Welcome to ABC Arts' monthly book column: a shortlist of new release reads recommended by The Book Show's Claire Nichols, The Bookshelf's Cassie McCullagh, ABC Arts' Nicola Heath and critics Declan Fry and Jinghua Qian.
All read voraciously and widely, and the only guidelines we give them are: make it a new release; make it something you think is great.
The resulting list includes the latest novel from three-time Booker-nominated Scottish novelist Andrew O'Hagan and a previously unpublished novella by Charmian Clift, unarguably one of Australia's most acclaimed writers of the 20th century.
Caledonian Road by Andrew O'Hagan
Faber
There's no mistaking the ambition of this thumping 641-page novel.
Borrowing the form of a sprawling Victorian novel, O'Hagan's attempt at capturing contemporary Britain is grand and often glorious.
We're swept through the streets of London and into its nooks and crannies — from art galleries and private clubs to council flats and sweatshops. And we're also taken into the lives of dozens and dozens of characters and cameos (59 are listed at the front). We meet aristocrats and oligarchs as well as drill rap gangs and would-be immigrants trapped in sweatshops that would have been called workhouses in a previous century.
At the heart is Campbell Flynn, a barely disguised cipher for O'Hagan himself. He's a working class outsider who's climbed the greasy pole and become a public intellectual — a writer and broadcaster of impeccable taste and education. Who better to see Britain inside-out and top-to-bottom?
Ambition is what drives each of these people. For some it's money, status, fame, sex, beauty, even more money. For others, it's a job, somewhere to live, enough to eat. Some are drawn with a mere few sentences. With the major characters, the arc of hubris spans the entire narrative.
It's as if O'Hagan has taken a core sample of the geology of Britain's class and social structure and revealed its strata, from the deeply buried to the most recent.
Some readers will flag at the two-thirds mark; others will find O'Hagan's flair exhilarating and his surgical evisceration of Britain compelling.
— Cassie McCullagh
Martyr by Kaveh Akbar
Picador
There are books you devour feverishly, and others you nibble line by line, allowing yourself only a portion each day so you can sit with it and savour it to the last.
Martyr! was like that for me, a book I set down at the end of each chapter despite my greed for the pages to come. I wanted to draw it out, to live between doses, to see the afternoon sun on the river while carrying these characters in my mind.
Cyrus Shams is a poet who barely writes, though he is thinking (and drinking) about a book on secular martyrs – people who have died for their beliefs. Meanwhile, he scrapes by selling his plasma and pretending to die so med students can rehearse their empathy when delivering terminal diagnoses.
In some ways he’s a typical disaffected twenty-something, obsessed with death and paralysed by potential. He’s also an orphan compelled to fossick for meaning in the deaths of his parents: his mother, the accidental martyr, was one of 290 aboard the Iranian passenger flight shot down by the US military in 1988; while his father’s ordinary death is all the more tragic for being unnewsworthy.
Martyr! is an ambitious, monumental work dealing with the meaning of death and life. It’s also a book that revels in absurdity and contemporary pop culture references. In-jokes abound – for writers, addicts, artists and the Iranian diaspora.
One chapter sees the protagonist’s dead mother facing off against a familiar spiky yellow heroine, Lisa Simpson. Other scenes capture the tedious self-flagellation of millennial queer culture, or the way love feels like excoriating, lonely madness.
The startling sensual accuracy of Akbar’s metaphors remind you that this is a novel by a poet, but the plot and shifting perspectives are so well engineered that you forget this is a debut.
Martyr! is a book that radiates with existential glory and secular mysticism, but it’s also a story that lives in the current, material world. Our world. Our unbearable, violent, senseless world.
— Jinghua Qian
The White co*ckatoo Flowers by Ouyang Yu
Transit Lounge
Provocateur, DIY punk and your friendly neighbourhood poet-uncle, Ouyang Yu is a transgressor whose faith lies only in the hardest vices (poetry, disappointment).
Although he has translated several works of Australian literature (The Female Eunuch, Fly Away Peter, The Ancestor Game, to name a few) and many Chinese poets, The White co*ckatoo Flowers is his first collection of short fiction in English. It reveals Yu to be an incisive romantic and satirist.
Filtering, through several literatures and cultures, the lives of the lonely and rootless, his exiles and outcasts are both in love with and eternally dissatisfied by China — a place they return to but never feel entirely at home in — and Australia, source of drab, lonely desolation.
They keep wanting to say 拜拜, 澳洲! — Goodbye, Australia! — but can never quite leave. (Picture here Philip Roth's character Mickey Sabbath: "How could he leave? How could he go? Everything he hated was here.")
They may seem similar to the author known as Ouyang Yu (or 欧阳昱), but don't be fooled: this isn't autofiction, it's fiction that automatically refuses categorisation. Fiction that doesn't "give a sh*t about nation, nationality and nonsense".
Yu's narrative voice is puckish and insouciant. It's never entirely clear what is serious, what is droll, what is a joke. Suffice to say that nothing ever feels wholly earnest or cynical, at least where the self is concerned.
Physicality — the body and its excretions, weather, food — punctuate everything, alongside ugly feelings and everyday disappointments (unanswered phone calls, emails, texts; sometimes answered ones, too). Stories frequently end with a sense of still being in progress and left behind early.
The collection's humour tends to derive from small observations and insights that become funnier when you appreciate the peculiarities of both English and Chinese.
Many tales chronicle lost generations of men isolated by both Australian suburbia and the ruptures of post-89 China, uninclined to look back and energised only by loneliness, language, boredom, horniness and humour. They refuse the West's goal of "profitsuccessdeath" in favour of poetry and food, masturbation and fantasy.
As Yu writes: "Tomorrow is another day. There is no climax. No anticlimax. Just this stream of unconsciousness."
Yu has experienced, like several other 90s Ozlit punks (Dorothy Porter, Christos Tsiolkas, Kathleen Mary Fallon, Ania Walwicz, Susan Hampton , others), a renaissance of late . Rightly so. He embodies, as one character puts it, the poetic spirit: all he does is live his poetry and let his poetry live through him.
The cool kids are on board (invitations to bar readings! hip literary hangouts!). The uncool kids are on board, too. It's a big bus. Let's get driving. 拜拜！
— Declan Fry
The End of the Morning by Charmian Clift (edited by Nadia Wheatley)
UNSW Press
More than 50 years after her, Australian writer Charmian Clift’s literary star continues to rise, in no small part thanks to the dedication of her editor and biographer, Nadia Wheatley.
In 2022, Wheatley edited a new collection of Clift essays, Sneaky Little Revolutions. Now, she is behind the release of a previously unpublished fragment of an autobiographical novel Clift worked on throughout the 60s.
The End of the Morning is told from the perspective of Cressida Morley — Clift’s alter ego, who also appears in her husband George Johnston’s acclaimed trilogy (which included the Miles Franklin-winning novels My Brother Jack and Clean Straw for Nothing).
Cressida, aged 10 or 11, is the youngest of the three Morley children, who live with their parents, Tom and Grace, in the fictional Lebanon Bay, a stand-in for Clift’s hometown of Kiama, NSW.
While Cordelia, the eldest, is a beauty and her parents’ favourite, Cressida, middle child Ben and their fellow quarry kids run wild in the scrubby dunes around Lebanon Bay.
“We were frowzled, freckled children, skinny and hard, with our front teeth still coming down like half-lowered blinds… We could swim like fish and fight like tigers.”
Clift captures the insularity of their life on the NSW south coast in the Depression-era years of the 1930s. Despite the family’s straitened circ*mstances, it’s an idyllic and richly cultured childhood.
Grace Morley declaims poetry while doing the laundry in the backyard, while Tom Morley — who works in the quarry’s machine shop over the hill — insists the children read Rabelais and Cervantes rather than The Wind in the Willows.
Readers who reach the end of the 50-page novella will inevitably want more, which Wheatley delivers in the form of an afterword providing valuable context about Clift and her life.
Clift and Johnston, who had three children together, were close literary collaborators and co-wrote several novels. Over the years, Clift routinely put aside her solo projects to assist the prolific Johnston in writing his books and, later, after he was diagnosed with tuberculosis, became his carer.
In 1968, Clift won a six-month Commonwealth Literary Fund (CLF) fellowship to write The End of the Morning — notably half the value of the 12-month fellowship awarded to Johnston in 1967. She died by suicide in 1969.
The last half of this book comprises 30 of the roughly 225 essays Clift wrote for the Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne’s Herald, a weekly column upon which much of her popularity and literary reputation rest.
Tackling issues such as the role of women, property development and consumerism, Clift’s voice sounds remarkably modern. She provides a fascinating snapshot of Australia in the 60s, and reveals how closely her novella draws from her life.
— Nicola Heath
Bullet Paper Rock: A Memoir of Words and Wars by Abbas El-Zein
Upswell Publishing
"It is psychotic to draw a line from one place to another," wrote poet and author Bhanu Kapil about the partition of India. "It is psychotic to submit to violence in a time of great violence and yet it is psychotic to leave that home or country, the place where you submitted again and again, forever."
Abbas El-Zein — a professor at the University of Sydney and author of three books, including an award-winning memoir — applies these ideas to the Middle East in his book Bullet Paper Rock. But he makes those lines of enclosure into trajectories of flight.
Tracing the lives of family, the repercussions of political corruption, sociopolitical trauma and war from the 1970s through to the present, this memoir is a testament to the examined life.
El-Zein's writing is by turns witty and heartfelt, his meditations guided by wisdom and love. We witness the invasion of Lebanon by the Syrian government of Hafiz al-Assad, during which El-Zein finds an "accidental, if nicely ironic" resonance in a cinema screening Alain Resnais's La guerre est finie (The War is Over) at the demarcation line between a civil war-scarred East and West Beirut.
We see the incursions of soldiers from Israel into Lebanon, variously targeting the Palestine Liberation Organisation and the refugees of 1948 as they stage guerilla attacks to liberate the land they have been exiled from.
He explores the afterlives of language in postcolonial Beirut, where multilingualism is both part of Lebanon's European and Arabic lineage, and particular to the Lebanese Arabic language.
As an author, El-Zein describes himself as "unconverted, unenchanted", and prey to the urge "to bid farewell, at long last, to the unloved century that has made my world". Which begs the question: is to give up to relinquish faith?
This book is about the pain of distance, both temporal and geographical, and how it overwhelms "our collective ability to make sense of events and challeng[es] our capacity to remember and, even more gravely, our need to forget".
But it is a pain that encourages, for El-Zein, considerations of faith and hope: "The Bible insists that 'hope maketh not shamed', but why should hope be associated with shame in the first place, so as to require rebuttal?" he asks.
"Is it because despair is safer, more hard-headed, its bleakness more likely to be borne out by the world? Is there shame, then, in being wrong about the future? Or is hope a kind of false promise?"
Amid the "small joys of kith and kin", El-Zein envisages community as interdependence, the will to imagine.
In the end, for earthly salvation, that is all we have.
— Declan Fry
The Spoiled Heart by Sunjeev Sahota
Harvill Secker
A book about a UK union election probably shouldn't be this interesting.
Sunjeev Sahota's fourth novel takes us to the author's own hometown of Chesterfield, where lifelong union man Nayan is running to be the first man of colour to lead Britain's biggest union. He's been told he has it in the bag, and he's feeling confident — but in this novel, pride will come before a fall of epic proportions.
As union officials, Nayan and his rival — a younger woman called Megha (a woman who shares his Indian heritage) — are both firmly on the left. But within that world, their personal political ideologies set them firmly apart.
Megha's focus on identity, particularly racial identity, means her campaign is about confronting racism and discrimination. The older Nayan, however, isn't interested in identity politics. He sees the union's struggle as a class issue (Sahota himself has said UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is "not my racial friend, he is my class enemy"). For Nayan, solidarity is key.
The political divide escalates — and becomes personal — very quickly.
Meanwhile, Nayan is pursuing a relationship with an old classmate, Helen, and developing a bond with her troubled teenage son Brandon. Nayan lost his own mother and son in a tragedy 20 years earlier (with his marriage collapsing soon after) and perhaps sees in Helen and Brandon a ready-made family for him to slot himself in to. But, in this novel, nothing is as easy as it seems.
I read much of The Spoiled Heart with my heart in my mouth. The tension of the election, the pitfalls that Nayan strides into, and the utter tragedy of his past are revealed with great skill by Sahota, who is twice Booker-nominated for previous novels The Year of the Runaways and China Room.
For me, it's one of the best reads of 2024 so far.
— Claire Nichols
Naag Mountain by Manisha Anjali
Giramondo Publishing
Manisha Anjali takes the violence of indentured labour that her Indo-Fijian ancestors experienced and weaves a dream of sustenance and communion in her new book Naag Mountain.
The writer's second collection sings and improvises history through dreams, visions and hallucinations, bringing together peoples displaced and indentured by the Colonial Sugar Refining Company. The thousand-mouthed snake called the Naag weaves routes of narrative poetry across the Pacific, traversing India, Fiji, Aotearoa and the continent christened Australia.
Anjali doesn't seek to fantasise or imagine wholeness, but instead looks to honour brokenness. As she writes, "Loss is the birthplace of song." Loss here is acceptance of life, the connections between generations and the regeneration of song and dream.
What I especially like in this collection are the connections Anjali draws between ideas of affect and aftermath, the reliance of our dreams and psychic intuitions upon that woolly mammoth we often (falsely) dub the "real world". The universe of dream and affect is no less real or material than the world it draws upon and survives through.
She puts this beautifully, linking the materiality of food and the body with ritual, solace, ephemeralities that can be made real, tangible: "The poetry of rice is in the rituals performed before ingestion. Ingestion is a form of gratitude, and a commitment to living as flesh."
Anjali's poetry maps trepanation, the skull turned inside out, the act of retrieving memory "the same as summoning a ghost", forging connections between irreconcilable journeys.
The Naag is coiled and circular, capable of dissolving the separation between the colony and the New World, between the more than 62,000 South Sea Islanders from across the Pacific Ocean who were taken to Australia for sugar and cotton labour between 1863 and 1904 — in many cases abducted, forced, trafficked — and the indentured labourers of India.
Forced migration, indentured labour: the violence of the colony is always surreal, informed by its own dreams and cryptic imagery — cryptic because translation and exegesis might bury the bones again.
Naag Mountain is a place where the material and immaterial are both incarnate; where incantation is commemoration, summoning the dead back to life and making visions and dreams manifest: "Start by pulling at the throat […] Draw out the venom with your tongue. Spit it out. Spit it out."
— Declan Fry
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