Fiction

The Books of Jacob is a book about the internet. That is to say, it’s a response to the experience of encountering information online, and realising as a result that ‘many things remain quietly connected’, as Tokarczuk writes in her postscript. This realisation in turn gives rise to the notion of the system as a whole, a kind of totality – everything that has happened ‘alongside all that might have happened as well or instead.’

Where will you go? Will you follow Lili, an Australian young woman of Asian heritage in 1980s France, or Lyle, a middle-aged man who also migrated from Asia in post-pandemic Australia?

Kassab presents a full and rich account of life outside of major cities, and, continuing the moral project begun in her debut work, House of Youssef, she draws us into this world to separate myth from reality.

The Last One takes us with Fatima as she builds both an individual and collective identity through old and new connections and orientations.

Lemon begins like a conventional crime novel – there’s a detective interrogating a suspect, trying to pin the murder of a young woman onto an obviously vulnerable young man.

We might, like Ćehić’s characters, brood on our paralysis by the information economy in its seamless loop of sampling, packaging and delivering our private desires to our doors. But what else can we say besides the obvious cultural diagnosis and the self-affirming circuit of the minimalist style in the age of distractions? Is there a way to argue for a technique that is not about the internet, our lord and saviour, at least not solely?

This is a book that does not attempt to contain its own reception or anticipate its reader’s reproach. We aren’t asked to pity the protagonist, or to see virtue in her unhappiness. We aren’t asked to find her funny, either, although we do.

Wild Abandon reads like a Künstlerroman by proxy, its subject the self-consciousness of being an Anglo-Australian writer and the challenges of resisting the pull of ‘greater’ cultural centres and finding a ‘natural’ voice.

History happens to us in dreams: it is experienced and understood there as much as in our waking lives.

In the history of Black authors writing in French – and in Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s new novel, winner of the prestigious Prix Goncourt – it turns out that authorship matters very much.