Question 7 by Richard Flanagan
Knopf
It’s a big call to make for a Booker winner, but Question 7 could be Richard Flanagan’s greatest yet. This elegiac, chaptered essay touches on ideas that have haunted his fiction for years: his father was a PoW in Japan for three years during the second world war and was freed after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Thousands died – but because of that event, 16 years later Flanagan would be born in Tasmania.
Question 7 is Flanagan’s painful and powerful examination of the psychic implications of what it means to be alive directly because so many people died – a deeply existential conundrum that is so very personal and so very universal, that it’s hard to shake. – Sian Cain
Read more: Question 7 by Richard Flanagan review – this deeply moving book is his finest work
Wifedom by Anna Funder
Hamish Hamilton
Anna Funder has added a brilliant, eye-opening perspective to the literature about George Orwell. Courage was needed for the Australian author to put her own human-rights hero under feminist scrutiny, and Funder charged ahead with scholarship, imagination and outrage. Eileen O’Shaughnessy, Orwell’s first wife, emerges as an educated, adventurous woman who subsumed her talents into supporting his career and boosting his creativity, while Orwell was a neglectful, unfaithful and even cruel husband.
Wifedom has been highly acclaimed, controversial and divisive, stimulating the liveliest literary conversations of the year. – Susan Wyndham
Read more: Wifedom by Anna Funder review – a brilliant reckoning with George Orwell to change the way you read; Sadistic and misogynistic? Row erupts over sex claims in book about George Orwell’s marriage
Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright
Giramondo
Sometimes a novel adopts a unique language you can only learn to speak as you read it. Exhibit A: Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy. Wright’s furiously conceived portrait of the death and life of a fictional Aboriginal community in the 21st century roils with the immiseration wrought by the Howard-era Northern Territory intervention, and an all-encompassing metaphysical cataclysm of uncertain origin.
The novel’s cast of players is large, but it is Tommyhawk, the youngest member of the book’s embattled central family, who proves one of the great characters of Australian literature. Like many antiheroes before him, Tommyhawk defies Manichean notions of good and evil: some villains are just lost innocents. – Declan Fry
Read more: Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright review – how can one novel contain so much?
Anam by André Dao
Hamish Hamilton
Sometimes a book quiets you from the first page: you’re struck by a calm, silver intelligence and intensity of thought. In this novel – which branches gracefully into memoir, essay and something beyond – Dao, or a young father very like him, riddles over the history of his family.
At the centre is the story of his grandfather, a political prisoner in Vietnam’s Chí Hòa. From there, he can begin to comb through the claims of loss and memory; of duty and of love. This beautiful, difficult book is about waiting and what inheritances you might dare to claim. Dao has poured everything into it and the result is something exceptional. – Imogen Dewey
Read more: Anam by André Dao review – decades-spanning family epic examines the difficulties of memory
The Anniversary by Stephanie Bishop
Hachette
The Anniversary has stayed with me because of its fine balance between taut suspense, dark and complex emotion, and something that would be cheekiness if it weren’t so pointed and profound. The protagonist is a novelist who has lived in the shadow of her film-maker husband for years, and her reflections on the treatment and reception of women writers are devastatingly sharp. They recur across a gripping plot involving the husband’s disappearance at sea, and ever-shifting revelations about the relationship, the work, the past.
It is beautifully crafted, utterly compelling and great fun as well. – Fiona Wright
The In-Between by Christos Tsiolkas
Allen and Unwin
In Christos Tsiolkas’ previous book, 7 1/2, the autofictional narrator is taken to task for choosing to write not about politics, but beauty. “We have grown old,” his friend says: “And you have grown soft.” It’s a neat way to frame Tsiolkas’ next novel, which is all softness and tenderness: a love story between two men in their 50s, trying to reconcile their personal regrets and heartbreaks as they meet across a “rough hands/smooth hands” class divide.
As always with Tsiolkas, the carnal and pungent sex might not be to your tastes – but stick with it for the sweetness of the romance and the most stressful dinner party scene since Edward Albee. – Steph Harmon
Read more: The In-Between by Christos Tsiolkas review – carnal but tender love story; A walk with Christos Tsiolkas: ‘I don’t understand wanting to live a youthful life forever’
Unfinished Woman by Robyn Davidson
Bloomsbury
Robyn Davidson – who shot to fame trekking with camels across Australia – had always applied a “scorched-earth policy” to her past. But after a shattering midlife breakdown, the Tracks author felt compelled to sift back through the ruins – from her tumultuous relationship with Salman Rushdie to her mother’s suicide in suburban Queensland when Davidson was 11 – to ask herself: “What is the relationship between my mother’s despair, and my own?”
In a memoir that’s as evocative and restless as its author – flitting from Doris Lessing’s abode in London to the Indian home of her Rajasthani prince “companion” – Davidson interrogates what family, freedom and home mean when you never truly belong anywhere. – Janine Israel
Read more: The woman who walked alone across the desert: what Robyn Davidson learned by risking everything
Shirley by Ronnie Scott
Penguin Random House
Scott’s debut novel, The Adversary, spent a long, febrile summer with a cadre of hunky cads – the kind who wield side-eyes like weapons at the Fitzroy pool. His follow-up, Shirley, feels equally as catty and equally as uncanny.
Set in the first few months of 2020 – catastrophe impending – it follows a thirtysomething narrator and her various exploits with an inept ex-boyfriend, a Gorman-core neighbour and an estranged mother – a former celebrity chef who drops in only to wreak emotional havoc. Looming large is Shirley: the family house abandoned after a vaguely remembered – though gruesome – incident. The mystery streaks through the book like blood. Things get weird. – Michael Sun
Read more: Shirley by Ronnie Scott review – finally, a male author who brilliantly writes women
Gunflower by Laura Jean McKay
Scribe
McKay’s acclaimed 2020 debut The Animals in That Country saw a pandemic spread the globe that enabled animals and humans to communicate with each other. This fiercely inventive, beguiling short story collection returns to similar ideas, around animal consciousness (one is told from the perspective of chickens in a battery farm), science and the climate crisis.
The titular story, named after its setting – an Icelandic boat where women around the world can get abortions in international waters – is particularly outstanding. For fans of George Saunders, Naomi Alderman and Margaret Atwood. – Sian Cain
Read more: Gunflower by Laura Jean McKay review – exciting speculative tales
Homecoming by Kate Morton
Allen & Unwin
When Jess returns to Sydney from London to be with her dying grandmother, she unwittingly stumbles upon a long-buried secret, and a connection to a well-to-do family whose 1959 Adelaide murder remains unsolved.
Morton is a master storyteller who effortlessly criss-crosses time periods, geographies and protagonists in this sweeping saga of family secrets, illicit love affairs and finding home. A rich, vivid and gripping epic by one of Australia’s biggest exports, Homecoming is an indulgent read at over 600 pages: atmospheric and evocative in its descriptions and its sometimes-protracted, winding storyline, but worth it for escapism alone. – Sarah Ayoub
Crossing the Line by Nick McKenzie
Hachette
When journalists Nick McKenzie and Chris Masters brought the war crimes of decorated Australian soldier Ben Roberts-Smith to light in 2017, it sowed the seeds for a defamation case that made Australian history. McKenzie’s account of what went on behind the scenes is compelling, fast-paced and accessible storytelling that emphasises the power of investigative journalism and the importance of media integrity.
Entertaining is probably not the right word to use, but this is an unexpected page-turner: the twists and turns are electrifying, and McKenzie’s dogged pursuit of truth and justice admirable. – Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen
Hear more: Nick McKenzie was interviewed by Guardian Australia’s Ben Doherty in an episode of our podcast Ben Roberts Smith vs The Media
I’d Rather Not by Robert Skinner
Black Inc
Buy two copies of I’d Rather Not – one for yourself and one to lend – because this is the kind of impish little book that disappears from shelves. Less a memoir than a series of escapades, Robert Skinner’s swashbuckling debut sees him tussle with an ornery camel, the robodebt goons and the ever-fickle literary gods. We know he’s destined to lose, but oh, how glorious failure can be when you put your heart into it.
Skinner has been compared to Oscar Wilde, but his book is as self-effacing as it is quip-witted. I’d planned to include a quote or two – take a joyride on Skinner’s comedy coat-tails – but my (latest) copy is missing. – Beejay Silcox
Search History by Amy Taylor
Allen & Unwin
This incredibly online novel is for the girlies who simply can’t help but lurk. Protagonist Ana is delighted when she meets a man IRL rather than via the drudgery of the apps, but is quickly sucked into the digital vortex anyway when she goes down the social media rabbit hole and becomes obsessed with his dead ex.
There are plenty of peek-through-your-fingers cringe moments in this pacy and juicy novel, which hits the nail on the head with its depiction of the thrills and dangers of modern dating. – Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen
Read more: Search History by Amy Taylor review – sharp and pacy cautionary tale for the extremely online
God Forgets About the Poor by Peter Polites
Ultimo Press
So many autobiographical books on this list play with the genre, and Polites’ latest is no exception. It begins with a stream-of-consciousness chapter, told to the narrator (an apparent stand-in for the author) by his acerbic mother; she wants him to write her story, but: “Try and write something good this time.”
The resulting book is packed with tenderness, love, humour, magic and myth. From her birth in Lefkada to her young adulthood in Athens and her migration to Australia, we are told the story of not just this woman but of migrant Australia and diasporic Greece; and shown how history reaches forward through generations to make us who we become. – Steph Harmon
Read more: God Forgets About the Poor by Peter Polites review – the author’s most striking work yet
Edenglassie by Melissa Lucashenko
UQP
Talking to a friend about this book the other night, I clocked again that it’s taught me more about Australia than anything I’ve ever read, fiction or otherwise. “Educational” carries very particular connotations, but none of them apply to Lucashenko’s vivid, moving historical opus.
With strands of appalling violence, but also of romance, community and the transcendent joy of First Nations culture, she binds together two stories: one from Brisbane/Meanjin now, one from the city’s colonial beginnings. You’ll laugh! You’ll cry! You’ll take sides! You’ll see just how many problems could be fixed by affordable housing! A brilliant storyteller on raucously good form, I can’t recommend this enough. – Imogen Dewey
The Bell of the World by Gregory Day
Transit Lounge
Gerald Murnane’s litmus test for a story’s worth was whether it leaves an enduring image upon the mind. By this metric, Gregory Day’s The Bell of the World seared me like a branding iron.
Taking place in the early 20th century in post-federation, colonial Australia, the novel follows Sarah, a young woman living an unsettled existence after her parents’ acrimonious divorce. When she moves to outback Victoria, however, she experiences a great osmosis – like a “long clench releasing” – with nature and its flora and fauna. This is generous, mellifluous eco-fiction that engenders in its readers a similar shift, a great light breaking. – Jack Callil
Read more: The Bell of the World by Gregory Day review – an electric crescendo of Australian nature writing
Paradise Estate by Max Easton
Giramondo
A punk musician, a cam girl, an activist couple and a woman crippled by grief move into a mouldy Sydney share house. So begins the second novel from author Max Easton, a sequel of sorts to 2021’s The Magpie Wing.
Like his debut, Paradise Estate has plenty to say; incisive about class, gentrification and the true motivations behind some of the left’s most vocal “allies”. But what’s most enjoyable is its essential Sydney-ness, including how vividly Easton paints a house full of people you don’t always like but who feel very real and recognisable. And the writing is exceptional – the first and last pages, especially, will stick with you. – Katie Cunningham
Read more: Paradise Estate by Max Easton review – a layered, aching portrait of millennial malaise
Women and Children by Tony Birch
UQP
Like many of Birch’s short stories and novels, Women and Children takes place in the mid-1960s and is set in one of the less affluent (now gentrified) suburbs of inner-city Melbourne. Birch’s child protagonist is Joe Cluny, an 11-year-old boy who struggles with the disciplinarian nuns at his school.
Joe’s family are as memorable a cast of characters as you will find – the relationship between Joe and his grandfather Charlie is simply beautiful. When domestic violence threatens Joe’s aunt Oona, the bonds of family are tested. This is another elegant and powerful book from Birch. – Joseph Cummins
Read more: Women & Children by Tony Birch review – a new high for the master craftsman; A walk with Tony Birch: ‘I got into a lot of fights. I was a very good street boxer’
Dress Rehearsals by Madison Godfrey
Joan
Madison Godfrey’s second collection was released during Sydney WorldPride and the two are intertwined for me. These often-funny poems can be read as memoir, as Godfrey takes us through their early life of emo, fandoms and Harry Styles (he gets a poem, as does Halsey; Lara Croft gets two!); to their encounters with the complexities of girlhood; and towards a non-binary identity and a queer community painted with exquisite, breathless joy.
Ode to My Kneecaps is a favourite: “There are so many odes to collarbones / I’m sorry I didn’t look lower sooner. / You unassuming barricade, / A mountain I can curl around / on the train ride home.” – Steph Harmon
Read more: I don’t feel like I was born into the wrong body. There’s not a right or wrong way to be trans
Frank Moorhouse: A Life by Catharine Lumby
Allen & Unwin
Catharine Lumby’s slim life of Frank Moorhouse is the first of two published biographies of the avant-garde author who died in 2022 (the second, by Matthew Lamb, came out this month). As a friend, she had intimate access to the man and his huge archive. And as an academic journalist, she finds resonant connections in his complex personal life, times and writing within thematic chapters such as Living in the ’70s: Sex, Gender and Politics and The Moorhouse Method: Rules for Living.
With wit, insight and sensitive omissions, Lumby unconsciously echoes the “discontinuous narrative” form that Moorhouse applied to his fiction, sparking questions for future biographers. – Susan Wyndham
Read more: ‘Way too much information, Frank’: I wanted to be Frank Moorhouse. Instead I became his biographer
Ravenous Girls by Rebecca Burton
Finlay Lloyd
This short novel about family dysfunction, the fickleness of teenage friendship, mother-daughter symbiosis, and illness, packs an almighty emotional punch. The family of 14-year-old first-person protagonist Frankie is stressed to breaking point when her older sister Justine becomes an inpatient at an eating disorders unit. But this is a family already shaken by the death of a father and husband, 11 years earlier.
Chroniclers of fictional family life don’t always understand that trauma is most often multilayered, like scar tissue. Just how fully author Rebecca Burton grasps this is evident in her delicate characterisations and sometimes heartbreaking plot. – Paul Daley
Songs for the Dead and the Living by Sara M Saleh
Affirm Press
Amid the deaths of more than 18,000 Palestinians in the current Israel–Gaza war, according to the Gaza health ministry, this lyrical debut novel is as much a story for the present as it is the past. Saleh writes from where much of it began: with a newly widowed and pregnant Palestinian’s initial dispossession of her homeland and then, by extension, her descendants’ ongoing intergenerational trauma and displacement, as refugees in Lebanon, Egypt and Australia.
Delicately and boldly written, this book highlights the layered realities of Arab and Muslim women as wives, daughters and sisters, with a critical tenderness. – Sarah Ayoub
Read more: Sara M Saleh: ‘I want to know the system and its flaws, so I know how to undo it, transcend it’
Green Dot by Madeleine Gray
Allen & Unwin
One of the most anticipated debuts of the year, Madeleine Gray’s razor-sharp novel doesn’t disappoint. Green Dot follows 24-year-old Hera, bored with her life and where it’s headed. When she begins a doomed love affair with older colleague Arthur, she decides this relationship might be the thing to give it all meaning.
Gray manages to make something fresh out of this well-trodden territory: her approximation of millennial life and language is both on-point and very, very funny. But underneath all the sass and sarcasm, there’s real vulnerability – the bind of the modern young woman. – Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen
Read more: Green Dot by Madeleine Gray review – a sassy love story with a bleak worldview
Secret Third Thing by Dan Hogan
Cordite Books
Named after the 2022 meme of being neither x nor y (joking or serious, productive or relaxing) but a Secret Third Thing, Dan Hogan’s debut poetry book bashes against the confines of how we articulate ourselves and live.
It’s also very funny, an onslaught of absurdity with lines like, “So drunk at late night shopping right now Sent from my iPhone.” from how_to_be_the_best_worker_in_the_world.ppt. But as Hogan details a world of debasing Centrelink calls, awful landlords and the cruelty of late capitalism, the jokes act as momentary serotonin distractions, questioning what ceaseless scrolling obscures and upholds. – Jared Richards
Eleven Letters to You by Helen Elliott
Text
This lovely memoir by Elliott, a much-admired literary critic, examines periods of her life through letters to the people who shaped her when she was growing up in Australia’s burbs in the 1950s and 1960s. The neighbour who lent her the books that would change her life; the teacher who taught her about art; the attractive male boss who became “an instruction in both desire and decency”; and all the bold women who revealed to her how to live a life of one’s own.
I keep thinking about this book – it is one to return to. – Sian Cain
