Tracker by Alexis Wright; Pig by Matilde Pratesi; Taking Manhattan by Russell Shorto
Tracker by Alexis Wright (And Other Stories, £19.99)
'Am I Aboriginal, or how much of an Aboriginal am I?' This question, posed by Tracker Tilmouth, encapsulates the profound introspection at the heart of Tracker
.
More than a biography, Alexis Wright's work is a living, breathing testament to oral storytelling. Chronicling the extraordinary life of Aboriginal leader Tracker Tilmouth, she assembles a chorus of voices, refusing to smooth them into a singular narrative. The result is messy, brilliant, and deeply human. Tilmouth emerges as a fiercely intelligent, often mischievous visionary – someone who saw beyond political pragmatism to a radically different future for his people. Wright challenges western notions of biography, privileging contradiction and collective memory over linear storytelling. It demands patience, but the reward is immense: a portrait not just of a man but of history in motion. Storytelling here is resistance – complex, unfiltered, and utterly compelling.
– Adam Wyeth
Pig by Matilde Pratesi (Little Brown, £20)
This debut novel, shortlisted in 2023 for the Caledonia Novel Award, addresses the topics of neurodiversity and coercive relationships. However, the author's naive understanding of these subjects makes for an uncomfortable read. Vale, our pig-obsessed protagonist and narrator, is inconsistent as a character. The young Italian woman displays a lack of self-awareness when such is required of the plot and ample self-awareness when
that
is required of the plot. Vale's world, viewpoint and experience of a coercive relationship with her childhood friend challenge credibility. Pratesi may be well intentioned, but this is not matched by a knowledge base worthy of the neurodiverse community. Moreover, this lack of rigour does an injustice to Pratesi's characters and her readers.
– Brigid O'Dea
Taking Manhattan: The extraordinary events that created New York and shaped America by Russell Shorto (Swift Press, £20)
New York was not named twice because it was 'so good', as the song says, but because two European imperial powers successively ruled and developed it on land that they annexed from the indigenous inhabitants. New Amsterdam, on the southern tip of Manhattan Island, was created 400 years ago, in 1625, by the Dutch West India Company. It was renamed 40 years later following a 10-day siege by four gunboats sent by Britain's Duke of York, who had been gifted its contiguous lands by his brother, King Charles II. A bloodless Anglo-Dutch 'corporate merger' then begat the 'hybrid colony', this scholarly and engaging history shows.
– Ray Burke
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Irish Times
09-05-2025
- Irish Times
The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon: Fictionalised murder mystery inspired by a towering real-life midwife
The Frozen River Author : Ariel Lawhon ISBN-13 : 9781800755529 Publisher : Swift Press Guideline Price : £14.99 In November 1789, midwife and healer Martha Ballard is summoned to determine the cause of death of a man entombed in Maine's frozen Kennebec River. Her profession ensures she is more aware than most of the intimate lives of her close-knit community of Hallowell. Ballard keeps a diary, in which she not only records births and deaths, but also any crimes brought to her attention. She had noted the dead man's name months earlier as one of two alleged rapists of a local woman. Ballard declares the death a murder, but when the town's new physician disagrees, she decides to investigate alone. From the striking opening scene describing the frozen body to the thrilling showdown and delivery of justice – in several forms – months later, this dramatic narrative powers along as sure and strong as the Kennebec itself. A bestselling author of historical fiction, Lawhon has always taken pride in sticking closely to fact. The Frozen River is inspired by real events rather than based on them, making it her first deviation from 'biographical fiction'. She alters dates and events to suit her narrative, yet Martha Ballard (who delivered more than 1,000 babies in her career without losing a mother in childbirth) and her diaries were very real. It was unusual for a woman in Ballard's situation to be literate, making her decades of record-keeping even more remarkable. Lawhon's Martha regards her diary as a form of safekeeping, a chronicle of facts not feelings: 'Memory is a wicked thing that warps and twists. But paper and ink receive the truth without emotion, and they read it back without impartiality.' The imagery is consistently imaginative and period-specific ('the light feels weak and sickly, as though sifted through old cheesecloth') and Martha's character and her relationship with her community and family make for compelling reading. The research underpinning The Frozen River is impressively extensive, though the serving sizes can be large, such as passages about the ratification of the constitution or the workings of the legal system. Martha Ballard's life and legacy are impressive. She was great-aunt to Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross, and great-great-grandmother of one of America's first female physicians. Through fiction, Lawhon celebrates and honours a memorable, and very real, woman.
Irish Times
02-05-2025
- Irish Times
Tracker by Alexis Wright; Pig by Matilde Pratesi; Taking Manhattan by Russell Shorto
Tracker by Alexis Wright (And Other Stories, £19.99) 'Am I Aboriginal, or how much of an Aboriginal am I?' This question, posed by Tracker Tilmouth, encapsulates the profound introspection at the heart of Tracker . More than a biography, Alexis Wright's work is a living, breathing testament to oral storytelling. Chronicling the extraordinary life of Aboriginal leader Tracker Tilmouth, she assembles a chorus of voices, refusing to smooth them into a singular narrative. The result is messy, brilliant, and deeply human. Tilmouth emerges as a fiercely intelligent, often mischievous visionary – someone who saw beyond political pragmatism to a radically different future for his people. Wright challenges western notions of biography, privileging contradiction and collective memory over linear storytelling. It demands patience, but the reward is immense: a portrait not just of a man but of history in motion. Storytelling here is resistance – complex, unfiltered, and utterly compelling. – Adam Wyeth Pig by Matilde Pratesi (Little Brown, £20) This debut novel, shortlisted in 2023 for the Caledonia Novel Award, addresses the topics of neurodiversity and coercive relationships. However, the author's naive understanding of these subjects makes for an uncomfortable read. Vale, our pig-obsessed protagonist and narrator, is inconsistent as a character. The young Italian woman displays a lack of self-awareness when such is required of the plot and ample self-awareness when that is required of the plot. Vale's world, viewpoint and experience of a coercive relationship with her childhood friend challenge credibility. Pratesi may be well intentioned, but this is not matched by a knowledge base worthy of the neurodiverse community. Moreover, this lack of rigour does an injustice to Pratesi's characters and her readers. – Brigid O'Dea Taking Manhattan: The extraordinary events that created New York and shaped America by Russell Shorto (Swift Press, £20) New York was not named twice because it was 'so good', as the song says, but because two European imperial powers successively ruled and developed it on land that they annexed from the indigenous inhabitants. New Amsterdam, on the southern tip of Manhattan Island, was created 400 years ago, in 1625, by the Dutch West India Company. It was renamed 40 years later following a 10-day siege by four gunboats sent by Britain's Duke of York, who had been gifted its contiguous lands by his brother, King Charles II. A bloodless Anglo-Dutch 'corporate merger' then begat the 'hybrid colony', this scholarly and engaging history shows. – Ray Burke
Irish Times
25-04-2025
- Irish Times
Barley Patch by Gerald Murnane: An intense single-mindedness
Barley Patch Author : Gerald Murnane ISBN-13 : 978 1 9167 5114 9 Publisher : And Other Stories Guideline Price : £14.99 The Australian writer Gerald Murnane is one of the literary world's idiosyncrasies . His work is demanding enough to attract regular tips for the Nobel Prize in Literature, but irresistible enough to give him a dedicated more-than-cult following. He attracts praise from writers such as JM Coetzee: he is the Nobel laureate's Nobel-laureate-in-waiting. Sheffield-based publisher And Other Stories has done sterling work in the last six years to bring Murnane's work back into print. Murnane writes about himself, or more accurately about a 'personage' (a favourite Murnane word) who to all intents and purposes is Murnane. All of his mature fiction, barring a couple of early novels, comprises what he calls 'no more and no less than an accurate report of some of the contents of [my] mind'. These contents are what most of us would call memories, but which Murnane thinks of as images. Even when recalling a favourite book – and of the thousand books he read from the 1960s to the 1990s, only 'twenty or so had left on me some sort of lasting impression' – what he remembers is not the plot or characters but the experience of reading: 'those mental entities that had come to me almost stealthily while I read'. [ Gerald Murnane: 'I could be killed by my own writing' Opens in new window ] There is, as this suggests, an intense single-mindedness to Murnane's work – a literal manifestation of the fact that, he says, he writes everything by typing with one finger. It's a hermetically sealed world that can be hard to break into, but it's worth making the journey. One of his novels, Inland, turns repeatedly to a sentence from the poet Paul Éluard: 'There is another world but it is in this one' – as good a description of a work of fiction as we could ask for. And now we have a reissue of a novel – sorry, 'fiction' – first published in 2009, 14 years after Murnane had declared himself done with writing fiction. READ MORE Barley Patch, then, is a book of fiction explaining why he has stopped writing fiction. That's very Murnane. And in a sense Barley Patch is his most Murnane work of all, the central text to which the earlier books led and from which the later books flow. Less a stand-alone novel than an episode of his great ongoing project, it contains all the elements Murnane-watchers expect: highly attuned memory, a specific sense of place, familiar subject matter (books, childhood love, horse racing), his fears (fast flowing water, meals prepared by other people) and a quietly mischievous quality. The books Murnane discusses include Josephine Tey's Brat Farrar, Charles Kingsley's Westward Ho! and adventure comics of his youth. These work as examples of what Murnane himself does not, cannot, do – literature of the imagination. 'I had never created any character or imagined any plot' in his own fiction, Murnane writes. 'I had no imagination.' Perhaps making a virtue out of a necessity, imagination is not what he values anyway: he prefers to present experiences in perfectly grammatical prose, and he reads each sentence he writes aloud, working and reworking it until he is satisfied. This makes the reading of Murnane's prose a pleasing process for the reader too, and it works best in a traditional sense when Murnane – or the Murnane surrogate ('I would remind the reader that every sentence hereabouts is part of a work of fiction') – is recalling his past, rather than talking about books. There is a charming and touching sequence about an early girlfriend who grew apart from him because the young Murnane couldn't resist spending his time with her 'explaining how one or another poem or work of fiction that I had read recently affected me'. There is also evidence that Murnane does after all have imagination, because of the creativity with which he shapes other stories from his past. We get a drily funny account of visiting a monk, who subsequently quits the monastery with a stolen pair of binoculars that he takes to a horse race (Murnane in tow) and makes up for lost time by quickly acquiring a girlfriend ('somewhat plump and dressed in pink'). Elsewhere Murnane reports how a nun once told him she was disappointed in his work because of the sex in it. Murnane observes, with inevitable precision, that of the half million words of his fiction to that point, 'no more than 150 [words] could be said to describe an act of sexual intercourse [and] only two refer to any part of the human body: the words are hands and knees .' In a sense Murnane's books work best in accumulation – which makes it hard to recommend the best point to begin. Barley Patch, being so central to his output, is probably not the one: The Plains or even an early novel like Tamarisk Row is more friendly to the newcomer. When I interviewed him for this paper in 2023, Murnane observed that he had given up writing four times, 'but this time it's for good'. He immediately qualified that – he is still writing, even if not publishing. There will be more, and we should be glad.
