Rodney Hall, Gail Jones and Gina Perry on what they're reading in April
Rodney HallA Stolen SeasonPicador Australia
Your book in your words: The super-rich are parasites on society, wrecking social cohesion and profiting from war. Against this background the novel’s characters struggle to survive – in three independent streams of action that connect at the very end.
The central metaphor is a Mayan pyramid in central America, and an Australian tourist climbing it. She discovers sculptured panels that immortalise the priests who butchered their human sacrifices there. And others of the slaves who built it. Thus, the pyramid bears witness to its own brutality.
A soldier returns home to Melbourne from the Iraq war. Hideously disfigured by an explosion, he survives long enough to discover that the reasons for sending Australian troops were a lie. Worse, the government, as puppets of international finance, were aware there were no WMDs, also that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the destruction of the twin towers. All lies – for the benefit of whom?
What you were reading when you wrote it: The book took three years and I am an avid reader, so there were too many books to list. The biggest influence was rereading Nikolai Gogol’s 1842 masterpiece Dead Souls, which defiantly ignores the orthodox narrative tradition. Marvellously fresh, with its free form and rich gallery of characters.
The next Australian book you will read: In 2012, Josephine Rowe published a book of exquisitely written stories, Tarcutta Wake. I’m expecting to find the same qualities of elegance, concision and power in her latest novel A Loving, Faithful Animal, UQP. She is a young writer of outstanding talent.
Joëlle GergisSunburnt Country: The future and history of climate change in AustraliaMUP
Your book in your own words: Sunburnt Country is a book for anyone interested in understanding what climate change really is, and what it means for our lives here in Australia. It’s a gentle way into a topic that can sometimes feel overwhelming.
The book pieces together our national story about climate change for the first time. It covers the latest advances in climate science, Australian history, psychology, politics, human health and ecology. You don’t need to be a scientist to read the book; you just have to have an open mind.
Sunburnt Country is also an invitation to be part of the biggest cultural revolution taking place across the planet right now.
What you were reading when you wrote it: I re-read Facing Climate Change by American scientist, psychologist and author Jeffrey Kiehl. I kept this quote right near my computer screen as I wrote my book: “I do not become less of a scientist by opening my heart to the world. I become more whole. I embody a source of wisdom resting in each of us.”
It felt like permission to blend aspects of myself that I usually keep separate – the scientist and the storyteller, the head and the heart. It was a reminder that it is deeply human to care about the things that really matter. If I couldn’t bridge those places in myself, then how could I expect my readers to?
The next Australian book you’ll read: Common People by Tony Birch ahead of our panel together at the Sydney writers’ festival. I read Shadow Boxing when I first moved
to Melbourne. It was a powerful read that really brought to life Fitzroy’s gritty history. Given my work as a scientist, any opportunity to read fiction is a treat!
• Joëlle Gergis will be appearing at the Sydney writers’ festival on Friday 4 May.
Gail JonesThe Death of Noah GlassText publishing
Your book in your words: The Death of Noah Glass centres on the life of an art historian, Noah, from Sydney, and his passions, memories and possible participation in an Italian art theft. A second narrative involves his son Martin, an artist who travels to Sicily after his father’s death to try to unveil the secrets of Noah’s life; and a third is based around his daughter Evie, a former philosopher, who is tracking her brother’s journey from a position of both concern and estrangement.
These stories are braided to suggest the mystery of families – the way they share a culture, sayings, habits and memories, while parents and children are essentially unknown to each other. Each story is connected to visual culture – this is a novel full of images and movies – but also to aspects of love, violence and the surprise of time.
What you were reading when you wrote it: I revisited Primo Levi’sThe Drowned and the Saved. This is a text about Auschwitz; I wanted to think about survival and the appalling idea, linked to the myth of Noah, that some are worthy to be saved and others deserve to drown. This remains an ethically compelling text for our times.
The next Australian book you’ll read: I’ve just begun Kristina Olsson’s Shell, a beguiling, original and beautifully written imagining of Sydney of the 60s – this will be her international breakout book. I’m really looking forward to Gregory Day’s A Sand Archive. Day is an inventive storyteller, clever and humane, and deserves wide readership.
SA JonesThe FortressEcho Publishing
Your book in your words: Jonathon Bridge is wealthy, successful and well-connected. He’s also flawed in ways that will be familiar to the #MeToo generation. In order to preserve his marriage and prepare for impending fatherhood, he agrees to his wife’s request that he enter The Fortress for a period of one year.
The Fortress is a cloistered citystate run by a female-identifying civilisation called the Vaik. The price of his entry to The Fortress is absolute submission to the Vaik and their guiding principles of Work, History, Sex and Justice. The book imagines a radical inversion of sexual and social power structures and asks: what does it take to make a man change?
What you were reading when you wrote it: Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel. Her portrait of Thomas Cromwell is a masterclass in complex, flawed, compelling male characters. I live in dread of something happening to Mantel before she releases the final chapter.
The next Australian book you’ll read: I’m lucky enough to have an early reading copy of A Superior Spectre by Angela Meyer. It is feminist speculative fiction with a Highland twist from the dynamo behind Captives. I’m also super-excited that Annabel Smith has another book in the offing because of her uncanny way with novel form and structure.
Leigh StrawLillian ArmfieldHachette
Your book in your words: When Lillian Armfield joined the newly created Women’s Police in New South Wales in 1915, she was one of only two female officers appointed anywhere in Australia. Her brief was extensive. Australia’s first female detective, she investigated Australia’s most notorious gangsters and sex workers, runaways and dodgy fortune-tellers, drug dealers and rapists. This work was done with nothing more than her handbag to protect her.
Female police officers were not allowed to wear a uniform or carry a gun in NSW until the 1970s. Her policing career was of its time and shows us what it was like to police Sydney’s underworlds in the early 20th century. Lillian not only had to fight crime but also prove to the boys in blue that women could be there too. Lillian Armfield was a trailblazing police officer who set the standard for women in the Australian police force.
What you were reading when you wrote it: I write with my collection of F Scott Fitzgerald books nearby. He’s one of my heroes and a comfort blanket of sorts. While writing Lillian Armfield I was reading The Crack-Up (1945), and the notebooks provided me with insights into Fitzgerald’s everyday observations. It’s captivating and made me think deeply about my own writing.
The next Australian book you’ll read: I’m really looking forward to reading the second volume of Jimmy Barnes’ autobiography Working Class Man. I’ve been saving it for a family holiday to the US in July. I loved the first volume; we ScottishAustralians like our own yins a lot and we all love Jimmy!
Jamie Marina LauPink Mountain on Locust IslandBrow Books
Your book in your words: Pink Mountain on Locust Island is a novel written in short bursts from the central perspective of Monk, who lives in Chinatown with her failed-artist-father. When Monk meets Santa Coy in an internet cafe one night, she brings him home to meet her father, who adopts Santa as his artistic disciple. Monk’s life soon becomes a buzz of homemade art exhibitions, late-night trades, road trips, red parties, shopping centre tiles and crappy tutorial VHSs.
I was really interested in writing about the transactions between people and of people as a “product”. What was also very important to me was exploring the difference between choice and necessity of certain professions and lifestyles – especially unpacking the social, cultural and psychological obligations of professions which rely on giving their customers “hope” – for instance, professions in entertainment, drug culture and religious/ spiritual organisations. All this – and then how it ties in with diasporic communities too.
What you were reading when you wrote it: I was reading this tiny modern, gothic-noir novella which was only available at a university library: Cowboy Maloney’s Electric City by Michael Bible. I’d also just finished studying and writing at uni about Jazz by Toni Morrison. Both are so incredibly striking and unique and heavily influenced the way I thought about form when writing this book.
The next Australian book you’ll read: I’ve been meaning to read more Australian poetry and essays – I feel like Australia has so much to offer in that realm. I want to be reading Comfort Food by Ellen van Neerven, Omar Sakr’s These Wild Houses and Maria Tumarkin’s Axiomatic.
• Jamie Marina Lau will be appearing at the Sydney writers’ festival on Friday 4 May.
Jeremy Heimans and Henry TimmsNew PowerPan Macmillan
Your book in your words: It is a manual for everyone to be able to navigate our crazy world of crowds and hyper-connection. It helps people understand a new set of skills that are essential if you want to make progress in the 21st century. We cover everything from how to spread ideas, to how to build movements, to how to raise money. Whether you are a health worker, a CEO or an activist, these are critical abilities. Those who get these skills right are getting ahead. Those who don’t – especially those who have thrived relying on what we think of as 20th century “old power” skills – are falling behind.
But it is also a manifesto. We want a world where everyone is participating to also be one where everyone is seeing greater benefits. Too often the rise of new power is making others more powerful – from platforms like Facebook to strongmen leaders in the political sphere.
What you were reading when you wrote it: Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks. His work has lit the path for many.
The next Australian book you’ll read: Taboo by Kim Scott. By all accounts this is a powerful novel that addresses parts of Australian history and politics in a courageous, thought-provoking way.
• Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms will be appearing at the Sydney writers’ festival on Saturday 5 May.
Julia PrendergastThe Earth Does
Not Get FatUWAP
Your book in your words: The Unexpected Education of Emily Dean is set in 1944, during the second world war in country Victoria. Emily is 14 and she’s sent, against her will, for an extended stay at the family property with various relations, servants and farm hands. She’s desperate to go home to Melbourne, but there’s no escape and inevitably she gets drawn into the lives around her – including her young aunt, the aloof and mysterious Lydia; Claudio, the Italian POW employed as a farm labourer; and her uncle William, who returns from the war, wounded in body and soul.
Love and sex, class, politics and religion, the trauma of war and the liberating power of literature all inform Emily’s transformation from girl to woman, as her world view is challenged and changed in unexpected ways. It’s a story of self-discovery, and my aim was to give it a tone that is both funny and poignant.
What you were reading while you wrote it: The novel’s protagonist, Emily Dean, is desperate to read Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, as she’s heard from her arch nemesis at school that Mr Rochester is the most romantic hero ever. But instead, she’s stuck with George Eliot’s Middlemarch, a second-hand Christmas present from her father. I reread both books while writing the novel and despite Emily’s view, was awed once again by George Eliot’s masterpiece. I loved Jane Eyre too!
The next Australian book you will read: I’m looking forward to reading What the Light Reveals by Mick McCoy, where he explores the moral complexities of political idealism through the story of an Australian family living in Moscow during the cold war. It sounds compelling.
Your book in your words: The Earth Does Not Get Fat is a gritty story about a broken mother and her daughter’s efforts to “save” her. Chelsea is a teenager in her final years of high school. Her mother is dysfunctional and emaciated. Useless. Chelsea thinks her mother is going to die.
Chelsea barely attends class. In addition to caring for her mother, she is responsible for her grandfather – he is becoming increasingly confused. Rattled by the brokenness, Chelsea’s boyfriend “vanishes”. She is alone. In order to help her mother, she needs to understand why she is the way she is. Pelts, a man from her mother’s past, re-enters their lives. He cares for Annie, Chelsea, Grandad. Eventually, Annie tells her stories: reliving past trauma.
The story is about silver lining, light in shade. It is realist fiction, a story of “behind close doors” in contemporary Australia.
What you were reading when you wrote it: I’m always reading short fiction, and Australian literary magazines. I was reading Frank Moorhouse, various works, and articles about “discontinuous” narrative – I came to understand the fracturing in my work as intrinsically related to themes of memory and trauma. I love Moorhouse’s depiction of “grunge” characters and “dirty realism” in Australia.
The next Australian book you’ll read: I’ve just read Josephine Rowe’s A Loving Faithful Animal, followed by her previous work: Tarcutta Wake and How a Moth Becomes a Boat. Stunning writing: insightful characterisation, innovative structure. I’m readingAustralian Short Stories.I’m grateful to have stories in that collection.
Gina PerryThe Lost BoysScribe
Your book in your words: The Lost Boys is a biography of a social psychological experiment. It tells the story of how two groups of 11-yearold boys came to be pitted against one another in a remote state park in Oklahoma in 1954, to prove that hostility and violence is inevitable in societies where people are forced to compete.
In writing about the experiment I went in search of the now adult boys to hear their memories and to understand how they were affected both as children and adults. But I discovered that the boys had as many unanswered questions about the research as I did, and that to understand how the experiment came about I had to understand the man behind it: Turkish-born social psychologist Muzafer Sherif.
In the process my research took me from Oklahoma to the Ottoman empire, Robbers Cave to republican Turkey, cold war politics and back again.
What you were reading when you wrote it: The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore. She has this wonderful knack for making the past come alive and making it seem effortless. Her evocation of the period and the place of William Moulton Marston, psychologist and creator of Wonder Woman in feminist history, reinforced how important it is to situate psychological science in a historical context.
The next Australian book you’ll read: Anaesthesia by Kate ColeAdams. I’ve heard wonderful things about this book and I love the idea that so little is known about a medical procedure that is so common. I’m always fascinated to read science writing where writers insert themselves into the story. And in a book about consciousness and subjectivity that seems particularly apt.