Fiction

In a quietly melancholy way, Bewilderment is a politically defeated novel, and perhaps in a deeper sense defeatist.

Building on and breaking from more than a decade of writing, Lahiri’s Whereabouts (2021) is the product of a becoming which refracts life through the medium of a new linguistic lens.

What makes a book distinct from a meme if both are dependent on a web of intertextual references, some of which are digital and some which rely on the printed page?

The cover of The Rabbits, showing a Hills Hoist and overgrown lawn, indicates something hiding in this suburban household, even as an outsized sun bears down, reminding us of the deep shadows it can cast.

In Jennifer Mills’ The Airways, we travel through a series of bodies. The we here is us, the readers, but we share this journey with something else too – a ghost, a consciousness, something that speaks and thinks and feels but isn’t necessarily a body. It is something that will call into question the way we think about bodies.

Small Joys of Real Life is a quintessentially Melbourne book, with Richards’ characters not straying far from the city and the inner-north postcodes: from share houses to public swimming pools, pubs to bars.

Jennifer Down’s second novel, Bodies of Light, is about Maggie, a child who is not told the truth, and so spends her life attempting to attach herself to things and people that seem true.

At the Edge of the Solid World is a deliberately frustrating novel, as in challenging the assumptions of fiction, it withholds many of its expected pleasures – dramatized action, satisfying narrative closure, the revelation of meaning – and in so doing tears away its common, but illusionary, assurances.

The vague terms ‘experimental’ and ‘avant garde’, which are routinely applied to Quin, convey something of her striking originality, but not the depth and perspicacity of her work.

Her vision and writing of the female experience is curious and expansive, conveyed as it is through these short fictions that take in the messiness of life and arbitrariness of death.