Australian literature
An island of sanity: Gotland by Fiona Capp
Gotland is a memoir-like novel that shuttles between Melbourne in July and October 2010, and the Swedish island of Gotland in September of that year, where Esther’s sick sister, Rosalind, witnesses Esther’s life-changing and possibly life-saving encounter with the sculptor Sven.
On the road again: Great Western Highway: A Love Story
Macris uses his full quiver of unorthodox techniques to pierce any familiar sense of reality, just as he introduces a range of linguistic ephemera – emails, journalese, advertising claptrap – to remind the reader that words can’t be trusted, especially in the novel, the most mendacious of art forms.
Haunted rooms: Hotel Hyperion by Lisa Gorton
Memory, imagination, dreaming, invention and protean makings: such preoccupations are at the heart of Lisa Gorton’s new poetry collection, Hotel Hyperion. This relatively short and condensed book returns again and again… to related tropes and imagery: weather, mirrors, rooms, crystals, hauntings and strange effects of light.
As if the sea curved up: The Railwayman’s Wife by Ashley Hay
One of the strange contradictions of fiction is that immense beauty can often be found in writing about grief and loss. The things we often choose to look away from or avoid in everyday life can, in the hands of a novelist like Ashley Hay, become rich terrain.
Fasten your seatbelts: Prepare the Cabin for Landing by Alan Wearne
If I were selecting a Modern Australian Poetry XI, Wearney, like his near-namesake in another kind of XI, would be one of the automatic choices. To my mind (and ear), he is one of the best formal poets writing in Australia today.