Latest news with #Landfall
Newsroom
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Newsroom
Wilkins flies in late to win Ockhams
High drama on Wednesday night at the Ockham national book awards as Damien Wilkins only just made it from Wellington to Auckland in time to be presented with $65,000 as the winner of the fiction prize. Delayed flights meant the Wellington writer had to literally run onto the stage at the Aotea Centre for the final announcement of the night at the Ockham awards held in the Aotea Centre. His novel Delirious won the fiction prize and $65,000. In any case, righteousness and natural justice prevailed at the 2025 Ockham national book awards with the two best books published last year winning major awards: huzzah to Wilkins, and to Rotorua activist Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku, who won the $12,000 nonfiction prize for her astounding memoir Hine Toa. Both books are destined to re-enter the bestseller charts like two blazing comets. Other winners included Emma Neale, who won the $12,000 poetry prize for Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit, and Deidre Brown and Ngarino Ellis, authors of the winner of the $12,000 illustrated nonfiction prize, Toi Te Mana: An Indigenous History of Māori Art. Prize money of $3000 was also awarded to the winners of best first book. The full list appears at the end of this article. The main spotlight belonged to Wilkins and his $65,000 windfall. It has been a long time between drinks: he won the fiction prize way back in 1994 for his debut novel The Miserables (recent inane review on GoodReads, by someone called Annie: 'Found it rather inaccessible, meandering, plotless and dry. Who gives out these literary awards anyway?') although he also won the prize for best YA novel for Aspiring at the 2020 children's book awards. Delirious may be his masterpiece, the book he was meant to write. It tells the story of a nice old couple who sell up their home and move to the arid lands of a retirement village. Pip Adam's review in ReadingRoom got it perfectly: 'At its heart it's a deeply affecting novel about the almost unbearable pains of being alive that are usually impossible for us to look at directly … It's an incredibly accomplished novel which demonstrates a deep and lived understanding of the ways we carry on while knowing what is coming for us at increasing speed the longer we live. In many ways this book destroyed me. It brought me to tears more than once, but it's a gift.' Note the highly emotional response. It's also there in the recent review in Landfall, by Breton Dukes, who wrote, 'Like Damien, maybe you have had a sister die, or a mum go nutty … In Delirious, Wilkins disappears entirely and that's what makes it a great book; it's what makes a masterpiece—the absence of author, combined with riveting content, faultless craft and heart, heart, heart.' If you have not read it already then you ought, ought, ought. Same goes for Hine Toa by Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku. It's such a powerful book. (Congratulations, also, are due to HarperCollins, a commercial publisher which rarely features in the rarefied air of book awards; the commercially unpressured university presses picked up six of the eight Ockham awards on Wednesday. The other exception was Saufo'i Press, which published the winner of the best first book of poetry, Manuali'I by Rex Letoa Paget.) I expected Ngāhuia would write fascinating chapters on her involvement with emergent Māori rights group Ngā Tamatoa at Auckland University in the 1970s, and she did not disappoint. But she was just as compelling in her personal stories growing up in Rotorua and, later, realising she was lesbian. It's a sexy book. Hine Toa marks her second win at the national book awards, after winning the culture prize in 2008 as co-author of Mau Moko: The World of Māori Tattoo. No surprises that Deidre Brown and Ngarino Ellis' Toi Te Mana: An Indigenous history of Māori art won the illustrated nonfiction prize. As Eva Corlett wrote in The Guardian, 'A landmark book celebrating Māori art has clocked up a couple of impressive firsts: not only is it the most comprehensive account of creative work by Indigenous New Zealanders ever published, it is also the first wide-ranging art history written entirely by Māori scholars.' It has since been published internationally, by the University of Chicago Press in the US and Australia. As for Emma Neale's prize-winning Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit, it follows the possibly equal honour of being named by poetry czar Nick Ascroft in ReadingRoom as one of the best collections of 2024. 'A lot always happens in an Emma Neale poem,' wrote the czar. 'You are not left meandering imponderables. Each is told with her fluid grace.' Nicely put; and indeed I saw Ascroft at the awards ceremony, drinking fluids with considerable grace. It was a good night. Arts minister Paul Goldsmith was there. Miriama Kamo was a gracious and regal MC. Huzzah, most of all, to the winners of the 2025 awards. They deserve their loot and more so they deserve the most important thing: to be read. JANN MEDLICOTT ACORN PRIZE FOR FICTION Delirious by Damien Wilkins (Te Herenga Waka University Press) GENERAL NONFICTION AWARD Hine Toa: A Story of Bravery by Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku (HarperCollins) BOOKHUB AWARD FOR ILLUSTRATIVE NONFICTION Toi te Mana: An Indigenous History of Māori Art by Deidre Brown and Ngarino Ellis (Auckland University Press) MARY AND PETER BIGGSY PRIZE FOR POETRY Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit by Emma Neale (Otago University Press) HUBERT CHURCH PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST WORK OF FICTION Poorhara by Michelle Rahurahu (Te Herenga Waka University Press) JESSIE MACKAY PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST BOOK OF POETRY Manuali'I by Rex Letoa Paget (Saufo'i Press) JUDITH BINNEY PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST BOOK OF ILLUSTRATED NONFICTION Sight Lines: Women and Art in Aotearoa by Kirsty Baker (Auckland University Press) EH McCORMICK PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST BOOK OF GENERAL NONFICTION The Chthonic Cycle by Una Cruickshank (Te Herenga Waka University Press)
Newsroom
30-04-2025
- General
- Newsroom
The curious case of the Catholic bigot
Dear old Landfall, New Zealand's most distinguished literary periodical founded in 1947, reaches a significant milestone later this year when it publishes its 250th issue. The occasion merits a fond retrospective of the journal which has published everybody who is anybody in New Zealand letters, and held fast to a model of good taste, intellectual rigour and liberal ideology. But its back pages also include one particular review of such extraordinary awfulness that it continues to draw attention like a fire in the night – and serves as a warning that others, one day when you least expect it, will let rip and do unto you. The review was by Auckland novelist Michael Joseph. He went by the pen-name of MK Joseph. It appears in the June 1959 issue of Landfall. It's a good issue. There are two poems from promising young turk CK Stead (27), and that dark classic by Maurice Gee, 'The Losers', a short story about horse racing, with its cruel and violent denouement: 'He went down on his knees and looked underneath the float; and stood up immediately, leaving the torch on the ground. He moved to the roadside and sat down in the grass with his feet in a gutter. Soon he began to retch. He didn't notice that another car had stopped and other people were climbing into the float, but he heard the horse scream…' MK Joseph's review of A Way of Life by James Courage releases its scream on page 178. The reviewer and the reviewed led lives in opposite directions. Joseph was born in Essex and emigrated to New Zealand with his parents, while Courage grew up on a sheep station in Canterbury and got the hell out of New Zealand as soon as he could. Joseph grew up in Bethlehem, attended school in Te Puke and boarded at Sacred Heart in Auckland, studied at Auckland University and later at Merton College in Oxford, from 1936-9. When war broke out, he joined the Royal Artillery and fought in the Battle of the Bulge. He returned to New Zealand after the war, joined the English department at the University of Auckland as full professor, married, and had five children. He was the author of six novels. Courage lived the rest of his life in London, and was the author of eight novels. His most famous book, A Way of Life, was New Zealand's first openly same-sex novel. There wasn't actually any sex in it; the author took many lovers home to his apartment, but was too timid to go into any erotic detail in fiction. In 1953, he wrote New Zealand's first openly gay short story, 'Guest at the Wedding', published in Landfall in 1953. The hottest it gets is when Hamish, who wears 'a Stetson hat, tight flannel trousers, a school blazer and yellow brogue shoes', wrestles nude with a groom on a beach on Stewart Island. A Way of Life was published in London and New York. Two years later in New Zealand, a committee made up of representatives from the Justice Department and Crown Law advised the Customs Department that the book was 'unacceptable'. It was withdrawn from libraries and bookstores. By then, several reviews had already appeared; the worst was by MK Joseph. Charles Brasch, editor and founder of Landfall, took the delicate operation of commissioning reviews with seriousness and sensitivity. He wanted to do right by Courage. He was a good and loyal friend, and like Courage, stayed close to the closet (he was attracted to men and women; his friend Margaret Scott told the Otago Daily Times, 'Charles and I slept together off and on for some years. He thought if he found the right woman then he could settle down and have a family'). Brasch put his trust in Joseph. He wrote to Courage ('Dear Jim') in February 1959, 'I shall probably ask MK Joseph to review it; he's a cool, judicious man who doesn't make rash judgments; and I should expect him to be reasonably sympathetic although he's a Catholic; there's hardly anyone else I'd care to ask.' Later in the year, he wrote to Courage again. 'I'm sorry to have to warn you that LF's review was not at all sympathetic, to my dismay.' New York edition of A Way of Love by James Courage. The review was hateful, patronising, repulsed, the ravings of a Catholic bigot. Little of it was about the book. Joseph writes, 'It is inevitable that the serious writer should wish to write of homosexual love. But once he tries to present it on the lines of a grand passion, he is immediately up against … insuperable difficulties. 'The first difficulty is to persuade most of his readers to accept homosexual relations as being on the same plane as heterosexual ones: they may be serious, destructive or pathetic: but any attempt to make them the subject of exalted lyricism must almost inevitably collapse into disgust or derision. 'The relation of man and woman is profoundly complementary, and not simply on the physical level. It is 'natural', in either sense of the word, whether one regards nature as the manifestation of a controlling intelligence or as the working of blind evolutionary forces. 'And it is not only a social function – it is the basic function without which no society exists; whereas homosexual relationship is outside any possible society, in a world of illusion and sentimental make-believe. That is why any homosexual love-story must almost automatically come out on the same level as the unreal and sentimental heterosexual love-story. 'Even if the writer can persuade us to accept his story on the same level as a tale of normal love, there is the difficulty of writing, truthfully but unselfconsciously, about the act of sex itself, at once the most natural and kindly of human acts.' Courage, then, was not only a degenerate but a fool. Joseph holds his nose and says of A Way of Love from a great height: 'Its attempts to persuade us of the reality of this passion have a desperate ring.' I sought comment from Chris Brickell, an Otago University academic and editor of James Courage Diaries (2020). He replied, 'MK Joseph's review of A Way of Love was a shocker, even for 1959. After reading it, Bill Pearson, a closeted homosexual man and Joseph's colleague in the English Department at Auckland University, decided not to reveal anything about his personal life to the other academics. At the same time, however, the queer community was becoming increasingly visible in the bigger cities. There was some coverage in the newspapers, not all of it as condemnatory as Joseph's piece. The Dorian Society was established in Wellington just three years later, and in 1963 its legal subcommittee took the first tentative steps towards law reform. 'Paul Millar, Pearson's biographer, blames Joseph's conservative Catholicism for the tone of his review. But Joseph was not the only one who regarded homosexual men as, in his words, 'inherently tragic'. 'The Woman Problem', an essay by poet and satirist ARD Fairburn, was a case in point. Fairburn railed against the 'dominating position' of homosexual writers in New Zealand culture. As 'foxes without tails', they were, 'in a deep and tragic sense, isolated from the full human context'. 'There was a twist, as there usually is. In an increasingly liberal society, the intemperate words of Joseph and Fairburn did their posthumous reputations no good at all.' But Joseph didn't have to wait to die before he was trashed. Allen Curnow got to him in his last years. It was time to reach out to likely the last man standing who moved with MK Joseph, with Bill Pearson, with Allen Curnow, who lived across the road from him in Parnell: CK Stead (92). * What did MK Joseph look like? He had a drooping moustache and he looked like an old English gentleman really. And he was very polite and very unaggressive. I'm sure he was astonished to find that he offended anyone. Mike was very tranquil and when we went to dinner at his place in Remuera, he always showed us his latest developments in his train set. A train set? Yes. He had a train set all set up. You know, the way people sometimes do with stations and everything. When did you first meet him? I was his MA student. I had him as a supervisor. So I got to know him very well because I met him once a week. He was very gentle and kind. But he had a very soothing voice. So if you'd had a hard night before, it was easy to go to sleep in his lectures. Not that they weren't good lectures. They were actually very substantial. MK Joseph at his home in Remuera. What sort of rooster was he? He was a nice old rooster to deal with. But he was a very devout Catholic, and produced a number of children. And so he wrote that review of the James Courage novel in which he said it wasn't possible to have a civilised society based on homosexuality, and that really deeply offended our other colleague, Bill Pearson, who was secretly gay. Bill was always ashamed of himself for not having come out because he made his character in his novel Coal Flat heterosexual. It was really Bill himself. So Bill was so offended by that review of James Courage's novel that when he reviewed one of Mike's novels, in the Listener, he kind of savaged him in revenge. And then he thought Mike had taken a slight revenge on him by representing him in his novel A Pound of Saffron as a drunk who danced wildly at a party and was sort of embarrassing everybody. Was this a tableau that Mike had possibly witnessed? I think so because Bill liked to get pissed. He drank a lot in those days. He eased off in his later life. He only drank beer, but he drank a hell of a lot of it. And he always had a very strange walk with his arms wide, rather wide on either side of him, as though he was trying to look like a tough guy. Bob Chapman also described Bill Pearson's dancing at parties, he wrote somewhere that it was wild and uncoordinated, like he shouldn't have tried because he was such an awful dancer. And anyway, Mike put it into his novel and Bill saw it as a revenge for his unkind review of Mike's novel. Did you read A Pound of Saffron and did you recognise yourself in it? I read it at the time and I remember we all read it trying to pick who was who. But Mike had done a fairly good job of concealing who the people were, but everyone knew it was Bill's character. He's described as tall, which Bill certainly wasn't, and Mike probably thought, 'If I make him tall, no one can say I'm writing about Bill.' But it was obvious. We all knew. * I took out A Pound of Saffron (1962) from the library, and enjoyed it immensely. This is the thing about MK Joseph: he was, sometimes, a wonderful writer and a significant author, and unusual, too, daring to range well beyond any expectations of conforming to the New Zealand literary realism tradition. In 2020, Atuanui Press posthumously issued his speculative novel Tomorrow the World, which imagined Hitler having won the war. His 1967 novel The Hole in the Zero is credited with inventing the word 'hoverboard'. He won the New Zealand national fiction prize with his time-travel novel The Time of Archamuth (1977). He was in possession, then, of a fine and lively mind. A Pound of Saffron operates as a satire, a bonfire of vanities at the English department, and it's often very funny; Joseph is also very skilled at setting, with descriptions of Albert Park in spring, an academic's converted boat shed on the North Shore ('His wife found it useful for adultery'), and walking from Queen St to the ferry terminal: 'When he reached the last intersection, the air changed sweetly. He emerged from the hot concrete canyon, lined with banks and espresso bars, big stores and novelty shops, movie-houses, insurance-offices, windows full of lingerie, motormowers and LP records; a perfume of salt, smoke and tar cleaned the air; cranes swayed and a bass hooter drummed; the gulls screamed, delighting in scraps. And here were the ships – the ferries plying their harbour shuttle, white sails and moored launches, the grey warships across the water, tankers, coasters, tramps out of Hong Kong or Surabaya.' Fantastic; and contemporary, too, because Joseph's sensory perceptions are as accurate now as they were then – in that last intersection of Queen St to Customs St, the air (and the light) really does change, sweetly. The book loathes racists: 'I won't have my son getting mixed up with a Maori tart,' says an awful old bag. It hates rock'n'roll, too. Here is the party where Bill Pearson is about to make his entrance: 'By 9 o'clock, the cool jazz discs had been put away, and from the record-player came a sound of idiots mumbling over untuned guitars.' (But Joseph was hip to the fact that some of these idiots were New Zealanders: in another scene, one of his characters sits on his floor, plays an LP by the contemporary Kiwi pop star Johnny Devlin, and enthuses to a visitor, 'It's Johnny, man!') ''It's Johnny, man!': Johnny Devlin LP, 1959, courtesy of his nephew, broadcaster Martin Devlin. And so to the scene with poor Bill Pearson, that 'awful dancer'. The party gets loud. Everyone is drinking. 'The unpublished novelist, a tall loose-limbed man, was being the life of the party by doing improvised dances in the middle of the floor with one of the arty girls. The students politely ignored him.' That's not too bad, but it gets worse. The party gets louder. Everyone is drunk. 'The novelist led a crowd down to the beach for what he called an open-air demonstration of free dance. He had soon fallen off a rock into a shallow pool: he was carried back, dried, and soothed with brandy.' The 'soothed' is very good. Poor, humiliated Pearson, knowing everyone knew the character was based on him, seething in the staff room at Auckland University, staring daggers at Michael Kennedy Joseph, that tranquil Catholic with his train set and his moustache; at least Pearson could claim he was, in fact, a published novelist, a year later, when Coal Flat appeared. But there was someone else in the staff room, his lips clenched around his pipe, also looking at Joseph and coveting ideas of retribution, in this golden age of an all but abandoned pastime in New Zealand letters – the literary feud. * MK Joseph's best-known novel was A Soldier's Tale (1977). It was made into a film, shot in France with Gabriel Byrne, later to star in The Usual Suspects, and French actress Marianne Basler. The book was reissued in 2010 by HarperCollins. Film poster for A Soldier's Tale, starring Gabrielle Byrne and Marianne Basler. Its synopsis: 'Normandy, 1944. In a small village near Bayeux, a young soldier comes across an isolated farmhouse, where a woman waits alone. As they talk, three grim-faced Frenchmen arrive to take her away for 'questioning', telling him she betrayed their Resistance colleagues to the Gestapo, through her SS lover. The soldier is armed, and forces them to leave her – but they all know he will eventually have to move on, and the woman will be theirs …' It ends like no other novel has ever ended. The woman makes the soldier a bowl of soup with meatloaf. She runs a bath. He sits by the fire. 'She led him towards the bedroom … Afterwards she rested on her back … Perhaps we shall have a baby, she said.' Perhaps not. The French Resistance are waiting to get to her, torture her, rape her, kill her. In the morning, the soldier puts a towel around his waist, strips her naked, and kisses her. She likes that. 'With my right hand I loosened the towel and reached for the long knife which I'd strapped to my thigh, under the towel … Then I went down and in with the long knife behind the collarbone.' She doesn't like that. 'She groaned and fell onto the flagged floor and began to kick and scrabble like an old dog dying in the road, but I knew that it was as good as over.' Then he goes into great, loving detail about laying her body on the bed and arranging a crucifix and two lit candles beside her. The narrator of A Soldier's Tale concludes his story: 'Sometimes it appals me, and sometimes I think it's the finest love story I know. Cruelty and mercy share the same human heart.' Jesus Christ. Au revoir, 'old dog'; such is love among the ruins. Back to my interview with CK Stead. * So you were a friend of Mike Joseph. Yes. He was an all right guy really. And I did feel sorry for him when Curnow wrote a vicious but brilliant poem about Mike's novel A Soldier's Tale. At the same time I could only concede it's absolutely brilliant. Do you know Allen's poem? No. Oh God, it's so savage and so brilliant. Was there some personal animus behind it? Well, Allen didn't like Joseph's view of homosexuality. Allen deeply disapproved of that. At one point there was a famous case involving a guy who was a producer of plays, and he produced Curnow's play Moon Season, which really rather bombed out and was unsuccessful. His name was Ronnie Barker. He wasn't the famous Ronnie Barker. He was the unfamous Ronnie Barker, and he was caught sucking someone off in central Auckland by a cop who was just there to entrap gays. Mike and Bill Pearson were in the university common room together. And Bill said, 'That was terrible. That was just an entrapment.' And Mike said, 'Well, we've got to protect our children.' And of course Bill was furious. He knew it was a nonsense that gay people were hellbent on corrupting children, but it was a popular thought back then. I mean, [Frank] Sargeson had that problem too. People thought he had to be kept away from their children in case he seduced them. What happened to poor old Ronnie Barker? He didn't get imprisoned. They tried to make out it was a medical problem. I ran into him on Princes Street and he was showing us how he had to take the green pills and the blue pills and the red pills. Ronnie was very theatrical. He put on this very funny skit about being absolutely engulfed in these pills. Was the medication supposed to suppress his gay cravings or some bullshit like that? I think that was the theory. It might have been something his defence lawyer made up to keep him out of jail. His lawyer was John Haigh, the great liberal lawyer of the times. The father of John Haigh, later one of the great criminal lawyers at the Auckland High Court. Yes. And so Allen was very, very, very fond of Ronnie. Ronnie had a wife and two children but clearly Ronnie was bisexual and active on both fronts, so to speak. So Mike said this thing and of course it got back to Allen, who held it against Mike. Allen and Bill both sort of hated Mike as a Catholic bigot and he probably was a Catholic bigot. Tell me about this poem that Allen wrote. It's dripping with heavy irony. What happens in the novel is that in order to save a French woman from the terrible things that the Resistance would do to her, because she was an informer, he has sex with her and then he murders her. And then he lays her out beautifully on a table with a crucifix. Kay [Stead's wife] was so revolted by it and felt she could never speak to Mike again. She was so disgusted by the whole idea that he's saving her by killing her, by cutting her throat. Really, it's so outrageous. It made you wonder about Mike sitting up late at night writing these things, these sorts of dirty thoughts. He looked such a saintly person and behaved in such a saintly way, and yet there was this turmoil of dirty thoughts going on in his mind that he could concoct this scenario and then write about it so lovingly. She was quite revolted by it. * The poem by Allen Curnow was titled 'Dichtung und Warhreit', taken from Goethe; translated, it means poetry and truth. It first appeared in Curnow's collection An Incorrigible Music (1979). It came too late for James Courage to read and perhaps exact some kind of satisfaction; he died in 1963. But Bill Pearson would have read it and so, too, would MK Joseph, that 'cool, judicious man', who looked on 'the act of sex itself, [as] at once the most natural and kindly of human acts'. He died in 1981. The poem begins, A man I know wrote a book about a man he knew and this man, or so he the man I know said, fucked and murdered a girl to save her from the others who would have fucked and murdered the girl much more painfully and without finer feelings, for letting the Resistance down and herself be fucked by officers of the arm of occupation…… What a fucking shame, this man the one the man I know knew decided, if you want a job done well do it yourself, and he did and he left her in a bath of blood from the hole in her neck which he carved in soldierly fashion, a way we have in the commandos, after the fuck he knew she didn't of course was her last, and a far better thing, wasn't it? than the bloody fuckup it would have been if he'd left her to be unzippered and jack-the-rippered by a bunch of scabby patriots with no regimental pride. And he had this idea, and he mopped up the mess and he laid her out naked on a bed with a crucifix round her neck for those bastards the others the sods to find, furious it must have made them… 'And,' the poem concludes, 'he wrote this book.'
ABC News
27-04-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
What should I read next? April's best books include exciting new work by Kate Grenville and Andrea Goldsmith
Consider that unpleasant feeling of not knowing what to read next fully remedied: in this month's Best Books column, ABC Arts critics recommend their favourite April reads — and there are some rippers. You'll find a love story with a twist, new works from Australian literary heavyweights, a gruesome thriller, and a crime novel where climate change plays a leading role. Unsettled by Kate Grenville Black Inc Grenville won the 2006 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for her novel The Secret River. ( Supplied: Black Inc ) The colony will fall. Have you heard this phrase recently? It came to mind as I read Kate Grenville's latest work of non-fiction. Grenville has previously written several books that take the theft of this continent as their subject. Her most well-known, The Secret River, was a bestseller inspired by an ancestor who settled on the Hawkesbury River. In Unsettled, Grenville confronts, more directly than before, what it means to live on stolen country. She follows her family's stories to the places where they happened, "the sharp edge of the moving blade that was colonisation". Rather than assuming what she should look for, Grenville decides to take things as they come. She will be open, she decides: learning to see patterns does not mean solving a single crime but confronting a series of them. Sometimes, she finds silence. Sometimes, the loss of things that can never be recovered. Intellectual curiosity alone cannot make sense of everything. It cannot account for what to do with the unalterable truth of the violence committed. When you claim land was "taken up", do you deny the theft? Is it a weasel word, an attempt to domesticate all of the violence involved? As Grenville writes, "Now that we know how the taking was done, what do we do with that knowledge?" Elegantly and simply, Grenville lays out the contours of Australia's theft from her perspective as a descendant of one of the many involved. She practices ways of thinking and living that can make sense, not only of what has been taken, but of what may still be possible. In a continent that often delays confrontation with its colonial history, what happens after the fall? Responsibility for history, Grenville writes, is not always a matter of direct connection or participation: sometimes, one's responsibility is as simple as having benefited from the crime. — Declan Fry Landfall by James Bradley Penguin Landfall is Bradley's eighth work of fiction. ( Supplied: Penguin Books Australia ) A missing child, a noble cop and a race against time: at first glance, Australian writer James Bradley's latest book seems like a bog-standard crime novel. But there's a lot more going on here. Landfall is set in a near-future Sydney where rising sea levels have swallowed parts of the coast. In an area known as the 'Floodline', disadvantaged people live in the top stories of abandoned apartment buildings, improvised jetties providing access in and out. It's from this dystopian nightmare that a six-year-old child, Casey, has disappeared. Photo shows The Book Show Your favourite fiction authors share the story behind their latest books. Sadiya Azad is the detective on the case. A climate refugee herself, Sadiya is determined to find the missing child before a massive cyclone hits the coast. And the odds are stacked against her — she has enemies within the police, her father is ill and a corporation with links to the Floodline is not answering questions. Bradley has done something very clever with Landfall. He entices us in with all the bells and whistles of an unputdownable crime thriller, but then demands that we pay attention and imagine what our country could look like as climate change takes hold. — Claire Nichols The Buried Life by Andrea Goldsmith Transit Lounge Goldsmith's novels include The Prosperous Thief, shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2003. ( Supplied: Transit Lounge ) Adrian Moore is an academic who works on the cultural practices of death — the rituals, the poetry, the gestures and more. And this has nothing, he assures us, to do with the heartbreaking death of his mother when he was very young or the devastating death by suicide of his father a few years later. Nothing. At. All. Nothing to do with his failed relationships or cobwebby house, nothing to do with a certain dissatisfaction or a lack of revelation to his friends. But he is just one character in this novel of delicately interwoven lives. There's also Adrian's friend, Kezi, an artist in her late 20s who has escaped her evangelical family, and longs for some reconnection but has no need to repent or be forgiven. Photo shows Two women with dark hair smiling; one in a pink shirt and gold earrings, with her arm around the other, in a floral shirt Poet Dorothy Porter could take a handful of words and do extraordinary things with them. Her sister celebrates her work in a new memoir. And then, part way through, we encounter a third major character, Laura — a striking, confident, competent town planner, whose verve she somehow ascribes to someone else. We're taken into her worldview, but are also invited to doubt it, at least when it comes to her sense of herself. This spoiler alert is for her, not for the readers: Laura, your husband is awful. As these three characters meet and change each other, we can read their buried and revealed lives on multiple levels at once, which is of course the pleasure of complex fiction. — Kate Evans Consider Yourself Kissed by Jessica Stanley Text Publishing Consider Yourself Kissed is a literary love story set in East London. ( Supplied: Text Publishing ) Coralie Bower, 29, is a copywriter in a London creative agency but dreams of being a writer. She left Sydney in a cloud of shame and relishes, with a sense of masochism, the anonymity the new city offers her. That is, until she meets Adam, a 37-year-old political journalist and father of one. The meet-cute is dispensed with expeditiously: Coralie fishes Adam's five-year-old daughter, Zora, out of a freezing duck pond in the first chapter. They quickly become an item and when her lease runs out, it makes perfect sense for her to move in with him. They are perfect together — someone even stops them in the street to tell them so. But being perfect together isn't enough. Photo shows Close up photo of Saman Shad in floral jacket with red slipstick and brown hair to the side, smiling slightly with closed mouth. When Saman Shad sat down to write her latest novel, she came up against the challenges of how to find time to write with three small children. Despite her youth and inexperience with children, Coralie quickly takes on a large share of caring for Zora, who she loves. We see Coralie assume more and more of the mental load of their domestic lives, a disparity that grows even larger when she and Adam have two children. Coralie's writing aspirations become a distant memory as Adam's professional life takes precedence. Many readers will find Coralie's struggle to juggle her career with caring responsibilities deeply familiar as she's passed over for a promotion, deemed not committed enough to the job because she leaves early to pick up her children. Australian author Jessica Stanley's 2022 debut novel, A Great Hope, featured a fictitious Labor politician at its centre and her interest in politics is evident here too as general elections and Brexit form a backdrop to Coralie and Adam's everyday lives. A clever and funny rom-com in the vein of Dolly Alderton's Good Material, Consider Yourself Kissed shows how relationships have to change to find an equitable balance for both partners. — Nicola Heath Orpheus Nine by Chris Flynn Hachette Australia Flynn says the premise for Orpheus Nine came to him in a dream. ( Supplied: Hachette Australia ) Brace yourself: this supernatural thriller starts with one of the most shocking scenes I've read in a long time. At an under-10s soccer game in regional Victoria, the kids on the field suddenly stop playing. The children seem stuck to the spot, unable to move, before they all start singing in Latin, in high clear voices. Then — and this is where it gets really awful — their bodies start swelling, filling with salt. Moments later, they're all dead. It turns out this hasn't just happened here. All around the world, every nine-year-old has died in the same gruesome way. And from here on in, it will continue, with every child destined to die the day they turn nine. Photo shows A bald white man wearing a white collared shirt, pictured in front of a bookshelf Is it a virus? Alien invasion? Terrorism? It doesn't really matter. What Belfast-born, Australian-based author Chris Flynn (who says the opening of this book came to him in a dream) is interested in is the impact of this event, known as Orpheus Nine, on the parents left in this small country town. Those who have lost their children are angry and ready to take action. Those whose children survived — because they were 10 or older — feel fated for greatness. And the parents of children about to turn nine are desperate to save them from disaster. Cue the rise of "saltfluencers" — Instagram mums promoting the potentially life-saving benefits of a salt-free diet. Orpheus Nine is bizarre, funny, horrifying and tender. Take a deep breath and read it — you'll be glad you did. — Claire Nichols Good Girl by Aria Aber Bloomsbury Publishing Good Girl is shortlisted for the 2025 Women's Prize for Fiction. ( Supplied: Bloomsbury Publishing ) Good Girl is a gritty, dark and rich coming-of-age story. Born and raised in the "ghetto-heart" of Berlin, our protagonist Nila feels adrift, unfixed and burdened by shame. When we meet her, Nila is a party girl. Her life is "purgatorial and meaningless": she goes out, drinks, takes drugs and avoids her father. Nila is Afghan yet denies this at every opportunity, claiming, if asked, an ancestry she considers more palatable: Greek or Italian. Her family's experience of trauma, Islamophobia and racism have left Nila fearful and averse to her own identity. Photo shows A young white woman with chin-length red hair wearing black stands side on against a backdrop of green leafy plants The sad girl novel maps the emotional landscape of a generation. When Nila meets Marlowe, an older American writer, and falls in with his friends, she begins to drift even further from herself. Nila calls herself "his loyal stray" and willingly submits to Marlowe both sexually and socially. Fearing that her new friends will smell "the whiff of my poverty and family history" she lies and lies again, forgoing anything left of her Afghan identity. Aria Aber's prose is lush and unflinching, with the visceral descriptions of sweaty clubs and devastating come-downs highlighting her background as a poet. In a literary trope repeated in recent years — younger waifish woman falls for older and richer man — Aber notably brings a new perspective. She unpacks what it means for Nila to be a "good girl". Is it a submissive partner to Marlowe? A pure and honourable Afghan girl for her family? Or the creative and independent artist that she imagines for herself? — Rosie Ofori Ward I Ate the Whole World to Find You by Rachel Ang Scribe Publications Ang is an artist and writer whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Age and Meanjin. ( Supplied: Scribe Publications ) The art leaps out from the first page: in the foreground, a fish head, menacing and skeletal. In the background, shadows hover around a family seated at a table. In Rachel Ang's graphic novel debut, the unsaid, the implicit, the suggested and the hidden all loom as large, if not larger, than what is visible. The book's five stories follow Jenny, a woman stumbling through her late 20s. In the opening story, 'Hunger', Jenny and a co-worker converse. It is clear they are talking around things, that there is something between them. (Playfully, Ang makes this obscurity explicit by drawing obscured speech bubbles.) Their burgeoning romance grows complicated when he reveals a sexual kink to her. Photo shows An illustration of falling books on a beige background with the ABC logo and text reading The ABC Book Club The ABC's place for readers to talk books — with each other, with books specialists from across the ABC, and with your favourite authors. Jenny is someone who knows but does not know, or perhaps does not want to. Seemingly banal conversations and ordinary events often reveal aspects of the characters they might otherwise wish to conceal. In 'The Passenger', Jenny's self-absorption allows her to conceal jealousy toward a defensive ex, both former partners variously ignoring and embarrassing the ex's new one. In the harrowing 'Your Shadow in the Dark', a cousin's trauma manifests in ways that cause Jenny to miss an opportunity to commiserate with her, then finally learn how to begin to. Such ambiguities and suggestive evocations make each narrative more layered than their surfaces may suggest. The final story offers hope for Jenny, as both language and self split and disintegrate in order to create something new. There is movement and dimension to the contours of Ang's black-and-white line art. Their ability to evoke night scenes and darkness is tactile: check out the beautiful rendering of Melbourne's Peel Street in the opening story. Working into each colour's gradations with subtlety and depth, Ang suggests a place where even the shadows have shadows. — Declan Fry Out of the Woods by Gretchen Shirm Transit Lounge Shirm is the author of Having Cried Wolf, Where the Light Falls and The Crying Room. ( Supplied: Transit Lounge ) Out of the Woods makes a powerful statement about bones: the bones of men and boys killed in the 1995 genocide at Srebrenica, during the Bosnian War. The bones of children and husbands and brothers and friends; the bones of memory, rendered bare by time and memory and scrutiny or lack of it. Bones unearthed, in part, by the UN's International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in 2006. Australian novelist, critic and lawyer Gretchen Shirm draws us into the process of bearing witness, through the character of Jess, a woman who has left Sydney behind to work as a judge's assistant at the tribunal. Through this woman's experience, we are given a delicate and thoughtful entrée into important stories of war, into The Hague, and into one woman's life and history, as she becomes more than a conduit for words and translations. Photo shows The Bookshelf Podcast Image The latest and best fiction reviewed by a team of dedicated bibliophiles. What does it mean that she watches the main defendant and feels some sympathy for his sadness, his sore leg, what she thinks are his kind eyes? What does it mean to make eye contact with this man, who denied holding guns but was part of the bigger-picture organisation? The deeper the story develops, the more we enter into Jess's own life and history: her childhood of poverty and trauma, her love for her son, her tentative relationship with a tall Dutch security guard, with his sweet punning jokes. In between Jess's work and life, there are patches of other text — in a thinner font, stark — of witness testimony, drawn from actual evidence statements from the Tribunal (Shirm herself worked there as a legal intern in 2006). This is a difficult balance, full of ethical and moral decisions — both for the world and for a novelist, an artist — and Shirm handles it beautifully. — Kate Evans Tune in to ABC Radio National at 10am Mondays for and 10am Fridays for .
The Age
22-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
James Bradley's new novel subverts the classic crime-solving trope
Landfall James Bradley Penguin, $34.99 The progress of Tropical Cyclone Alfred towards landfall across south-east Queensland and northern New South Wales prompted warnings and evacuations in areas not typically in the direct path of such severe weather. As communities in Brisbane, the Gold Coast and Northern Rivers braced for impact, I switched between scrolling news reports and social media updates on Alfred, and reading James Bradley's remarkably prescient novel, Landfall. The third instalment in his critically acclaimed climate fiction series, Landfall builds on the themes of its predecessors, Clade and Ghost Species, along with Bradley's 'climate project' —long and short fiction for adults and young people, essays, journalism and non-fiction books — all centred on exploring the impacts and possible remedies to the human-induced climate crisis. While no stranger to writing eco-thrillers, this time Bradley flips the well-loved Australian trope of the missing child by transporting it from its cliched bush setting into a post-climate-apocalypse Sydney, producing a genre mash-up of cli-fi and detective fiction. 'The Melt' — a tipping point climate event — has seen the great Antarctic ice sheets crash into the ocean, sending water levels rising across the world. The Sydney of Landfall is a world inhabited by characters whose lives are irreparably transformed by climate catastrophe, a city whose flooded streets, scorchingly hot suburbs, and social divides, are both alien and unsettlingly familiar. When five-year-old Casey Mitchell goes missing, suspected abducted, Senior Detective Sadiya Azad and her partner Detective Sargeant Paul Findlay, are dispatched to the city's margins to investigate the case. The 'Floodline', a series of half-submerged houses and apartments strung together with makeshift duckboards and pontoons, is home to Casey's mother, Emma and stepfather, Jay, who immediately becomes a suspect based on his social media links to white supremacist groups. Bradley furnishes the novel with the requisite cast of shady characters to question and eliminate: a convicted paedophile lurking around the scene of the girl's disappearance, the head honcho of an exploitative corporation having an illicit love affair, an ex-junkie relative of a person of interest, and various other crooks and rogues operating in a web of corruption who round out the whodunit. When the body of a seemingly unrelated woman turns up in the boot of a burnt-out car, the case becomes curiouser and curiouser. In Landfall, environmental devastation is not merely a backdrop to the action; it is a central character and driving narrative. The police investigation into Casey's disappearance is hindered by the everyday reality of living with the extreme heat and inundation of a coastal city on the brink of societal collapse. The novel's chapters are titled by days of the week, running Monday through Friday. Each passing day builds the urgency of finding the girl and is amplified by the impending landfall of Nasreem, 'a massive cyclone …building over the Pacific', which is expected to be unprecedented in scale and devastation. Bradley's world-building in this speculative novel is never heavy-handed. Future tech feels near-at-hand: drones collecting footage of protesters, AI assistants and AR lenses, a failing power grid, and street cooling, while the tumultuous world of crop failures, fires, floods and hurricanes is an all too foreseeable future, 'created decades before catching up with the world'.
Sydney Morning Herald
22-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
James Bradley's new novel subverts the classic crime-solving trope
Landfall James Bradley Penguin, $34.99 The progress of Tropical Cyclone Alfred towards landfall across south-east Queensland and northern New South Wales prompted warnings and evacuations in areas not typically in the direct path of such severe weather. As communities in Brisbane, the Gold Coast and Northern Rivers braced for impact, I switched between scrolling news reports and social media updates on Alfred, and reading James Bradley's remarkably prescient novel, Landfall. The third instalment in his critically acclaimed climate fiction series, Landfall builds on the themes of its predecessors, Clade and Ghost Species, along with Bradley's 'climate project' —long and short fiction for adults and young people, essays, journalism and non-fiction books — all centred on exploring the impacts and possible remedies to the human-induced climate crisis. While no stranger to writing eco-thrillers, this time Bradley flips the well-loved Australian trope of the missing child by transporting it from its cliched bush setting into a post-climate-apocalypse Sydney, producing a genre mash-up of cli-fi and detective fiction. 'The Melt' — a tipping point climate event — has seen the great Antarctic ice sheets crash into the ocean, sending water levels rising across the world. The Sydney of Landfall is a world inhabited by characters whose lives are irreparably transformed by climate catastrophe, a city whose flooded streets, scorchingly hot suburbs, and social divides, are both alien and unsettlingly familiar. When five-year-old Casey Mitchell goes missing, suspected abducted, Senior Detective Sadiya Azad and her partner Detective Sargeant Paul Findlay, are dispatched to the city's margins to investigate the case. The 'Floodline', a series of half-submerged houses and apartments strung together with makeshift duckboards and pontoons, is home to Casey's mother, Emma and stepfather, Jay, who immediately becomes a suspect based on his social media links to white supremacist groups. Bradley furnishes the novel with the requisite cast of shady characters to question and eliminate: a convicted paedophile lurking around the scene of the girl's disappearance, the head honcho of an exploitative corporation having an illicit love affair, an ex-junkie relative of a person of interest, and various other crooks and rogues operating in a web of corruption who round out the whodunit. When the body of a seemingly unrelated woman turns up in the boot of a burnt-out car, the case becomes curiouser and curiouser. In Landfall, environmental devastation is not merely a backdrop to the action; it is a central character and driving narrative. The police investigation into Casey's disappearance is hindered by the everyday reality of living with the extreme heat and inundation of a coastal city on the brink of societal collapse. The novel's chapters are titled by days of the week, running Monday through Friday. Each passing day builds the urgency of finding the girl and is amplified by the impending landfall of Nasreem, 'a massive cyclone …building over the Pacific', which is expected to be unprecedented in scale and devastation. Bradley's world-building in this speculative novel is never heavy-handed. Future tech feels near-at-hand: drones collecting footage of protesters, AI assistants and AR lenses, a failing power grid, and street cooling, while the tumultuous world of crop failures, fires, floods and hurricanes is an all too foreseeable future, 'created decades before catching up with the world'.
