Get Involved! Well, as our cover shows September is our annual chance to highlight the Indigenous Literacy Foundation, as we celebrate Indigenous Literacy Day, on Wednesday September 4th. Of course, as our readers would know, Gleebooks has been a passionate advocate of ILF for well over a decade, and we’ve delighted in the growth and expansion of the essential services the ILF supports. For us it’s a year-round commitment, and we’d encourage you to respond at any stage with support, financial or otherwise, at any stage. But, as the ILF website says (have a look ilf.org.au—it’s terrific to get an overview of the scope and range of projects in train): ‘Wednesday 4 September is a national celebration of Indigenous culture, stories, language, and literacy. Through activities on the day, we focus our attention on the disadvantages experienced in remote communities, and encourage the rest of Australia to raise funds and advocate for more equal access to literacy resources for remote communities.’ Schools, businesses, community groups and individuals are all encouraged to to take part in activities to raise much-needed funds. Join in! Meanwhile, I’ve just done my annual trip to Melbourne to look at the offerings for Christmas and holiday reading, and I’m happy to report that you can expect a rich and varied menu in fiction, non-fiction, and kids’ books this year. To whet the appetite, here’s a sample of what I’m hoping to read: Margaret Atwood’s ‘sequel’ to The Handmaid’s Tale—The Testaments (Sept); Author of Museum of Modern Love, Heather Rose returns with a political thriller, Bruny (Oct); Christos Tsiolkas turns to historical fiction with Damascus—based around the gospels and letters of St Paul, focusing on characters one and two generations on from the death of Christ (Nov); Ann Patchett The Dutch House—out this month and reviewed glowingly by Louise and Morgan—by some accounts her best novel yet; Helen Ennis has written a biography of Australian photographer, Olive Cotton (Nov); in Gotta Get Theroux This Louis Theroux offers memoir of his ‘Life and Strange Times in Television ‘(Oct); in the style of his A Short History of Nearly Everything Bill Bryson turns his highly readable attentions inward to explore the human body in The Body (Oct): Geoffrey Robertson takes his cue from Cicero, the great Roman barrister, to argue that justice requires the return not only of the ‘Elgin’ Marbles to Greece, but of many looted antiquities on display in the museums of Britain, Europe and America in Who Owns History? (Nov); Julian Barnes tours Belle Epoque Paris, via the life story of the pioneering surgeon Samuel Pozzi in The Man in the Red Coat (Nov); John Le Carré is back chronicling the horrors of our age with Agent Running in the Field (Oct); Archie Roach—stolen child, seeker, teenage alcoholic, lover, father, musical and lyrical genius, and leader gives us his life story in Tell Me Why (Nov); Arkady Renko returns to do battle with harsh and forbidding landscape of Siberia in Martin Cruz Smith’s The Siberian Dilemma (Nov); Helen Garner offers up accounts of her everyday in Yellow Notebook: Diaries Volume One 1978–1986 (Nov) and much, much more. You’ll see them all in the Gleaner and the Summer Reading Guide of course, but in the meantime, here are two more from the list which I have managed to get my hands on on: Garry Disher’s Peace (Nov) is the second of many (I hope) in a crime fiction series set around and beyond the Flinders Ranges. In my opinion, Disher mastered the now red-hot (viz Jane Harper and Chris Hammer) rural noir genre, and he has created, in Paul Hirschhausen a credible and compelling cop. There’s many a twist and plot turn, but Disher’s feel for atmosphere, and capacity to make real characters in real settings is first-rate. A terrific continuation to Bitter Wash Road. It’s been four years since the publication of Charlotte Wood’s ground-breaking The Natural Way of Things. The Weekend (Nov) is a brilliant, provocative, original, disquieting unsettling, follow-up. Four older women have been close friends for decades. Three of them converge on the beach house of the fourth, Sylvie, on the Christmas just after her death, to fulfil her wish that they clean out her house. It’s a sad, tender, funny, uncomfortable scenario, and Wood is asking serious and challenging questions about the nature of relationships, and about how honest people might be about others and themselves, once the apparent bedrock of shared friendship is rocked. David
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Australian Literature The Rich Man’s House by Andrew McGahan ($33, PB)
In the freezing Antarctic waters south of Tasmania, a mountain was discovered in 1642 by the seafaring explorer Gerrit Jansz. Not just any mountain but one that Jansz estimated was an unbelievable height of 25,000 metres. In 2016, at the foot of this unearthly mountain, a controversial & ambitious ‘dream home’, the Observatory, is painstakingly constructed by an eccentric billionaire—the only man to have ever reached the summit. Rita Gausse, estranged daughter of the architect who designed the Observatory is surprised, upon her father’s death, to be invited to the isolated mansion to meet the famously reclusive owner, Walter Richman. But from the beginning, something doesn’t feel right. Why is Richman so insistent that she come? What does he expect of her? When cataclysmic circumstances intervene to trap Rita & a handful of other guests in the Observatory, cut off from the outside world, she slowly begins to learn the unsettling—and ultimately horrifying—answers. This is Andrew McGahan’s 11th & final novel.
The Unforgiving City by Maggie Joel ($30, PB)
Colonial Sydney in the final weeks of the 19th century: a city striving for union & nationhood but dogged by divisions so deep they threaten to derail, not just the Federation, but the colony itself. There are chasms opening too when a clandestine note reaches the wrong hands in the well-to-do household of aspiring politician Alasdair Dunlevy & his wife Eleanor. Below stairs, their maid Alice faces a desperate situation with her wayward sister. Each alone in their torment, Eleanor, Alice & Alasdair must each find some solution, but at what cost to themselves & those they love? This is the story of 3 people, their passions & ambitions & the far-flung ripples their choices will cause.
The Breeding Season by Amanda Niehaus ($30, PB)
The rains come to Brisbane just as Elise & Dan descend into grief. Elise, a scientist, believes that isolation & punishing fieldwork will heal her pain. Her husband Dan, a writer, questions the truths of his life, and looks to art for answers. Worlds apart, Elise & Dan must find a way to forgive themselves & each other before it’s too late. An astounding debut novel that forensically & poetically explores the intersections of art and science, sex and death, and the heartbreaking complexity of love.
Wolfe Island by Lucy Treloar ($30, PB)
Kitty Hawke, the last inhabitant of a dying island sinking into the windlashed Chesapeake Bay, has resigned herself to annihilation—until one night her granddaughter blows ashore in the midst of a storm, desperate, begging for sanctuary. For years, Kitty has kept herself to herself—with only the company of her wolfdog, Girl—unconcerned by the world outside, or perhaps avoiding its worst excesses. But blood cannot be turned away in times like these. And when trouble comes following her granddaughter, no one is more surprised than Kitty to find she will fight to save her as fiercely as her name suggests.
The Collaborator by Diane Armstrong ($33, PB)
It is 1944 in Budapest & the Germans have invaded. Jewish journalist Miklos Nagy risks his life & confronts the dreaded Adolf Eichmann in an attempt save thousands of Hungarian Jews from the death camps. But no one could have foreseen the consequences. It is 2005 in Sydney, and Annika Barnett sets out on a journey that takes her to Budapest & Tel Aviv to discover the truth about the mysterious man who rescued her grandmother in 1944. By the time her odyssey is over, history has been turned on its head, past & present collide, and the secret that has poisoned the lives of three generations is finally revealed in a shocking climax that holds the key to their redemption..
Hollow Earth by John Kinsella ($30, PB)
Fascinated by caves & digging holes since childhood, Manfred discovers a path through to another realm via a Neolithic copper mine at Mount Gabriel in Schull, Ireland. The world of Hollow Earth, while no Utopia, is a sophisticated civilisation. Its genderless inhabitants are respectful of their environment, religious & cultural differences are accommodated without engendering hate or suspicion, and grain not missile silos are built. Yet Ari & Zest accompany Manfred back to the surface world. ‘Come with me and see my world.’ So begins an extraordinary adventure in which the 3 wander the Earth like Virgil’s Aeneas, Ari & Zest seeking re-entry to their own world. The Hollow Earthers are shocked at the cruelty & lies of the surface world, the dieback spreading through the forests. Yet they are seduced by the world’s temptations.
Here Until August by Josephine Rowe ($30, PB)
An agoraphobic French emigré watches disturbing terrorist footage as she minds a dog named Chavez. A young couple weather the interiority of a Montreal winter, more attuned to the illicit goings-on of their neighbours than to their own hazy, unfolding futures. A Melbourne writer of real-estate listings reflects on the stifling power of shared history as she wonders what life might be like over the fence. From the Catskill Mountains to NSW, the abandoned island outports of Newfoundland to the sprawl of an Australian metropolis, Josephine Rowe shows us how the places we inhabit shape us in ways both remote & intimate.
