Fiona Wright
The World Was Whole
Giramondo
Tell us about your book: The World Was Whole is about the idea of home, and what that might mean for people like me – living long-term and precariously in rented houses and in a city in the grip of rapid change, and living with chronic illness, which is an unsettlement all of its own. It’s also about ordinariness – I’m fascinated by the things we consider ordinary, because they’re what we accept as natural or even inevitable, when in reality they are anything but. We just fail to see them because we see them every day, and this book is interested in what happens when we pay them attention, even honour them, instead.
What were you reading while you wrote it? The Odd Woman and the City by Vivian Gornick. Gornick’s book is a memoir about inner-city friendship, and it’s peppered with little anecdotes about the encounters and interactions that are a part of daily life. I loved this idea, the different kind of information these stories can carry, their directness and surprising humour.
What will you read next? Alison Whittaker’s Blakwork. Whittaker is a remarkable poet, and her new book mixes this form with reportage, satire, fiction, memoir in a way that sounds really thrilling, as well as vitally important.
Kerry Greenwood
The Spotted Dog
Allen & Unwin
Tell us about your book: This is the seventh Corinna Chapman mystery set in an inner Melbourne apartment building called Insula. Newcomers in this book include a troupe of actors, some medieval embroiderers, a mysterious mute in a wheelchair and a gay couple who have opened a music shop. Corinna finds an exhausted ex-soldier outside her bakery and is drawn into a world of dognapping, mysterious break-ins and Disorganised Crime.
Corinna begins to suspect that Professor Monk’s latest biblical researches may be of considerably more than academic interest to groups of intrusive outsiders. Insula is treated to repeated attacks after dark. Meanwhile Sergeant Sinclair wants just his dog back. After everything he’s been through in Afghanistan, he wants his best friend restored to him. And why would anyone steal an ex-army dog anyway?
As always, she has bread and muffins to be baked, cocktails to be drunk, ruffled feathers soothed and mysteries to be expounded.
What were you reading while you wrote it? I read many books about war, soldiers, service dogs and Afghanistan (see bibiliography at the end of the book); notably Kipling’s Barrack Room Ballads published in 1896. Given that the western alliance is still getting involved in wars in Afghanistan I can only conclude that we are exceedingly slow learners.
What will you read next? I am looking forward to Alison Goodman’s A New Kind of Death. She does hard-boiled thrillers with wit, style and panache. Having your protagonist as a female film-maker is an exciting digression from genre expectations and it promises to be a brilliant read. Beside my bedhead; next on my list.
Stephanie Bishop
Man Out of Time
Hachette
Tell us about your book: Man Out of Time is a novel that explores the ways in which the trauma associated with the experience of mental illness reverberates down through the generations.
Moving across two narrative strands, the novel tells the story of a very troubled relationship between a father and daughter, Leon and Stella. The novel opens with Leon’s disappearance. Stella is approached for questioning and the implication is that she knows what has happened to her father, but is refusing to speak. The book then tracks back through her childhood as we discover the history of their relationship.
Meanwhile, in the contemporary narrative, we follow Leon on his journey towards self-destruction, with the two strands coming together towards the end. It is part ghost story, part love story, and part mystery. Man Out of Time is about depression, about the enduring bonds of love within a family, and how we learn to live with the histories inside of us.
What were you reading while you wrote it? I was writing this novel on and off for close to 10 years, so many books influenced its development. In the early stages I was reading Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. I was interested in how Woolf shows a family reshaping itself in the wake of a bereavement, and wanted to pay homage to the structural playfulness of that novel. In the latter stages I was reading Deborah Levy’s Swimming Home. She is brilliant at conveying emotion through objects, and is a master of narrative compression. I wanted to think about how to carry some of this over into Man Out of Time.
What will you read next? I’m really looking forward to reading Fiona Wright’s The World Was Whole, the follow-up to her wonderful collection of essays Small Acts of Disappearance. Her essays have a rare power to them – you are both gripped by the story and moved by the intensity of thought.
Rosalie Ham
The Year of the Farmer
Picador
Tell us about your book: The Year of the Farmer is about irrigation, water, love and justice. The main protagonist, Mitchell Bishop, is under siege from the banks, the weather, vermin, the water authority and his wife. Matters collide, the small rural community around Mitch fractures and factions are pitted against each other. Then Mitch’s one true love returns to town. His wife declares war on everyone, the community unites and a kind of justice is achieved.
What were you reading while you wrote it? I was reading The Weekly Times, The Land and The Stock and Land, as well as The Last Pulse by Anson Cameron and anything else that featured farming, irrigation technology, river ecology and primary production figures. I learned a huge amount, and it was all gripping, life-affirming stuff.
What will you read next? I’m all set to read Jane Harper’s The Lost Man. Jane writes good landscape in an authentic, economical way.
Clare Wright
You Daughters of Freedom
Text
Tell us about your book: You Daughters of Freedom is the extraordinary tale of how and why Australia came to be the global leader in democratic practice and progressive reform at the turn of the 20th century. Through the interweaving stories of five remarkable women, it takes the reader on a thrilling ride through the years between Federation and the first world war, when Australian white women, having won historic voting and citizenship rights, took their message of hope, optimism and gender equality to the world. Internationally renowned in their own time, my book is an attempt to reintroduce their audacity, activism and courage to the contemporary conversations about the limits and possibilities of participatory democracy. Sounds heavy, but it’s actually heaps of fun!
What were you reading while you wrote it? I mostly read novels while I’m writing my own works of narrative non-fiction. In this instance, I went back to the classics and read Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career and Henry Handel Richardson’s The Getting of Wisdom. Both were written during the period of my study and helped me understand how women were experiencing their own muzzled and muted lives – and why they sought both cultural and political solutions to that lack of a voice.
What will you read next? I am ridiculously excited to read Toni Jordan’s new book, The Fragments. I love Jordan’s writing for its pitch-perfect blend of intelligence, compassion and humour. Like her brilliant Nine Days, this new book has a historical element and a research base, so seriously, I can’t wait!
Shaun Tan
Tales from the Inner City
Allen & Unwin
Tell us about your book: Tales from the Inner City is a collection of short stories about animals that I’ve been writing, drawing and painting for more years than I can exactly remember. The basic premise is this: how might humans react when wild animals, previously pushed to the periphery of our urban consciousness, suddenly re-enter it? A rhino on a freeway, crocodiles filling a skyscraper floor, foxes in bedrooms, bears in high courts and so on, each absurd enough to jolt us out of the usual anthropocentric haze. What might each story reveal of our deepest wishes and anxieties, our uncertainties about ourselves and the world we have made?
What were you reading while you wrote it? Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens reinforced my suspicions that our most scared human institutions are actually very useful and persistent fictions, for better or worse. At the other end of the spectrum, Virginia Morell’s Animal Wise is a terrific survey of recent – and long overdue – research into animal sentience.
What will you read next? Probably Markus Zusak’s Bridge of Clay, a book he mentioned to me back when we were much younger men, still finding our feet in the world of YA literature (whatever that is). He’s a writer of inspiring patience, generosity and integrity, with a very down-to-earth awareness of transcendental things.
Celeste Barber
Challenge Accepted
HarperCollins
Tell us about your book: My book, Challenge Accepted, won’t change your life. It won’t even give you advice on how to be a thinner prettier person. It will, however, show you what it was like for a young girl growing up with undiagnosed ADD and overactive zest for dancing, and what it’s like to be trapped in a room with the ghost of your fake dead brother.
Challenge Accepted explores the theory that being famous on Instagram is like being rich at monopoly and if you get undressed and take inappropriate and, at times, unflattering photos of yourself, you just might start believing you’re more important than you are.
What were you reading while you wrote it? Tina Fey’s Bossypants. It’s my bible. I have notes all through it. Before I go onstage I read over particular sections of it and while writing my book I referenced it a lot trying to paraphrase most of what Tina said in an attempt to make it sound like I came up with it.
What will you read next? Jimmy Barnes’ Working Class Boy. I watched the special a few weeks ago and couldn’t believe what a life he has lived, so I can’t wait to read it.
Chloe Hooper
The Arsonist
Hamish Hamilton
Tell us about your book: A few days after Black Saturday, I read about the arrest of a 39-year-old man named Brendan Sokaluk who was charged with arson causing death. This crime seemed incomprehensible: on a day when the land was tinder dry, the temperature 46 degrees and a hot northerly blew, he was said to have deliberately lit two fires near his hometown of Churchill, unleashing a fatal firestorm. I wanted to know what sort of person becomes an arsonist and why.
Later, detectives from Victoria Police’s Arson Squad drove me to Churchill, which is deep in the state’s coal country, to the site where the fire had been lit. They believed they had arrested a cunning serial firelighter. But this wasn’t the perspective of Brendan’s Victoria Legal Aid lawyers.
With Brendan and his family’s permission, these lawyers told me his side of the story. After his arrest, Sokaluk had been diagnosed as autistic and intellectually disabled. He’d been misunderstood and perhaps mistreated for much of his life. He claimed to be innocent. I wanted to tell this story from both sides in the hope of getting closer to what is optimistically called the truth.
What were you reading while you wrote it? If there’s one writer who shaped my view of this story, it’s the ecologist and master-chronicler of fire, Stephen Pyne. In Burning Bush: A Fire History of Australia he marries a peerless understanding of fire science with a greater sense of the element’s mythic and poetic force. His work also sets Black Saturday in a larger environmental context: we’re living in the Fire Age.
What will you read next? I look forward to reading Ceridwen Dovey’s On JM Coetzee because I’m a great fan of both writers. As a child, Dovey saw her mother, a Coetzee scholar, poring over his books, and I’m looking forward to seeing how such a talented novelist deals with this inheritance.
Holly Throsby
Cedar Valley
Allen & Unwin
Tell us about your book: Cedar Valley is about a girl called Benny Miller who arrives in a small NSW town, seeking information about her mother who has recently died. On the same day, a man in a vintage suit arrives and sits down on the footpath outside the antique store. Due to unexpected events, he becomes the subject of great intrigue for the townsfolk. I think of it as a kind of anti-crime book.
What were you reading while you wrote it? One of the books I was reading was Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout. I loved the humour and tone, the clarity of description, and the way Strout makes you fall in love with such a difficult character.
What will you read next? Boys Will Be Boys by Clementine Ford. I’m very interested in gender politics and I think Clem is a great writer and a courageous person.
Clementine Ford
Boys Will Be Boys
Allen & Unwin
Tell us about your book: Boys Will Be Boys is an exploration of patriarchy and its impact on boys and men. It’s an accessible, funny and oftentimes heartbreaking book about the harm patriarchy inflicts on men and enables them in turn to inflict it on others. From the way we socialise children in and outside of the home to internet subcultures, rape culture and the codes of brotherhood that protect powerful men, the book advocates for a better, more liberated vision of masculinity. It is not a book about how men are shit; it’s a book about how the systems we live in enable men to do deeply shitty things.
What were you reading while you wrote it? Asking For It by Kate Harding: an unflinching look at rape culture in America and how it manifests in ways both overt and insidious. This was a crucial text to read when writing my own chapters on sexual violence and the harm it causes to women and men.
What will you read next? Beautiful Mess by Claire Christian. It’s been out for a year or so, but I have been so busy writing that reading has been impossible. I met Claire recently and she is hilarious, wise and wonderful, so I can’t wait.
Di Morrissey
Arcadia
MacMillan
Tell us about your book: I was drawn to Tasmania as I felt its time had come! It is “flavour of the month” literally, given the wonderful gourmet products, wine and foodies who’ve trekked there to live and run a business and develop new products. But it is, as always with my books, the landscape that overwhelms. The brooding misty mountains, the remote islands, the rugged coast and, most of all, the old-growth forest, which inspired me. Its past, its modern lifestyle, its creatures, the effect of this environment that dictates the lives of the main characters: Stella in the 1930s, and her granddaughter in the present day.
Arcadia is a story of a modern friendship between two girls, childhood friends, who reconnect and stumble across Stella’s secret past. What started as a modern-day girls’ road trip becomes a story of the past, to solve the present and save their future.
What were you reading while you wrote it? As the endangered masked owl features in the book, I sought some information about this magnificent bird and was guided to Wesley, The Masked Owl by Stacey O’Brien. A true story. Working as a naturalist in the US, she cared for a four-day-old owl, Wesley, and he became her constant companion for 19 years! A fascinating story.
What will you read next? I’m keen to read a book by my friend Gabrielle Chan, Rusted Off: Why Country Australia is Fed Up. As I live in regional Australia, we do feel marginalised and neglected, so I’m hoping Gabi has some solutions!
Mike Carlton
On Air
William Heinemann
Tell us about your book: My father had been a famous Olympic athlete and then a Catholic priest. When he married my mother in 1945, the scandal was page one. But I barely knew him. He died when I was five. That’s how On Air begins.
People sometimes ask how long it took to write. The answer is 72 years. It’s the story of my life as a baby boomer in the ’burbs of Sydney in the fifties when money was tight. I’d wanted to join the navy, but I got side-tracked into journalism at the ABC at the age of 16.
Over 50 years in radio, TV and newspapers I had a fortunate career as a Vietnam war correspondent, political reporter, radio Newstalk host in Sydney and London, satirist and columnist.
I’ve tried to be candid about the good times and the bad, and the good people and the bad, and to leaven the mix with dollops of humour and anecdote.
What were you reading while you wrote it? I can’t read anything else when I write, except stuff for research. But before I began, I reread Clive James’s brilliant Unreliable Memoirs, to see how the master had approached much the same task.
What will you read next? Looking forward to Peter FitzSimons’s next one: Mutiny on the Bounty, which is out at the end of the month. I’m a Bligh freak, and I’m curious to see if Pete has made him hero or villain. Or both, which he was.
