1) "The Spare Room" by Helen Garner
In a short, wise, oddly uplifting novel by Australian writer Garner, an old friend dying of cancer makes a memorable final visit.
Garner (The First Stone, 1997, etc.) tackles big themes—truth, death, the limits of friendship—with ease. Nicola and Helen are “old bohemians” whose bond reaches back a decade and a half. Sydney-based, wealthy Nicola is quirky and imperious (she has no use for deodorant, suitcases or underwear), whereas Melbourne-based Helen is more grounded, with family living next door. When Nicola arrives, her cancer is already far advanced: She has had surgery and radiation and is at stage four, the final stage, but the point of her visit is to try another, expensive alternative therapy. Helen, a tireless host, soon finds herself angry, partly because death has arrived in her house, partly because Nicola refuses stronger painkillers, but mainly because her friend stubbornly insists the treatment can cure her. Helen vents some of her mounting rage on the institution treating Nicola, taking her money while aware that her case is terminal. But eventually she confronts Nicola for using the treatments to distract herself from preparing for the end. When an oncologist advises a spinal operation, to be performed locally, which would mean Nicola's stay would be extended, Helen snaps. She can tend her friend no longer. What ensues is described briefly but with enormous love, despite Nicola's unchanging expectations.
Wit, simplicity and scorching honesty distinguish an understated triumph.
2) "Caleb's Crossing" by Geraldine Brooks
The NBA-winning Australian-born, now New England author (People of the Book, 2008, etc.) moves ever deeper into the American past.
Her fourth novel’s announced subject is the eponymous Caleb Cheeshahteaumauk, a member of the Wampanoag Indian tribe that inhabits Massachusetts’s Great Harbor (a part of Martha’s Vineyard), and the first Native American who will graduate from Harvard College (in 1665). Even as a boy, Caleb is a paragon of sharp intelligence, proud bearing and manly charm, as we learn from the somewhat breathless testimony of Bethia Mayfield, who grows up in Great Harbor where her father, a compassionate and unprejudiced preacher, oversees friendly relations between white settlers and the placid Wampanoag. The story Bethia unfolds is a compelling one, focused primarily on her own experiences as an indentured servant to a schoolmaster who prepares promising students for Harvard; a tense relationship with her priggish, inflexible elder brother Makepeace; and her emotional bond of friendship with the occasionally distant and suspicious Caleb, who, in this novel’s most serious misstep, isn’t really the subject of his own story. Fascinating period details and a steadily expanding plot, which eventually encompasses King Philip’s War, inevitable tensions between Puritan whites and upwardly mobile “salvages,” as well as the compromises unavoidably ahead for Bethia, help to modulate a narrative voice that sometimes teeters too uncomfortably close to romantic cliché. Both Bethia, whose womanhood precludes her right to seek formal education, and the stoical Caleb are very nearly too good to be true. However, Brooks’ knowledgeable command of the energies and conflicts of the period, and particularly her descriptions of the reverence for learning that animates the little world of Harvard and attracts her characters’ keenest longings, carries a persuasive and quite moving emotional charge.
While no masterpiece, this work nevertheless contributes in good measure to the current and very welcome revitalization of the historical novel.
3) "Life in Outer Space" by Melissa Keil
Sam Kinnison may claim an address in Melbourne, Australia, but from the moment Camilla Carter walks into first-period English, he might as well live in outer space.
The impossibly cool English transfer student is Bowen Lakes Secondary’s own “statistical anomaly,” breezing back and forth between the upper echelons of the “A-group” royalty and Sam and his friends at the very bottom of the social pecking order. And for some inexplicable reason, she actually seems to prefer hanging out with Sam. Kudos to the publisher for resisting the temptation to Americanize Sam’s story and for allowing his brilliant and uniquely Australian humor to shine through. There’s just something especially delicious about Sam’s description of the king of the jocks (otherwise known as the “Assorted Vessels of Wank”) as being a “pus-filled tumor on the arse of my life.” Though a secondary storyline about Sam’s gay best friend flounders, leaving his oft-referred-to sexuality feeling a bit gratuitous, there’s much to enjoy in the budding relationship between Camilla and Sam. As both kids struggle with issues on the homefront, they find a genuine ease and comfort with one another that make them an unlikely couple worth rooting for.
Much like a John Hughes movie, this is a humorous, heartfelt and angst-y romance with the potential to break the gender barrier. (Fiction. 14 & up)
4) "The Wild Girl" by Kate Forsyth
Forsyth (Bitter Greens, 2014, etc.) unearths a beautiful love story in the making of the Grimm brothers’ fairy-tale collection amid the turmoil of the Napoleonic Wars.
Twelve-year-old Dortchen Wild lives next door to Wilhelm Grimm and his brothers in the German kingdom of Hessen-Cassel. The “wildest” of six sisters, Dortchen would rather be outside than waiting on her bedridden mother to avoid the wrath of her ill-tempered father. Forsyth captures the sweetness of domestic life in a time of political unrest as Dortchen sneaks out to see Wilhelm, often bringing him herbal remedies from her father’s shop. Sickly and desperately poor, Wilhelm and his brother Jakob are collecting stories in the hope of publishing a book—and Dortchen hopes to get closer to him as he transcribes her homespun versions of “Hänsel and Gretel” and “Cinderella.” Her fanciful stories contain a morsel of truth, the most unsettling of which is found in “All-Kinds-of-Fur,” about a princess who's forced to marry her own father after her mother dies. Dortchen can’t hide from her father’s incestuous rage as she matures beyond his control. Nor can she shake the ghostly presence of Napoleon’s army: “Dortchen and her sisters had seen the innumerable red eyes of the French army’s campfires from the window of their sitting room.” Later, Forsyth describes the aftermath of war in chilling detail as Dortchen’s brother, Rudolf, returns from Russia with frostbitten fingers and toes, infecting his wife and baby with the germs from his coat. Wilhelm and Dortchen are separated for many years, enduring heartache, sacrifice, and longing as Wilhelm and Jakob work through several failed drafts of their book and Dortchen cares for her family.
In the bleak pages of history, Forsyth finds a story of enduring love and artistic integrity—her retelling is a fairy tale in itself.
5) "The Light Between Oceans" by M.L. Stedman
The miraculous arrival of a child in the life of a barren couple delivers profound love but also the seeds of destruction.
Moral dilemmas don’t come more exquisite than the one around which Australian novelist Stedman constructs her debut. Tom Sherbourne returns to Australia emotionally scarred after distinguished service in World War I, so the solitary work of a lighthouse keeper on remote Janus Rock is attractive. Unexpectedly, Tom finds a partner on the mainland, Isabel; they marry and hope to start a family. But Isabel suffers miscarriages then loses a premature baby. Two weeks after that last catastrophe, a dinghy washes ashore containing a man’s body and a crying infant. Isabel wants to keep the child, which she sees as a gift from God; Tom wants to act correctly and tell the authorities. But Isabel’s joy in the baby is so immense and the prospect of giving her up so destructive, that Tom gives way. Years later, on a rare visit to the mainland, the couple learns about Hannah Roennfeldt, who lost her husband and baby at sea. Now guilt eats away at Tom, and when the truth does emerge, he takes the blame, leading to more moral self-examination and a cliffhanging conclusion.
A polished, cleverly constructed and very precisely calculated first novel.
6) "Shantaram" by Gregory David Roberts
“The truth is, the man I am was born in those moments, as I stood near the flood sticks with my face lifted to the chrismal rain”: an elegantly written, page-turning blockbuster by Australian newcomer Roberts.
The story is taken from Roberts’s own life: an Australian escapes from prison (he committed armed robbery to support heroin addiction) and flees to Mumbai (here, Bombay), where, hiding in the slums, he finds himself becoming at once increasingly Christlike and increasingly drawn into the criminal demimonde. The narrator, Lin, now going by Shantaram Kishan Kharre, takes to healing the sick while learning the ways of India’s poor through the good offices of a guide named Pribaker, who’s a little shady and more than a little noble, and through the booze-fogged lens provided by dodgy Eurotrash expats like aging French bad boy Didier, who “spoke a lavishly accented English . . . to provoke and criticize friend and stranger alike with an indolent malignity.” Measuring their lives in the coffeespoons of one monsoon season to the next, these characters work in the orbit of fabulous crimelords and their more actively malign lieutenants, all with murky connections to the drug trade, Bollywood, and foreign intelligence agencies (as one tells our narrator, “All the secret police of the world work together, Lin, and that is their biggest secret”). Violence begets violence, the afflicted are calmed and balmed, friends are betrayed, people are killed, prison doors are slammed shut, then opened by well-greased palms. It’s an extraordinarily rich scene befitting Les Misérables, a possible influence here, or another less obvious but just as philosophically charged ancestor, James Michener’s The Drifters. Roberts is a sure storyteller, capable of passages of precise beauty, and if his tale sometimes threatens to sprawl out of bounds and collapse under its own bookish, poetic weight, he draws its elements together at just the right moment.
A roman-à-clef rejoinder to Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City (p. 676), splendidly evoking an India few outsiders know.
7) "What Alice Forgot" by Liane Moriarty
From Australian Moriarty (The Last Anniversary, 2006, etc.), domestic escapism about a woman whose temporary amnesia makes her re-examine what really matters to her.
Alice wakes from what she thinks is a dream, assuming she is a recently married 29-year-old expecting her first child. Actually she is 39, the mother of three and in the middle of an acrimonious custody battle with her soon-to-be ex-husband Nick. She’s fallen off her exercise bike, and the resulting bump on her head has not only erased her memory of the last 10 years but has also taken her psychologically back to a younger, more easygoing self at odds with the woman she gathers she has become. While Alice-at-29 is loving and playful if lacking ambition or self-confidence, Alice-at-39 is a highly efficient if too tightly wound supermom. She is also thin and rich since Nick now heads the company where she remembers him struggling in an entry-level position. Alice-at-29 cannot conceive that she and Nick would no longer be rapturously in love or that she and her adored older sister Elisabeth could be estranged, and she is shocked that her shy mother has married Nick’s bumptious father and taken up salsa dancing. She neither remembers nor recognizes her three children, each given a distinct if slightly too cute personality. Nor does she know what to make of the perfectly nice boyfriend Alice-at-39 has acquired. As memory gradually returns, Alice-at-29 initially misinterprets the scattered images and flashes of emotion, especially those concerning Gina, a woman who evidently caused the rift with Nick. Alice-at-29 assumes Gina was Nick’s mistress, only to discover that Gina was her best friend. Gina died in a freak car accident and in her honor, Alice-at-39 has organized mothers from the kids’ school to bake the largest lemon meringue pie on record. But Alice-at-29 senses that Gina may not have been a completely positive influence. Moriarty handles the two Alice consciousnesses with finesse and also delves into infertility issues through Elizabeth’s diary.
Cheerfully engaging.
8) "Bitter Greens" by Kate Forsyth
Forsyth blends fact and fiction in a novel that combines the story of a young woman with long hair who's been locked in a tower with the tale of the real-life Frenchwoman who wrote the story we know as "Rapunzel."
After King Louis XIV banishes his cousin Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de la Force to a convent in 1697, she has a hard time getting used to a life of austerity and isolation in the French countryside. She misses the excitement and luxury of the daring, robust court life she once led and yearns for the young husband for whom she renounced her religion. An elderly nun takes Charlotte-Rose under her wing and, as they tend the nunnery’s garden, relates the story of Margherita, a young Venetian girl imprisoned in a remote tower by an evil sorceress. The witch, La Strega Bella, weaves tresses into the girl’s fiery mane and regularly uses her long locks to climb the tower in order to bring Margherita food and extract droplets of her blood. The magical tales of the girl and the sorceress unfold in segments around Charlotte-Rose’s first-person account of her tenuous positions as a ward of the court, a Huguenot and a headstrong female who sometimes risks the king’s wrath to pursue her own interests or help others. Her story serves as a balance between Margherita’s innocence as she secretly explores the tower and makes a ghastly discovery and La Strega Bella’s shadowy actions, which feed her obsession for maintaining eternal youth. Each of the three finds love, but the outcomes of their relationships differ. Despite many lusty encounters that add little substance to the tale, Forsyth undertakes an ambitious plot and, with a creative presentation, makes it work. She convincingly conveys a fairy tale–like quality in her writing and peppers the narrative with historical detail and some interesting twists that neatly tie together the strands of the story.
This unconventional spin on a children’s classic is a captivating read and unquestionably aimed toward adults.
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