Fiction

The Yield is about the elementary miracle of rediscovering oneself; of finding, in the neon-lit recesses of lived and historical pain, a home. It is about the history of this continent as told through the history of Wiradjuri culture. And it is about the fact of this culture existing as a living, breathing work in progress.

His characters are men I have known, men with whom I have lived, hooked-up, been frustrated. They skirt around what they ought to say and try to reinvent themselves and downplay their opportunities and make geographical excuses for their oddities.

History runs in parallel tracks: there is the way things have been told, and the way things were. As in: not colonised, but civilised. And to be made civil, to be made ‘adequate in courtesy and politeness’, as Merriam-Webster defines it, makes it sound like a favour. Language obfuscates. It’s a way of controlling the narrative, forcing the eye into a narrow aperture. A single perspective becomes the singular perspective, which is how colonial literature came to skew mainstream cultural understandings of that period. Mirandi Riwoe seems determined to widen that aperture and, then, to shift the perspective entirely.

In relentless succession, Yumna Kassab’s fictions scrutinise the psychopolitics of displacement in a political landscape fortified by a warrant for Islamophobia.

‘This novel haunts crossing spaces, the liminal zones of libraries’ public privacies (laundering, humming, existential despair), hallways and elevators. And many of us are reading Weather in locked-down homes without much sense of what might happen next. Kazim Ali, writing about the magic of the poetic line, notes: “Something exists in the here and now with no dependence on before or after.” This is the space Offill observes, collecting shards and slivers of questioning.’

Since the publication of my novel The Making of Martin Sparrow in 2018 I have often been asked the question ‘What made you turn to fiction?’ This has turned out, usually, to be a question with a sub-text: ‘What made you, a long-time historian, cross over to the other side?’ But whatever form the question takes, my answer is always the same: ‘That’s easy,’ I say, ‘you get to make things up.’ It’s a rejoinder that is nowhere near as liberating as it may sound. Just what is meant by ‘make things up’? And is the writer now free, discharged of all responsibility to history, having gone over to the other side?

The year is 1998. For those of us Việt Kiều who entered adulthood in the late ‘90s, our coming-of-age coincides with the coming-of-age of our entire community, growing as it did in foreign soil. This is the world recreated in Vivian Pham’s The Coconut Children. It is an intensely evocative and familiar depiction of the Cabramatta from that time, which I can still recall clearly, and traces of which exist to this day.

Living at the centre of European politics for ten years, on the knife edge between the medieval and early modern, Thomas Cromwell may have been able to envision a better age to come. A reader of this bruising, brilliant sequence of novels might now be a little more sceptical. The arc of the moral universe is long in Mantel’s trilogy, but it bends more towards irony than justice.

Tan’s worlds in Rubik and Smart Ovens act as alternate realities to our accelerationist, mishmash world: one in which there are seemingly no limits, yet unspoken social mores reign in the background.

James Bradley has been one of our country’s most outspoken and prolific commentators on the climate crisis, and his warnings about the environmental devastation that is already locked into the future have started to bite in ways that can no longer be ignored. Now, with coronavirus so quickly following the bushfires, we recognise even more clearly the state of constant, underlying dread portrayed in this novel, with its ‘sense of hastening, a dislocation deep in the fabric of things’.