Carrie Tiffany
Julienne van Loon’s The Thinking Woman is a fascinating mix of essays
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I’ve read some fine essays this year. Fiona Wright, Maria Tumarkin, Meera Atkinson and Michelle de Kretser have all knocked my socks off. Most recently I spent some time with Julienne van Loon’s The Thinking Woman. A delicate and fascinating mix of memoir and philosophy, Van Loon shares her conversations with some international thinkers of repute including Rosi Braidotti, Marina Warner, Siri Hustvedt, Nancy Holmstrom and Laura Kipnis.

The Thinking Woman is applied philosophy in the manner of Alain de Botton, but frankly, much better. Van Loon isn’t repackaging the philosophy canon for the masses. Her thinkers are all contemporary and active in their fields.

Great essays have texture and this book demonstrates that in spades. Delicately threaded through the ideas and interviews is Van Loon’s own story written with a vivid, compelling simplicity.

The book can be dipped into – it is essentially a series of essays on love, play, work, fear, wonder and friendship. Van Loon’s description of playing ball with her young son in Western Australia is both tender and thoughtful. That playing with a ball could be a kind of physics experiment, that mother and son are both researchers in the world and in relation to each other, was exhilarating to read.

I love books that lead to other books. The Thinking Woman is just that kind of book. I’m now reading Rosi Braidotti. How wonderful to have found her.

Carrie Tiffany is the author of Exploded View. Read about it here.

Tara June Winch
Welcome to Country: A Travel Guide to Indigenous Australia by Marcia Langton is a perfect companion
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There’s something memorable when you feel a hardcover book under that sheet of wrapping paper, there’s no disguising what lies beneath. One is so careful about taking the paper off of a hardback – it’s akin to cracking caramelised sugar on a crème brûlée – there’s a delicacy and joy involved at once!

This book has a beautiful cover, entirely wrapped in the artwork Kura Ala by the Spinifex Women’s Collaborative, the artwork and the title are embossed, alluding to the deeper experience of what is contained within the pages. Inside the premise is simple enough, but it’s never been done – a travel guide, to the whole country, that leads the voyager to Aboriginal owned-and-run experiences, from national park guided walks to cooking classes.

The guidebook is broken into two parts; the first introduces the reader to Indigenous cultures of Australia; with chapters on history, kinship, art, performance and, importantly, a chapter on cultural awareness for visitors. Part two is the guide, state by state, and has all the necessary information including tips on everything from drinking water and fire permits to crocodiles.

There’s a beautiful foreword by Stan Grant and colour photographs throughout. During a recent two-month trip around the country I used my copy and can attest to it being a perfect companion, to read by the fire in the morning, and wrapped in a towel, makes a decent pillow for one.

Tara June Winch is the author of The Yield. Read about it here.

Stephanie Wood
Ruth Park’s The Harp in the South is a mighty evocation of place and time
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There is, for me, forever a part of inner Sydney and Melbourne that is The Harp in the South. Although it is set in the Surry Hills of the 1940s, the Darcy family of Plymouth Street, Surry Hills, could just as easily have been the Darcy family of mid-century Fitzroy or Collingwood. In these neighbourhoods now strewn with espresso-scented restaurants and renovated terrace houses, schmick designer dogs and well-fed affluent owners, I sometimes imagine myself into the impossibly grim past of Park’s novel. I see the flash of a thin child’s vanishing figure down a slum laneway, or a weary aproned housewife leaning on a fence outside a mean dwelling, or men in hats on street corners, idle and flicking cigarette ash.

Such is the brilliance of the novel: its mighty evocation of place and time. The other is its colossal humanity. These rich characters, the Irish-Catholic Darcys, have a decency and an emotional intelligence that lift them above their world of gut-wrenching poorness, of “fetid lavatories” and “rotting garbage” and bedrooms dank and bed-bug-ridden.

But there is more to The Harp in the South than poverty-porn nostalgia; plus ça change, it has something important to say still. Says Roie to Grandma: “You just ought to make your pension go further.” And the old woman’s reply: “What am I, a magic-an?” And Roie’s reflection on “the cheap and dirty portion of the city”: “She remembered the countless dirty old lonely men around the city, living in some cheap and squalid room”.

I cry through the novel’s finale, Roie’s great love affair with Charlie, but the tears might just as well fall for those not so unlike them who even today tread their own difficult paths through our ever unfriendlier inner cities.

Stephanie Wood is the author of Fake. Read about it here.

Charlotte Wood
Night Fishing by Vicki Hastrich is a stunning memoir
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Night Fishing, like any truly great book, resists summary. How to describe Vicki Hastrich’s stunning memoir, this “natural history” of the author herself?

Hastrich’s books have received little media attention, perhaps because they’re too complex for bite-sized packaging. But her reputation flourishes in the deep and personal exchanges between real readers, her passionate fans. Night Fishing is a case in point: everyone I know who’s read it has expressed a kind of shocked rapture at its beauty and depth, its intellectual audacity and originality – and then vowed to share it with every other reader in their lives.

Attempting the impossible, I’ll summarise Night Fishing as a collection of taut, lyrical essays about water, art, language, family, the natural world and ways of seeing. It’s a love song to the particular waterscape of Hastrich’s childhood and a joyful inquiry into what it means to really look at the world around us. Its breathtaking ambition lies in linking things as seemingly disparate as Goya and sea turtles; Rome’s Pantheon and Taronga Zoo; Galileo and a deadly numbfish. Hastrich’s prose makes such seemingly outlandish connections effortlessly natural, each one revealing profound truths.

I’ve perhaps made it sound a high-flown book, but much of its power lies in its tender attention to the ordinary, to the smallest human moment. In a world overwhelmed with crassness and cruelty, this book is a sanctuary. It will bring you truth, and beauty – and peace.

Charlotte Wood is the author of The Weekend. Read about it here.

Vicki Laveau-Harvie
Kristina Olsson’s Shell is an exceptional novel
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This Christmas, I recommend giving the pleasure of a big, generous novel: Shell by Kristina Olsson. In luminous prose that shimmers across every page, the author shows us Sydney in the mid-sixties: a storied place seeking a way into its future. The Opera House surges into the city’s consciousness, its “sails arcing out of chaos”; a lottery decides which of the country’s young men will be sent to Vietnam.

A journalist exiled to the women’s pages as punishment for her political activism, and a young Swedish glass sculptor brought to Sydney by Utzon to create something of beauty for future visitors to his visionary building, share a fleeting connection. The juxtaposition of their worlds shows us the forces defining the identity of this raw new place: engagement and neutrality; hardship and the richness of art and ideas. In one corner, philistinism and “a shuffle toward sameness”; in the other, freedom for the creative process, the furthering of the ‘vaulting potential’ of a nation.

These struggles remain with us. We must still reconcile the imperatives of the ordinary and the longing for something higher to define us. It is the stuff of our conversations and our public debate. This novel helps us, as exceptional novels do, to reflect upon our dilemma. It makes us think; it makes us choose. It fires us up to defend the place of freedom and creativity in our world, to recognise the necessity of beauty.

Shell is a gift.

Vicki Laveau-Harvie is the author of The Erratics. Read about it here.

Christos Tsiolkas
Patrick White’s The Tree of Man is a tale of great moral power
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If I could only recommend one book to buy for Christmas then it would be the same one that I would take to me to that mythical desert island at the end of the world: Patrick White’s The Tree of Man. It alternates between great cruelty and great beauty, and achieves a great moral power from an almost pagan immersion of its characters in the soil and air and sound of the Australian landscape.

There are moments reading The Tree of Man that made me feel like I had returned to the ancient writers of the Jewish Bible stories; and then there are moments where White’s precision and play with the English language made me gasp and I realised I was reading one of the great modernist works. Is it an easy read? Of course it’s bloody not – it’s a great read. Give it to a fearless reader.

Christos Tsiolkas is the author of Damascus. Read about it here.