1) "The Sound of One Hand Clapping" by Richard Flanagan
Winner of the Australian Booksellers' Book of the Year Award, a passionate working-class tale (and first US publication) from a Tasmanian author. In 1989, an unhappy woman, Sonja Buloh, returns to remotest Tasmania to revisit scenes of her tortured childhood and to have a baby. Much of Flanagan’s story, though, is in flashback, being comprised of the tale, set in 1954, of Sonja’s father, Bojan, and his wife, Maria. Bojan and Maria are Slovenians who immigrated to Australia so that Maria could work on backcountry hydroelectric projects, then touted as the great precursor to prosperity much as such projects were in the American West. Maria, however, is bored and unsatisfied with her life and wanders off to her death in a blizzard, leaving Bojan to raise Sonja alone. He’s a sentimental man who loves to work with wood, but he’s also afflicted by his memories of war and by his eternal grieving for Maria. Depressed, he takes to drink, and when he’s drunk he beats his young daughter. Sober again, he has no memory of what he’s done, though Sonja is profoundly traumatized. Even as an adult in faraway Sydney, she finds herself unable to trust any man enough to fall in love'indeed, her out-of-wedlock baby seems almost immaculately conceived. Upon her return, nevertheless, daughter and father become reconciled; it is almost as if Sonja is the reappeared Maria, and her baby Sonja’s own infant self. Everyone is given another chance. Even the land reverts to its primitive state, the dam breaking at last in concert with these revitalized lives, as if its violation of nature had caused human woes, too. In his soap-opera plotting and authentic feel for working people, Flanagan owes much to Colleen McCullough. But there’s no denying the power in his own wild flights of prose.
2) "Lexicon" by Max Berry
Modern-day sorcerers fight a war of words in this intensely analytical yet bombastic thriller.
Barry (Machine Man, 2011, etc.) is usually trying to be the funny guy in the world of postmodern satire, with arrows keenly aimed at corporate greed and how to make it in advertising. Apparently, our Australian comrade has changed his mind, racing up alongside the likes of Neal Stephenson with this smart, compelling, action-packed thriller about the power of words. In a deft narrative move, Barry parallels two distinct storylines before bringing them together with jaw-dropping surprises. In the first, a carpenter named Wil is jumped in an airport bathroom by a pair of brutal agents who kill his girlfriend and kidnap him for reasons unknown. In a storyline a few years back, we meet a smart, homeless grifter named Emily Ruff on the streets of San Francisco. After a run-in with a mark, Emily is invited to train under the auspices of a mysterious international syndicate known as “The Poets.” The shady peddlers of influence and power force Emily to study words as if they were a source of incredible power—and in the hands of gifted prodigies like Emily, they are. What could have been a sly attempt to satirize postmodern marketing and social media becomes something of a dark fantasy as couplets intended merely to influence become spell-like incantations with the power to kill. Back in America with Wil and his new captor, Elliot, we learn that Wil is the sole survivor of a terminal event in rural Australia and is being relentlessly pursued by Woolf, the perpetrator of the attack in Oz. In the background, the cult’s mysterious leader, Yeats, pulls strings that put everyone at risk, and no one turns out to be who we imagined.
An up-all-night thriller for freaks and geeks who want to see their wizards all grown up in the real world and armed to the teeth in a bloody story.
3) "Lost & Found" by Brooke Davis
An abandoned child, a nursing home escapee, and an angry, elderly shut-in make for a unique team in Davis' whimsical and touching debut.
Millie Bird is only 7, though she has already seen her fair share of "Dead Things." The most recent addition to her “Book of Dead Things” is her father. Millie’s mother, who is struggling with her own grief, leaves her beneath a display of women’s underwear in a department store with the instruction to stay put. After spending the night in the store, leaving notes for her Mum and hiding from the security guard, Millie meets up with “Karl the Touch Typist” in the store’s cafe. Eventually, Millie realizes she must disobey her mother’s orders and go looking for her. She arrives home to find it empty and in a state of disarray. While wandering the neighborhood trying to find someone to help her, Millie ends up on the doorstep of perpetually cranky Agatha Pantha, a widow who has sealed herself off within her home. Though Agatha follows a strict schedule, only allowing herself a moment to feel loneliness, the compassion she feels toward Millie forces her to leave her house. Eventually Millie and Agatha meet up with Karl again, and set forth on their journey to find Millie’s mother. Life exists for the young and robust adults in the novel, while children and the elderly essentially become invisible, allowing for a world where a child and an old man can live in a department store with no one noticing and an old woman can be sealed inside her house by overgrown plants. Millie's preoccupation with death is uncomfortable, as are Agatha's and Karl's obsessions with their own mortality and those they have lost, but this circles the central idea of the novel—death is the thing that none of us are willing to face.
Borderline cutesy, but ultimately powerful exploration of grief from a skillful and original new voice.
4) "The Distant Hours" by Kate Morton
A letter points the way to a castle in Kent, which harbors decades of grim secrets, in Morton’s latest (The House at Riverton, 2008, etc.).
Edie, a young woman underemployed by a London small press, is puzzled when her normally placid mother Meredith receives a long-delayed letter and bursts into tears. The letter, it turns out, is from Juniper, one of the three Blythe sisters who inhabit Milderhurst Castle, where Meredith, as a child during World War II, was evacuated to escape the Blitz. From here the story ricochets between the war years and the early 1990s. The evacuation proves to be an unexpected blessing for Meredith, a shy, bookish girl who’s misunderstood by her working-class family. Her teacher, Thomas Cavill, encourages her to excel in her studies. She finds true kinship with the three daughters of Raymond Blythe, famed author of a children’s classic entitled The True History of the Mud Man. Raymond, demented and delusional, has secluded himself in his tower room. Much to the chagrin of his eldest daughter Percy, Raymond has evinced an intention to disinherit his daughters. Second sister Saffy schemes to escape the castle for London. Percy is alarmed when Lucy, Milderhurst’s last remaining servant, deserts the family for marriage to their clock repairman—Percy's secret crush? Baby sister Juniper meets Thomas when he arrives to check on Meredith. After a whirlwind London love affair, Juniper defies Percy to announce wedding plans. Thrilled, Saffy makes Juniper a party dress and plans an engagement dinner. Juniper and Thomas are due from London by separate trains, but only Juniper shows up. Like Dickens' Miss Havisham, Juniper will grow old, still wearing the tatters of the dress she donned for the fiancé who got away. As Edie plumbs Milderhurst’s many mysteries, she also struggles to learn what short-circuited her mother’s dreams, so briefly kindled 50 years before.
After a lengthy buildup, which doggedly connects all the characters, however peripheral, there’s a rewarding, bittersweet payoff in the author’s most gothic tale yet.
5) "Dirt Music" by Tim Winton
Australian Winton’s seventh novel, seven years in the making, is an exhilarating multilayered amalgam of withering satire and beguiling character creation—a more than worthy successor to his critically acclaimed Cloudstreet (1992) and The Riders (1995).
The setting is fictional White Point, a fishing village on the western coast of Australia where a recent lobster boom has created a number of raffish, hard-drinking nouveaux riches. One of the more respectable of them is widower Jim Buckridge, who lives in something very like splendor with his two teenaged sons and his 40-year-old mistress Georgie Jutland, a former nurse, and a fugitive of sorts, from her own wealthy (and troubled) family. Winton has a fine time skewering the “White Pointers’” pretensions, while patiently revealing the present and past influences that shape stoical Jim and restless Georgie—whose relationship is thrown into more confusing relief when Georgie plays Catherine to the Heathcliff of itinerant fish-poacher and failed band musician Luther Fox, who completes the trifecta of major characters. All three have suffered traumatic loss or violence, or both (in Luther’s case, it’s a comic-horrible history of family maimings and deaths that’s positively Dickensian). All three make heroic and farcical efforts to shed the shackles of the past and reinvent themselves. Winton presents this uniquely textured fable of growth and change as a boisterous comedy, whose principals are surrounded by a garrulous Australian chorus of vivid supporting characters (“Beaver,” the shady video-store owner with a newly purchased Vietnamese wife, may be the best of a marvelously scurvy lot). All this against a rich backdrop whose landscape and climate are evoked with muscular imagistic precision (as a cyclone approaches, “Lightning bleaches the trees and a waterspout rises like an angry white root from the dirt-coloured sea”).
A terrific novel. Winton’s best yet.
6) "The True History of the Kelly Gang" by Peter Carey
Booker Prize–winner Carey (Jack Maggs, 1998, etc.) assumes the voice of 19th-century Australian outlaw Ned Kelly.
The story opens with an account of the Kelly gang’s capture by police on June 28, 1880, so we know this tale will end badly for the most famous of the “bushrangers,” who expressed the rage felt by many poor Australians, especially those who were, like Kelly, descended from Irish convicts, against English political and economic oppression. Ned’s first-person narrative is addressed to the daughter he’s never seen (her pregnant mother fled to America rather than witness his inevitable death) in run-on prose that faultlessly reproduces the speech rhythms of the uneducated without becoming distracting. Describing his youth, Kelly claims the early charges against him were largely fabricated by vengeful police with a grudge against his mother’s family. Her son adores Ellen Quinn Kelly, never judging her for the men she takes up with after his father abandons her (though he hates them all), or even for apprenticing him to bushranger Harry Power when he’s only 15. Landing in jail shortly thereafter, Ned writes, “I knew I were finally in that place ordained from the moment of my birth.” We quickly learn that the basically good-hearted Ned is a mediocre criminal and poor judge of character: his gang includes reckless younger brother Dan; Steve Hart, intoxicated by the self-destructive legends of Irish rebellion; and opium-addicted Joe Byrne, whose pipe companion betrays them to the police. Though their first robbery nets enough money to get them all safely to America, Ned suicidally refuses to leave. Our naive hero thinks he can get his mother out of jail by addressing long, self-justifying letters to the authorities. Not a chance, of course, but there’s a rough, poetic grandeur to Ned’s belief that “we had showed the world what convict blood could do. We proved there were no taint we was of true bone blood and beauty born.”
Carey has written several fine contemporary novels, but his genius always seems especially invigorated by an encounter with the past, as in this sorrowful, bleakly beautiful meditation on his native Australia’s poisoned history.
7) "People of the Book" by Geraldine Brooks
From 1480 Seville to 1996 Sarajevo, a priceless scripture is chased by fanatics political and religious. Its recovery makes for an enthralling historical mystery.
In Sydney, ace (and gorgeous) old-book conservator Hannah Heath gets a 2 a.m. phone call. She’s summoned to Sarajevo to check out a 15th-century Spanish-made Haggadah, a codex gone missing in Bosnia during a 1992 siege. The document is a curiosity, its lavish illuminations appearing to violate age-old religious injunctions against any kind of illustration. Remarkably, it’s Muslim museum librarian Ozren Karaman who rescued the Hebrew artifact from furious shelling. Questioning (and bedding) Ozren, Hannah examines the Haggadah binding and from clues embedded there—an insect’s wings, wine stains, white hair—reconstructs the book’s biography. And it’s an epic. Chapter by chapter, each almost an independent story, the chronicle unwinds—of the book’s changing hands from those of anti-Nazi partisans dreaming of departing for Palestine from war-torn Croatia, from schemers in 1894 Vienna, home, despite Freud and Mahler, of virulent anti-Semitism. Perhaps the best chapter takes place in 1609 Venice. There, not-so-grand Inquisitor Domenico Vistorini, a heretic hunter with a drinking problem, contends in theological disputation with brilliant rabbinical star Judah Aryeh. The two strike up an unlikely alliance to save the book, even while Vistorini at first blanches at its art—a beautiful depiction of the glowing sun, prophesying, the hysterical priest assumes, Galileo’s heliocentric blasphemy. Tracing those illustrations back to their origin point, Hannah unkinks a series of fascinating conundrums—and learns, even more fiercely, to prize the printed page.
8) "Graffiti Moon" by Cath Crowley
Alternating narrators and snatches of poetry tell the tale of love among graffiti artists.
Lucy has been searching for the mysterious graffiti artist Shadow, whose work seems to address her fear of romance. Unfortunately, the only guy who knows how to track him down is Ed, whose nose Lucy broke at the end of a disastrous date. Ed knows how to track down Shadow because he is Shadow—a secret he hopes to keep from Lucy while he leads her around town revisiting old haunts. When Lucy discovers that Ed has been lying to her, she must deal with her conflicted feelings over the artist and the annoying man. Readers will quickly realize that Ed and Shadow are one and the same, a fact that Crowley reveals fairly early on. With that mystery stripped away, Ed is difficult to like, lacking both a strong personality and emotional resonance. His difficulty at school due to dyslexia smacks of pandering and isn’t well integrated into the overall story. Lucy’s personality is slightly more developed; glassblowing is a talent not often seen in teen fiction. However, Crowley’s divided narrative doesn’t suit the characters, and the decision to intersperse poems into the mix further fractures their interactions.
There’s splashes of color, but teens will find their interest washes out rapidly. (Fiction. 13 & up)
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