’Ordinary Gods and Monsters’ by Chris Womersley

Suburban Melbourne and two Year 12 students on the cusp of setting out into a world beyond school uniforms and timetables. As they wait for exam results, best friends and next-door neighbours Nick and Marion discover a very different neighbourhood to the one they thought they knew.

A coming-of-age tale, the two have hung out together never quite boyfriend/girfriend for years. Nick would certainly like to see things develop further but Marion appears to be perfectly content with the friendship between the two. University beckons for them both. But Marion’s father has been recently killed in a hit and run accident whilst out jogging – and the police have no clues.

An air of sadness inevitably pervades the family homes and, slipping away on the day of the funeral to score dope in support of his bereaved friend, Nick inadvertently puts into motion events that escalate beyond his and Marion’s wildest expectations. Ordinary suburbia suddenly becomes somethng much more intense as, from a silly Ouija session with the dealer, Nick seems to have been given a clue as to who was driving the car that killed Mr. Perry. But in deciding to follow that clue, the two teenagers put themselves in significant danger as they are led into the maelstrom of local orrganised crime.

In his sixth novel, award-winning Chris Womersley plays to his strengths in building characterisation and describing the minutaie of 1980s suburbia – the weatherboard houses, the picket fence, backyards and quiet streets where neighbours know your business. Its an aura of nostalgia. The weakness of Ordinary Gods and Monsters is the lack of any visceral intensity or empathy with and for Nick or Marion within the crime thriller aspect of the novel. The boy’s family is dysfunctional with a father living away from home and a sister who’s mental state is parlous to say the least. And with divorce on the cards, the family home will have to be put on the market. The tragic death of Mr Perry is too distant to create care – and Womersley fails to build sympathy. As the teenagers immerse themselves further and further into the strange underworld, the novel’s style verges on pedantic and matter-of-fact, thus undermining any potential ‘thrill’.

’Exiles’ by Jane Harper

An easy-going crime thriller, Exiles is the third and final tale featuring federal investigator Aaron Falk. A South Australian food and wine festival in a regional town, a baby left alone in her pram. Her mother vanished into the crowds. Kim Gillespie is never seen again.

A year later, friends gather to celebrate the christening of Henry, a new member of the family – a christening that had been delayed due to the disappearance of Kim. Aaron Falk is to be Godfather. It’s a tight knit group of people he finds himself among. Having grown up in a small town called Kiewarra, son of the local policeman, his history connects him to Greg Raco, father of Henry and Kiewarra’s current police sergeant. They have continued to be close in spite of Falk working out of Melbourne with the federal rather than local police. A rare foray away for Falk, the wine country of South Australia is a perfect kickback spot.

But overshadowing it all is unsolved mystery of Kim. As a narrative, Exiles will certainly hook the reader as, unsurprisingly, not all is what it seems and there are many a dark secret to be discovered. Kim was the former wife of Greg’s brother Charlie: their teenage daughter Zara chose to live with her father rather than start a new life in Adelaide when Kim upped and left. A further schism was caused by her marriage to Rohan, a former schoolfriend of both Kim and Charlie, and the arrival of a new sibling, Zoe. Zara felt isolated and ignored by her mother.

A year later, Zoe is keen to use the festival to follow possible leads or jog memories. It’s a festival where people return again and again but may have left town before being fully aware of the unfolding of events. Charlie supports her but with Rohan and Zoe around, there’s a certain level of friction in the air.

But it’s polite, genteel friction. It’s a Jane Harper book after all. This is no gangland warfare transferred to the vineyards of the Adelaide Hills. Exiles is as much family drama and even a touch of romance as Falk is seduced by the world around him. And there’s Gemma Tozer. Some 20 years ago, the popular accountant Dean Tozer was killed whilst on an early morning jog at the back of the festival site – a mysterious hit and run death that has remained an open case. Greg and Rita Raco feel Gemma is the perfect match for Aaron who could well entice him away from the feds and invest in a real life for himself.

Exiles is not the most suspenseful of crime dramas – it’s a safe, multilayered narrative that is at its strongest in its characterisations. Aaron Falk will be a popular figure in Australian literature, the result of the film of The Dry, the first in the trilogy, starring Eric Bana. It currently stands as the 14th most successful of all time at the Australian box-office.

’Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens’ by Shankari Chandran

Layered and nuanced, the 2023 Miles Franklin Award winner, in spite of its title, has unexpected depth as Shankari Chandran tackles not only ageing but family, identity, racism and the trauma of civil war.

Cinnamon Gardens is a Sydney age care home catering mostly, but not exclusively, for Sri Lankans. Housed in an imposing two-storey federation building with a modern wing attached to the rear, the home was established some 40 years earlier by Maya and Zakhar Ali with the support of a childless older uncle. As Tamils, the young couple had fled their Sinhalese-controlled country. But not unscarred. Maya’s much academically published father and his brilliant student Zakhar had been arrested and tortured, with her father dying in captivity. Zakhar continues to carry the trauma.

But such past information is revealed only slowly by Chandran, chosing initially to focus on the present day and the characters populating the home. Nestled in the quiet, multicultural (fictional) suburb of Westgrove in Sydney, Cinnamon Gardens is run by daughter Anji with long-time best friend Nikki the resident doctor and Maya in residence upstairs in the best room in the old building. Anji is married to child psychologist Nathan whilst Nikki is navigating a strained relationship with husband Gareth, a local councillor. They lost a child 12 months earlier. Alongside residents with colourful histories and their own secrets, the enigmatic cleaner, odd-job man and carer Ruben dips in and out of the narrative. A speaker of 10 languages, he too carries the traumas, emotional and physical, of Sri Lanka.

So well cared for, the waiting list is growing as residents refuse to die off in this safe oasis. But Cinnamon Gardens does not exist in a vacuum and external social politics and the rise of racism continually threatens – Ruben seems to be a constant target. Police indifference or powerlessness goes hand in hand with the rise of gutter politics – with Gareth, much to the disgust of Nikki, playing a significant part.  

Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens is a carefully modulated social commentary juxtaposing the extremes of the civil war between Tamils and Sinhalese with the presence of ever increasing malignant violence in Australia. The personal drives the response in driving a wedge between difference rather than celebrating or embracing it, resulting in devastating consequences for all concerned. But Chandran herself celebrates that difference, resulting in a novel that is not, on responding to its title, a wry tale of ageing residents with their malapropisms and forgetfulness. Instead, we are presented with an engaging, emotive, shocking, tough, empathic story of individuals, old and young, male and female with differences of background, culture and experience coming together literally under one roof.

(A fascinating companion piece to the mordantly funny 2022 Booker Prize Winning The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka and set in Sri Lanka itself).

‘Ghost River’ by Tony Birch

An engaging coming-of-age tale as two young indigenous teenagers find friendship among the struggles of poverty, crooked cops and discrimination in the 1970s inner city industrial Melbourne suburb of Collingwood.

Something of a loner, very much the dreamer, the quiet introspective Ren lives at home with his mom and stepdad. Life changes for the boy with the arrival in the same street of Sonny. The two establish a friendship and quickly become the inseparable best of mates. With the older boy attracting trouble wherever, the two intrepid explorers spend time on the polluted banks of the River Yarra and the detritus of decaying and unregulated industries.

But they soon discover the makeshift shelters and factory waste forms the home of a small group of itinerants led informally by Tex. Unthreatened by the boys, the group include them in their stories of earlier lives led, fact or fiction. Indirectly, they learn about loyalty, leadership and the value of mutual support.

With his drunken, abusive father more absent than present, Sonny’s entrepreneurial survival sees him with the need to pick up casual work, sharing opportunities with his best mate. But it being inner-city Collingwood, there’s an inevitable contact with local hoods and Sonny, in particular, soon finds himself of use in running errands and making the occasional pickup for Vincent and his henchman working out of the local pub. Falling foul of Vincent in setting him up with Chris the illegal bookmaker at the Greek Coffee Club puts the boys in serious potential strife – as much from the serioulsy corrupt poilce detective, Foy, as Vincent.

But it’s the river that is central to the focus of Ghost River and the narrative returns time and time again – whether to the wreckage of ruinous industrialisation or, a little further upstream, the brooding cliff faces overshadowing what was once an initiation site that became a popular swimming spot. But even that is threatened as plans are made to divert the course of the river to build a freeway over and through it. Not even the river, a place of history and secrets, is offered permanence as Sonny looks to disable any attempt to drive a road through their place of escape, their place of freedom and adventure.

‘Seven and a Half’ by Christos Tsiolkas

Arriving at a house in a small New South Wales coastal town several hours drive south of Sydney, our narrator looks to cut himself off from the outside world. He has a book to write.

Ostensibly his book is the narrative of a former gay porn star, now married and with a teeange son living in Queensland, who is offered an enormous amount of money to spend a long weekend with an ageing (and wealthy) fan. But away from his partner Simon, family, friends, Seven and a Half becomes, in the narrator’s solitude, as much a self reflection and his exploration and understanding of the power and beauty of nature as it is a tale of Paul’s self discovery as he revisits old Californian haunts.

Unquestionably based on Tsiolkas himself, our narrator creates schedules for himself that are sustainable, practical and, to some degree or other, pleasurable. Time spent exploring the morality of the choices made by Paul then and now (his wife was also in the industry so there are no secrets between them) and how they may impact on his life now is interspersed with the writer spending time swimming or at the beach, cooking light, healthy meals or talking with Simon (with such an seeming ease, the two are obviously well versed with these separation retreats). The narrator mostly avoids accessing his phone or the internet and the inevitable distractions.

As Paul struggles with his decision, the writer also struggles with the dilemmas of his life and art, away from Simon and his Melbourne home. He draws upon his past and his experiences of love, desire and beauty, but also of shame and difference. He catches up with a friend for dinner who berates a once-politicised writer for wanting to capture and write about beauty. Paul is aware that he has been hired for his faded beauty where time has stood still, at least for his client. In returning to the world he left years before, will past temptations and desires be easily ignored or overcome?

‘The Well’ by Elizabeth Jolley

Obsession, jealousy, growing old and loneliness are explored in Elizabeth Jolley’s Miles Franklin-winning novel as an ageing spinster and her teenage ward struggle to live their lives in a rural farming environment.

Lonely after the death of her elderly father, Hester Harper shares her home with a teenage orphan girl, Katherine. Set on a remote sheep and wheat farm in rural Western Australia, the Harper family were treated like royalty in the town living as they did on the sprawling property. But, with just Katherine to indulge, and Hester’s wants limited, she succumbs to the suggestion by the family financial advisor, Mr Bird, to sell the too-big property and move to a cottage on the furthest edge of the farm.

Hester adores the dynamic teenager, indulging her every whim. But with its opening pages, we are already only too well aware that something dramatic has happened. A body – animal or human – has been pushed down the well, hit by Katherine whilst the two were driving home from the local dance. Instead of stopping to explore the accident or even make judgement, Jolley whisks us back to the first arrival of Katherine in the homestead, partly out of pity and partly from fancy.

To say their relationship is unconventional is an understatement. Hester immerses herself in the training of the adolescent (whiffs of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion with the older women as Professor Higgins readily springs to mind) and completely indulges her. Katherine herself is seemingly naive (although as the book is told only from the older woman’s perspective, any feelings or emotions are not forthcoming), coming across as an Anne of Green Gables with boundless enthusiasm and love of everything proposed by Hester. Selling the homestead makes sense but a normally careful Miss Harper ignores Bird’s advice and prefers to keep most of the cash sale in the house rather than tying it into investments.

And so the night of the accident looms and their relationship becomes strained after the incident. Money is found to be missing – with the assumption that it went into the well with the intruder. Their plans go awry, more so when Katherine begins to hear the voice of the man unceremoniously disposed of a few nights earlier.

An eccentric psychosexual love story (on the older woman’s part) evolves as Hester reminisces about her own childhood and feelings for the German governess, Hilde – or possibly something less overt, an understated commentary on women’s lives and friendship. It’s never clarified (in spite of intimations from the locals on Hester’s rare foray into town). But The Well remains something of an oddity – a rambling imbalanced narrative of an unclear relationship that changes when Hester’s carefully contrived world unravels.

Winner of the 1986 Miles Franklin Award (the last year where only the winner with no shortlist was announced).

‘Iris’ by Fiona Kelly McGregor

Born marginalised, Iris is twice married, twice charged with murder in a vividly imagined 1930s Sydney, based (loosely) as she is on real-lfe Iris Webber, busker, sex worker, thief. Iris is mayhem of time and place in the underbelly of the city, threatening, violent, nonconformist. But the margins are also a place of friendship, love, loyalty and fun.

Iris survives. She has navigated the violence of life, defied police and the challenge of the street. But she is now trapped in a prison cell, forced to tread carefully with what she says to her lawyer. Being charged with murder Iris is hoping that her story matches with the evidence already provided.

Arriving in depression-hit Sydney in 1932 from the country town of Glen Innes in northern New South Wales, Iris has already had her share of imprisonment, marriage and domestic violence. Hay Women’s Prison was Iris’ most recent abode, having been arrested for shooting her husband as revenge for leaving her and for owing her mother money. She soon settles into the rough and ready King’s Cross and Darlinghurst neighbourhoods of East Sydney. She falls in love with fellow sex worker Maisie Matthews, struggling to understand this attraction but, Iris being Iris, she goes with the flow.

It’s a tough, humdrum world – a chaotic, corrupt one of brutal cops, sex workers, petty criminals, alcohol pedlars and gangsters. Allegiances are critical – particularly for the women, whether it be the madams such as Tilly Devine or Kate Leigh through to the men who protect them. Whilst in Iris the women take centre stage, it’s the men who determine the development of the narrative, with the women reliant upon those that are little more than thugs or on the take. Iris works to some degree outside that system – tough, independent, a lover of women (even though she does not feel a close affinity other than Maisie). There’s generally no avoiding men as protectors or bullies (gangsters or cops) in trying to keep a roof over her head (other than a short period when Iris escapes it all and lives for a while with a church-going aunt in Glebe), but as a rule Iris tries to follow her own determined path.

The narrative of Iris is hardly original – an underbelly of a city is well visited. As a result, the novel verges on repetition and predictability. But what sets McGregor’s novel apart is her extraordinary use of the vernacular of 1930s Sydney – a mindfuck of words, phrases and descriptors like no other, a veritable smorgasbord. Banana benders, bronza on full display, Jews ’avin a shivoo, bidgee angie, drabbest, oscar, cove, dagos, Rock Choppers, going yarra, rozzers, Celestials, Micks and Chinks. And so much more.

Shortlisted for the 2023 Miles Franklin Award, but lost out to Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens by Shankari Chandran.

‘Hopeless Kingdom’ by Kgshak Akec

A wealth of migrant experience within a Sudanese family is the basis of Kgshak Akec’s insightful debut novel, based as it is on her own experiences as the family adjust to cross cultural differences not only in-country, but city to city. From Cairo to Sydney to Geelong, a young Akira and her mother Taresai share the alternating narration and focus of Hopeless Kingdom, with many of the same moments seen from two different perspectives.

Struggling in a high-rise apartment in Giza on the outskirts of Cairo, the family await news of their application to leave for Australia – with a good command of English, husband and father Santino has secured a position in an NGO. As outsiders, Akira and her older brother Santo are confronted daily with racism and violence at the Egyptian primary school – a situation that, whilst easing having left for the other side of the world, stays with them. Hopeless Kingdom is no fairytale as Akira and Taresai in particular look to find their place, with the older woman struggling as lack of English further isolates.

The sense of family is overriding in Akec’s narrative – but not always to positive effect. Santino is increasingly distant following the move to Sydney with the unexpected decision of returning to Sudan, leaving Taresai with little English and four children. In spite of a level of settled life with Akira blooming at school and, for the first time, friends, a decision is made to move to Geelong where family members can support Taresai. But she knows family is a challenge – a judgemental younger sister, a domineering and demanding mother. The decision is further compounded by Santo’s increasingly uncontrollable adolescent behaviour.

As the years pass, sadly Hopeless Kingdom settles into an everyday Australian suburban migrant tale. The vivid days of Giza and young children threading through the throngs of people and dust told with energy and verve is supplanted by the mean and threatening streets of northern Geelong. Akira is an A grade student, Santo a drug addict with behavioural problems. The two younger sisters barely feature whilst Taresai struggles through, eventually training as a nurse.

It’s an insightful narrative of racism and prejudice along with family struggles and expectation but the depth and nuance of Egypt and Sydney settles into something a little more mundane. Yet, what started out as a private project paying homage to her mother has received the Dorothy Hewitt Award for an unpublished manuscript and now shortlisted for the 2023 Miles Franklin Award.

‘Reaching Tin River’ by Thea Astley

Strong-willed Belle, a product of 1950s outback Australian upbringing, narrates her tale of a childhood and young adulthood in parochial Queensland prior to her obsession with a long-dead disgraced businessman and minor politician, Gaden Lockyer.

With youth centred around a middle-of-nowhere town called Jericho Flats, an absent (American) father and a mother, Bonnie, breaking all the rules as a drummer performing with her pianist sister, Marie, at barn dances, bars and weddings throughout the local territory, Belle struggles with stability.

She’s a complex character. A feeling of abandonment from an early age, a stoical embarassment of her freethinking mother results in Belle looking towards teaching and archive research, eventually settling in Brisbane, where she meets future husband Seb. He turns out to be a misogynist schmuck and that particular partnership does not last long – highlighted by Belle at one point disappearing without a word and travelling to LA to find her father. She tracks him down in New York and returns to Brisbane. All within a few days and where Belle only admits to such a journey sometime later at dinner with friends.

The failed marriage sees Belle becoming more and more internalised and increasingly obsessed with the life of Lockyer. So much so she takes time out to retrace his steps, checking out former homes from one isolated spot to another, reimagining the Lockyer family in residence.

It’s a difficult book not readily penetrated. Some talk of Astley’s satire, wit and occasional cruelty but, in Belle’s finding of herself through her obsession, Reaching Tin River is a fractured narrative that explores in a roundabout way gender and sexual politics. And, speaking personally, it fails to hit its target.

Shortlisted for the 1991 Miles Franklin Award but lost out to David Malouf and The Great World.

‘Cold Enough For Snow’ by Jessica Au

A deceptively simple novella, the second from Melbourne writer Jessica Au, Cold Enough For Snow sees a mother and (unnamed) daughter visit Japan, with the younger woman looking for a lost connection with her parent.

As the organiser, the daughter feels pressure to ensure her mother takes pleasure in the trip but not overtaxed. The days they have together merge into limited sight seeing, food and travelling to off-the-beaten track museums and galleries. As it is the onset of winter, Japan is cold and wet – an overnight trek, taken alone by the daughter whilst her mother stays at a traditional inn, is not quite the pleasurable experience hoped for.

It’s calm and zen-like, rarely raising above ‘quiet’ on the volume control in its telling. Now living in different countries, memories and recollections of shared experience unwind – but there’s little in terms of direct conversation between the two women. The daughter searches to know someone and to have them know me beyond the intimate detachment that exists.

Cold Enough For Snow looks to the carefully observed and is full of meditations of the minutiae of that shared experience. But in its quietness and lack of connection, Au’s novel is distant and, like the time of year they choose to visit Japan, cold. Calm control replaces emotion – not helped by the indirect communication that exists throughout its 70 or so pages.

Shortlisted for the 2023 Miles Franklin Award.