorisable; the book’s several contributors are working in ways that go beyond categories of European history and classification. Beautifully designed, it is a significant record – one everybody should read. – Declan Fry
The Settlement, by Jock Serong
Text Publishing
Australian history has been overly generous to George Augustus Robinson, who in the 1830s enticed some of the supposedly last “wild” Tasmanians to vacate their traditional lands for a windswept island settlement.
Robinson, named in Jock Serong’s The Settlement only as “the Man”, is at the vanguard of a failed and cruel colonial experiment as this celebrated novelist eloquently portrays it. To the settlement’s confined, Serong invests appropriate human dignity denied by their oppressors and their history. – Paul Daley
The Most Important Job in the World, by Gina Rushton
Pan Macmillan
In The Most Important Job in the World, journalist Gina Rushton grapples with the climate crisis and what “we owe to the planet when it comes to adding another human to it”. Rushton interrogates whether or not she wants to have children – a question informed by extensive and compassionate reporting.
The book is a limpid and compelling consideration of reproductive rights and justice, the physical and emotional labour of parenting, and both individual choice and collective responsibility. – Donna Lu
Read more: As a science journalist I’m reconsidering having kids. I’m not the only one
Denizen, by James McKenzie Watson
Penguin Random House
The word “thriller” seems inadequate – and perhaps a bit reductionist – for this unsettling psychological minefield. Tense, savage, compelling and deeply disturbing, Watson’s debut weaves between the childhood and young adulthood of its protagonist, Parker, who from a young age understands there is something very wrong with his brain.
Mental health issues, tortured family relationships and high stakes friendships against the brutal backdrop of modern rural Australia – with a frighteningly unreliable narrator – means you’ll have a tight grip on this one right until the horrifying end. – Lucy Clark
Read more: His dark materials: the bush noir that grapples with mental health
Which Australian books did you love this year? Join us in the comments
