Kiran Dass selects the year’s best
IN THE CITY OF LOVE’S SLEEP
by Lavinia Greenlaw
(Faber, $37)
This is an elegant and exquisitely pitched novel about love, recovery and repair. Iris is a recently separated museum conservator who repairs and restores the unique objects in the museum’s collections and Raif is a grief-stricken academic who is frozen after his wife’s death. After a chance encounter, there is an immense gravitational pull between the two. Greenlaw wrote this while on a residency at London’s Science Museum and cleverly intersperses chapters with descriptions of objects from the museum where Iris works. The objects and artefacts are things to be recovered, restored and repaired — just like relationships and people. Examining how the tissue of feeling can be prised apart into layers that are easy to define but not to reconcile, and also how we look to love as a way of transforming ourselves, In the City of Love’s Sleep is a beautifully crafted, structured and nuanced novel.
EVENING IN PARADISE: MORE STORIES
by Lucia Berlin (Picador, $38)
This new collection of 22 previously uncompiled stories from the harsh mistress of the short story form is a very welcome follow up to 2015’s sensationally good A Manual for Cleaning Women. Born in 1936, Lucia Berlin died in 2004. She had published sporadically through small presses until A Manual for Cleaning Women posthumously jolted her into rediscovery. With a dirty realism that scratches through the veneer of the American Dream, these stories make extraordinary the ordinary lives of working class people living on the margins and are set in such varied locales as Texas, Chile, New Mexico and New York — subterranean places and dusty towns. Berlin uncovers and examines the messy and visceral parts of life, the struggling young mothers and husbands who leave. Tough and prickly, these wise and radiant stories are tempered with wit and empathy that sand off the hard edges. The perfect short story collection to dip in and out of during summer.
NORMAL PEOPLE
by Sally Rooney (Faber, $33)
My favourite novel of 2018, Normal People isa strikingly seasoned dive into the complex intricacies of emotional and sexual relationships. Marianne and Connell are a young Irish couple from starkly different backgrounds. Marianne is from a wealthy family; Connell has a poor background. Marianne is an outcast; Connell is popular. They go to the same school and know each other because Connell’s mother is Marianne’s cleaner. Despite their differing social backgrounds, they develop an unshakeable intellectual and emotional connection that continues throughout their lives even when they try to take different paths. Irish writer Sally Rooney writes with a canny vision and this immersive and affecting novel is charged with feeling, energy and insight.
CRUDO
by Olivia Laing (Picador, $35)
In contrast to her highly refined and lyrical non-fiction, Olivia Laing’s fourth book but first novel Crudo is a dazzlingly inventive and raw work of autofiction. In an attempt to document the devastating fallout after the Brexit vote, Laing has distilled the atmosphere of confusion and shock felt by many at that time during the British summer of 2017. Writer Kathy is getting married and grappling with the complexities of cohabitation. While experiencing the giddiness of falling in love, she is also astutely aware of the feeling that politically, the world is falling apart around her. Examining the political, social and natural landscape with clarity and a tender eye, with Crudo, Laing looks at how personal and political lives intersect.
THE ICE SHELF
Anne Kennedy
(Victoria University Press, $30)
This sly comic novel is a laugh-out-loud hoot that pokes spiky fun at writers and the literary world of awards and residencies while obliquely addressing anxiety about the environment. Janice is a Wellington-based writer who is about to head off to Antarctica for an arts fellowship. Recently separated from her partner Miles, her only possession of substance is a glossy green vintage-style refrigerator. Moving out of the 1950s apartment she shared with Miles, Janice absurdly wheels her fridge through town as she tries to find somewhere to store it while away on her residency. The novel begins with an Acknowledgements section, where Janice, with her silver-lined perspective is positively “brimming with gratitude”, thanking almost everyone she has ever encountered throughout her life. As we dive into Janice’s backstory, not only does her seemingly irrational attachment to her fridge become clear, but our empathy for her grows. While The Ice Shelf is bitingly funny, it is also raw and humane.