Books Roundup

Crows Nest
Nikki Mottram (UQP, available now)

Crows Nest is our Debut Spotlight for February! Read an interview with first-time author Nikki Mottram here, plus watch an exclusive reading on our Instagram!

Australian crime writers know that in rural towns the wounds cut deeper, resentments bleed, grudges never die and everybody knows everybody else’s business. Think of Kenneth Cook’s Wake in Fright, Jane Harper’s The Dry, Garry Disher’s Bitter Wash Road and Margaret Hickey’s Cutter’s End. Small towns with big secrets are the blood that runs through the veins of crime fiction in this country. Nikki Mottram’s Crows Nest introduces us to another.

The year is 1996, and our story opens on the day of the Port Arthur massacre. Child protection worker Dana Gibson has absconded from her life in Sydney for a temporary posting in Toowoomba, Queensland, hoping the distance will obliterate wretched memories. A kangaroo jumping into the path of her Mercedes as it races down the highway provides an ominous welcome.

Mottram understands the mechanics of a great mystery; she has the grip of a born storyteller.

The eponymous Crows Nest is a real place, 158 kilometres from Brisbane and 43 kilometres from Toowoomba. Dana’s first case involves a welfare check on one of its residents, Sandra Kirby, and her children. Dana and her colleague are met with hostile acquiescence; Sandra has been through this process before. But despite her unfriendliness, there’s nothing to suggest the kids are unsafe; they are just in need of support, which Dana promises to provide.

She never gets the chance. Soon after, Sandra and her live-in best friend Debbie are discovered brutally murdered. The local cops quickly close the case as a murder-suicide. But certain details nag at Dana, and despite warnings to ‘keep your head down and try to get along with everyone,’ she is compelled to dig deeper into the women’s lives and their relationships with the townsfolk. Everyone has secrets, and not all of them have anything to do with the crime. But nobody wants their secrets exposed.

I have always believed we should feel rewarded rather than tricked when a crime novel springs something on the reader. Clues should be planted in plain view; we just don’t know enough at the time to identify them as such. Crows Nest is littered with suspects, and its red herrings are wonderfully kneaded into the narrative rather than pointedly festooned. Mottram understands the mechanics of a great mystery; she has the grip of a born storyteller. The plot hums, and it’s populated by a vast, vivid cast. But it’s Dana Gibson who is key to the novel’s success. Haunted, wounded, determined, obstinate and flawed—these are stock-standard tropes Mottram has moulded into an authentic character. We root for Dana to unravel the mystery but also to find some form of contentment as she comes to terms with her devastating trauma. Wherever her job takes her next, I’ll be there.

—Simon McDonald

Dazzling
Chịkọdịlị Emelụmadụ (Hachette Australia, available now)

‘Ozoemena, at eight, was a girl who had learned to read a room and provide exactly what it needed; and in that moment, the room needed her silence.’ This powerful phrase appears in the first chapter of Chịkọdịlị Emelụmadụ’s debut novel, setting the tone for the whirlwind of a story to come. The award-winning writer has created a work set to the backdrop of a Nigeria transitioning from military rule to democracy that is, true to its title, dazzling.

There is a joy in reading this well-paced work. The many threads of narrative draw the reader into a vivid world of love, sacrifice, and the weight of historical and familial legacies. At its heart are the parallel lives of Treasure and Ozoemena, which converge at a boarding school where they complete the transformation into their full selves in a way that moves beyond the coming-of-age narrative and unapologetically explores facets of Afro-Black girlhood.

True to its title, dazzling.

In this novel, magic and life are interwoven—the everyday is both fantastical and mundane. As Emelụmadụ puts it: ‘Everyone knows that the market is full of humans, spirits, angels and other beings, buying and selling.’ I hesitate to label this novel magical realism—as Emelụmadụ adroitly shows with her writing—in many Afro-Black spaces, there is nothing fictional about other worlds and their inhabitants interacting with ours. This unapologetically Igbo work blends tradition with modern life, the rural with metropolitan, when exploring the juxtaposition of a world where a dibia, a mediator between the human world and the spirit world, is a car ride away.

There is a universality in Emelụmadụ’s writing, for who of us is not undertaking a journey to understanding ourselves and our family? I found myself wincing in sympathy Ozoemena’s unfortunate back-to-school haircut. I felt the cringe of young-adult mortification as Treasure’s mother taunts ‘You think we’re agemates now?’ There is a tender understanding as the characters grapple and grow through changes and challenges.

Works such as Emelụmadụ’s are outliers in a sector where Afro-Black writers are often compelled to adhere to Eurocentric storytelling standards that cannot encapsulate the complexity of their work. Although written mainly in English, this work does not shy away from exploring the languages and cultures of Nigeria. Emelụmadụ characters speak in Igbo and Naija (Nigerian pidgin) throughout the work, and it is much more robust for it. ‘We are in synchrony,’ states one of the characters, and that is doubly true for the brilliant blend of languages. Emelụmadụ’s technique and precision give the reader a story that is refreshing and engaging even when re-read for the third time.

I look forward to the sequel of this novel and future works Emelụmadụ produces.

—Rafeif Ismail