Books Roundup

Hovering
Rhett Davis (Hachette Australia, available now)

Hovering is our First Book Club pick for April—Stay tuned for features on our website and podcast throughout the month!

Hovering is set in the near-but-unspecified future in the fictional Southern Australian city of Fraser. Alice Wren, returned out of the blue after leaving for Europe in her twenties, finds her home in a state of flux. The town is going through ‘geographical manipulations’ with streets and houses disappearing and moving somewhere different overnight.

The device of the rearranging city captures multiple Australian anxieties, namely living at the precipice of total climate crisis and the bullish instability of urban sprawl. Alice’s sister Lydia, thinking about their mother’s once-manicured, now overgrown garden, sees it as a ‘losing battle’: ‘Disorder always overcame order … The earth would always shift.’ A space that had been lovingly maintained by the previous generation is impossible to keep liveable for the next.

This is such an original novel, and Davis’s writing is exhilarating, surprising but never heavy-handed.

Land is central to Alice’s tenuous relationship to home. Before returning to Fraser, Alice was a member of a controversial guerrilla art group, producing works under a pseudonym. Her most celebrated and incendiary works were focused on the everyday violence of living on Indigenous land as a coloniser. But an inability to transcend the shame and guilt in any meaningful way is central to how the work is perceived. While the online furore towards Lydia’s work is written with an element of satire, one of these articles reflects that Alice’s work shows how ‘Fraser is a beast that grows and expands of its own volition and that may be remarkable, but it does so stupidly, poorly and with deep insecurities.’ This sentiment of ugly cultural insecurity amid a backdrop of rapid environmental upheaval comes straight from real-life Australia, and indeed any stolen land.

In this state, the future feels untenable, especially for the young—as seen via Lydia’s sixteen-year-old son George, who finds it impossible to imagine his future, even when it is set as a school assignment. Meanwhile, Lydia, who has never moved away, or indeed left the family home, escapes the pressures of the changing world around her (building to disaster-scale throughout the book) via a video-game addiction where she plays at being a botanist, connecting to nature via a simulation.

This is such an original novel, and Davis’s writing is exhilarating, surprising but never heavy-handed. Hovering poses questions of settler colonialism, the invasiveness of technology and the bizarre human tendency to adopt a ‘business as usual’ mindset as the world falls apart. By framing these themes with such an unusual plot, Hovering is one of the most exciting books of this year.

— Ellen Cregan

Unlimited Futures: Speculative, Visionary Blak and Black Fiction
Edited by Ellen van Neerven and Rafeif Ismail (Fremantle Press in association with Djed Press, available now)

Unlimited Futures, a collection of twenty-one works of speculative fiction by First Nations and Afro-diaspora writers, centres storytelling that remains ‘unapologetically Blak and Black.’ Edited by writer and poet Ellen van Neerven (of Mununjali Yugambeh and Dutch heritage) and writer / Djed Press managing director Rafeif Ismail (a third-culture youth of Sudanese diaspora), the collection recognises shared experiences of global colonisation, aiming to promote ‘solidarity between our different communities’ while acknowledging ‘the commonalities, the differences, the hopes and dreams and fears, but also the calls for action, the calls for change.’

As such, the anthology pushes against dominant settler narratives. In the poem ‘I have no country’ by Ethiopian born poet Yirga Gelaw Woldeyes, we are forewarned that ‘slavery is to live by a written history.’ The genre of speculative fiction has historically offered First Nations and Afro-Black writers a freedom to critique injustice by using creative and coded tools. Unlimited Futures, very aware of its part in a broader legacy, uses genre to its benefit, sharing cultural and political messages through compelling, accessible storytelling. As a reader, you are jolted into new technological realities, changed historical timelines and alternate worlds as a means of seeing and questioning our own.

Unlimited Futures, very aware of its part in a broader legacy, uses genre to its benefit.

Themes of threat, trauma and survival are viscerally evoked. In ‘The Debt’ by Kenyan born Chemutai Glasheen, a daughter is confronted with the cost of her mother’s violence as a police officer. Transported to an alternate world, she meets a lookalike mother who carries visible scars that mimic the harm her mother has caused others. The rippling consequences of enabling and ignoring state brutality are shown: ‘what you do in your world has real consequences in ours.’ In ‘Guyuggwa’, written by Laniyuk (a Larrakia, Kungarrakan, Gurindji and French writer and poet), we observe a conversation between two beings following a 400-year-old war against the ‘Common Wealth.’ As they watch the colony crumble they lament on their grief: ‘I don’t even know who I am outside of the struggle.’ But they have hope for the next generation, who ‘will never know life living in the colony, will always know their language, will always practise culture. Imagine what they’ll create and who they’ll be.’

The collection finishes with ‘The Prime Minister’, a piece written in 1945 by Kabi Kabi Nations Elder Sterling James Minniecon. As underscored by Ellen Van Neerven in their introduction, this story highlights the knowledge, pride and vision of communities (so often excluded from literary establishments) in a long and continuing legacy of storytelling and resistance. The story is powerful, not only because Minniecon taught himself to read and write under the harsh restrictions of the Queensland Aboriginal Protection Act, but also for his vision—creating a space-travelling future where a First Nations prime minister (using the by-line ‘remove the fear and the rest would take care of itself’) creates a utilitarian, equitable, environmentally-sustainable society. Although Minniecon did not live to see his contribution published, the teachings remain relevant today when so many of us remain disillusioned with near-sighted government parties that remain harmful and apathetic.

In a world where there is a pervasive pressure to decontextualise the historic and the political from its influence on the everyday, this collection offers a form of care, in own voices, that is needed by many. While you may come for the names—award-winners such as Claire G Coleman, Ambelin Kwaymullina, Sisonke Msimang and Alison Whittaker feature—there are new and emerging voices that will also make this collection a comfort and inspiration for years to come.

— Yamiko Marama

The Burnished Sun
Mirandi Riwoe (UQP, available now)

When you look up Annah the Javanese, the title of a striking nude by Paul Gauguin painted in 1893, one of the first things the results spit out at you is that the model was ‘Gauguin’s lover’ who left him and ‘stole everything of value from his apartment.’ You have to dig quite a bit deeper through the praise for the French painter, and his frustration with his lack of success, to discover that Annah was a teenage girl—and not the only one that the much older Gauguin conducted sexual relationships with.

‘Annah the Javanese’ is also the title of the novella that opens Mirandi Riwoe’s story collection The Burnished Sun. In it, with empathy and a deft hand, Riwoe carefully unpicks the narrative that history has stamped on Annah, and instead imagines what life for this young woman, fetishised, powerless, and used by those around her, must have been like.

Taking on themes of race, bereavement, motherhood and alienation across the twelve stories, Riwoe moves seamlessly between eras and protagonists.

The idea of seeing things from the perspective of those who are often misunderstood, overlooked, or spoken over runs through the collection. There’s the live-in maid in ‘Dignity’; the elderly woman in ‘Hazel’, who is cut off from her family by the pandemic; the young skater boy in ‘Hardflip’. In ‘The Fish Girl’, the Stella-shortlisted novella that rounds out the book, Riwoe takes a similar approach as she does to ‘Annah the Javanese’—plucking the ‘Malay trollop’ out of W. Somerset Maugham’s 1928 story ‘The Four Dutchmen’ and giving her context and personhood that was previously sorely missing.

Taking on themes of race, bereavement, motherhood and alienation across the twelve stories—many of which have had versions previously published—Riwoe moves seamlessly between eras and protagonists, from teenage boys to elderly women. Food plays a central role throughout, cooking and meals used to show anything from financial stress, love, connection to family and past, to loss.

One of the most poignant aspects of the book, however, are the cruelties dotted throughout. There’s cruelty inflicted by fate, by society, by history —but the ones that most often cut deepest are those inflicted by friends and loved ones. The grieving mother whose cries for help are brushed off and joked about by her husband who ‘points out the flab that mushrooms over the waist of [her] jeans.’ The primary school child who is always the only one not invited to birthday parties. The women whose friends belittle them because of their ethnicity, then wink to try and involve them in ‘the joke.’

The Burnished Sun is an accomplished collection offering up insight and new perspectives, bringing the unspoken to the surface.

— Elizabeth Flux

The Writer Laid Bare
Lee Kofman (Ventura Press, available now)

An award-winning author, Lee Kofman has amassed a passionate following of students with her popular writing courses and blog. Based on Kofman’s teachings, The Writer Laid Bare is a luscious and intricately rendered compendium for writers—both new and established— offering a toolkit, the subtitle tells us, for ‘mastering emotional honesty in a writer’s art, craft and life.’

It’s a mighty feat to cover as much as Kofman achieves in this work. Practical advice addressing both technique and style is interwoven with a shrewd analysis of the writer’s life, and its many glorious and painful corners. From finding your voice, all the way to building relationships with publishers and navigating social media, ideas are unpacked with compelling personal experience and insights.

The Writer Laid Bare is as much a memoir as it is a guidebook. Kofman’s charismatic wisdom shines through, as the writer lays bare her own mythology—her nuanced, divergent identities across Russia, Israel and Australia; her role as a wife, mother and daughter; and her resolution to build a creative life. The writer’s life is one that has challenged and nurtured Kofman over many years:

My vocabulary is consistent with who I am—a sensualist and a romantic. It expresses my predilection for weaving myths out of daily happenings, for elevating reality.

Through the lens of her previous memoirs, The Dangerous Bride and Imperfect, Kofman discusses roadblocks, discipline and ‘writing what is urgent.’ Alongside are memorable stories of literary giants (Hemingway, Didion and Garner, to name but a few) and numerous extracts from the canon that encourage writers to examine their own habits. I audibly laughed on several occasions at Kofman’s playful commentary, such as her wariness towards other writers’ ‘helpful advice.’

One of the final chapters, The Pram in the Hallway, is tender and strikingly candid. I have no doubt it will be of particular comfort to readers navigating the lines between expectations, routines and the realities of parenthood.

The Writer Laid Bare invites us to ‘walk into the flames’ and find the resilience within to sustain our own art. It’s a guide for writing, but also a manifesto for a creative life.

— Anna Rodway