It may feel like a long time ago, now that we've reached the halcyon days of the festive season, but August was a big month for books.
Four of the books deemed the best of the year were released in that chilly month — perhaps it's a coincidence, perhaps it was a balm for our seasonal depression. Either way, our critics were here for it.
Among them are this year's Booker Prize winner but also a debut short story collection, which is a perfect demonstration of the breadth of books that took the fancy of Kate Evans, Claire Nichols, Sarah L'Estrange, Declan Fry and Cher Tan this year.
The books that captured them most over the past year take us everywhere from Trinidad in the 40s to the politics of the heavy metal scene, a futuristic (but disturbingly familiar) reality TV show and into the mind of a kind-of ghost from 19th century France.
So, as you sit back and contemplate the year that was (almost), these are the books we recommend you take with you.
Hungry Ghosts by Kevin Jared Hosein
Bloomsbury
In 40s Trinidad, a rich farmer has disappeared. His glamorous wife, Marlee Changoor, has received a ransom note. But she has no intention of paying. She is finally free.
In Hungry Ghosts, Kevin Jarad Hosein introduces us to an unforgettable cast of complex people. There's Marlee and her employee Hansraj, who she pays to work as a night watchman in her husband's absence. There's Hansraj's disconnected wife Shweta and their angry son, Krishna, living in poverty in the nearby "barrack", crammed into a single room and dreaming of a better life.
With several other families packed into the crumbling barrack house, privacy is non-existent. They hear each other's arguments; they smell each other's vomit. And, as readers, we are also asked to pay attention. Grief, sex and violence are described in unflinching detail.
Hungry Ghosts is a rich and rewarding read, packed with characters you'll love one minute, and be appalled by the next. It's an incredible debut.
— Claire Nichols
Hungry Ghosts appeared in our Best Books of February, check out the full review and other great books from that month here.
Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton
Granta
Birnam Wood takes its name from a forest in Shakespeare's Macbeth, and most readers know that if a story is connected to this tragedy about a Scottish king's downfall, it's not going to be all lollipops and rainbows.
Indeed, Eleanor Catton's follow up to her Booker-winning novel The Luminaries is a fast-paced thriller, and is part of a growing literary trope that we on The Book Show call "bunker and billionaire" fiction.
In the novel, Birnam Wood is the name of a New Zealand guerilla gardening collective, led by the idealistic and driven Mira Bunting. She leads the group to a tract of seemingly abandoned farmland to rehabilitate the property. There she encounters the enigmatic American billionaire Robert Lemoine, who has his own plans for the property (cue the bunker trope).
Read on to find out who will be the victor in this murky battle of ideals versus capitalism.
— Sarah L'Estrange
Birnam Wood appeared in our Best Books of March, read the full review and see other great books from that month here.
Tomás Nevinson by Javier Marías
Hamish Hamilton
The final novel from Spanish novelist Javier Marías, who passed away late last year, offers a catnip-ready premise for spy/thriller fans: coaxed out of retirement to complete one last job, Tomás Nevinson — a half-English, half-Spanish spy — searches for the woman involved in a series of real-life terrorist attacks launched by Basque separatists in Spain.
The novel begins with Nevinson reflecting on the idea of killing Hitler before his rise to power — citing two examples, one fictional, one real — as a way of examining moral philosophy's trolley problem: can death ever be justified if it means preventing greater destruction? (Around the time the novel is set, Bill Clinton was finalising the Good Friday Agreement and losing opportunities to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, fearing collateral damage. Of course, no one knew 9/11 was around the corner.)
Tomás Nevinson offers a reflection on the historical antipathies and the relationship between peoples and nations. From the sorrows of Sarajevo and Rwanda, to Hamas and Israel currently caught in a war of incalculable carnage, Marías asks a perennial question: Where does enmity end?
Nevinson — described by his handlers as an "interpreter of lives" — gives Marías an opportunity to reflect on language, identity and the intractable limitations upon how much we can ever really know of ourselves or the world.
As in much of Marías' work, the writing moves with hypnotic grace. (And recommends itself to being read aloud: check out Ben Cura's wonderful audio recording.) The result is an ample display of Marías' many and various gifts, including a deft sense of humour and his agile ability to turn an aphorism ("You only have to introduce a little truth into a lie for the lie to seem not just credible, but irrefutable.")
Tomás Nevinson also represents a final chapter for one of the great translating partnerships of our time. Thanks to Margaret Jull Costa, anglophone readers may continue to read and reread nearly everything Marías has published since the 80s.
— Declan Fry
Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad
Grove Atlantic
The setting of Enter Ghost is one of colonial occupation and constant unease. Yet things are still required to continue.
It is in these circumstances that Sonia, Isabella Hammad's Palestinian British thespian protagonist, goes to visit her sister in Haifa. There, amid some devastating discoveries, she ends up reconnecting with Mariam, an old family friend, and is reluctantly roped into an Arabic stage adaptation of Hamlet in the West Bank.
Hammad's prose is precise. The world she writes has a dialectical feeling to it — an oozing disquiet is present throughout, even if there are small moments of joy. The Palestinian Hamlet actors turn up late for rehearsals when they encounter Israeli checkpoints that needlessly detain them on account of their identity. In one particularly acute scene, Mariam asks the actor playing Hamlet, Wael, to simulate an altercation with an Israeli soldier to bring out the character's aggression. We're left to interpret how that feels.
Enter Ghost is the rare kind of novel that seeks to reconcile aesthetic and political aims. It is a metafictional narrative of Palestinian resistance and love.
— Cher Tan
Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Harvill Secker
There's a new show in town, and it's as bloody as hell. Swinging machetes, chains, axes, knives … and tight, tight close-ups — because this is reality TV on steroids.
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah creates an America in which prisoners might be pardoned — if they agree to fight to the death in techno-filled arenas, while every aspect of their lives is broadcast with the roar and swirl of publicity, music and fanfare.
It's WWE wrestling with real red stuff and extra politics; it's adrenaline to the max; it's heart-pounding commentary.
This is a future fantasy world that is also now. Overwhelmingly, the prisoners fighting for their lives and freedom are black or people of colour. They work together in a group — chains — that reference the history of slavery and racialised incarceration. Speaking out, silencing, resistance, rebellion: it's all there, too.
This is a novel with a thumping pace and plenty of complicated narratives that build and intertwine and come together in a breathless crescendo.
The two women at the heart of it, warriors both, are allies and lovers — but we know they'll end up in the arena together. And the man whose mind has been shattered by surveillance and enforced silence will have a part to play too, won't he?
And what about the viewers/the readers, where do we stand? Adjei-Brenyah makes sure that our position is interrogated, too.
— Kate Evans
Chain-Gang All-Stars appeared in our Best Books of June, check out the full review and other great books from that month here.
Tonight It's a World We Bury by Bill Peel
Repeater Books
It's almost cursory to associate the black metal genre with the far right. Although it first began as a clarion call against Christianity, the scene became co-opted by figures such as Varg Vikernes and Faust, from whom proliferated right-wing views alongside bands who categorise themselves under the "NSBM" (national socialist black metal) umbrella.
But, as Bill Peel argues in Tonight It's a World We Bury, the genre is ripe for rehabilitation, particularly in this fractious era, to create a scene that holds Marxism as a value system as well as one of its political aims.
Peel's knowledge of the genre is vast. In this way — alongside close readings of philosophers like Mark Fisher and Byung-Chul Han — he manages to tell a compelling story of its past missteps, while also pointing out the bands who are bucking the status quo, preferring instead to visibly align themselves with the left.
What makes this book especially appealing is that, unlike many punters and thinkers of subcultural worlds, Peel doesn't revel in nostalgia.
Instead, he looks forward to possibilities yet unrealised, what could be further imagined. That in itself is part of a communist-minded paradigm — as Marx himself has written: "Reason cannot blossom without hope; hope cannot speak without reason".
— Cher Tan
Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy
Faber
Irish writer Claire Kilroy's novel blazes and shines with exhaustion, fury, love and resentment. In it, a woman (Soldier) addresses her baby son (Sailor) with all the weariness and heightened sensibility of someone at the end of their tether. And her tether is more like a frayed, gnawed rope.
Amid resentment of her husband, the humiliation of pram and doorway and buckles and supermarket tears, she is funny and ferocious and battling on and on.
Her writing takes us into the joy and the drag of her body: "My old enemy, the stairs."
Kilroy doesn't overplay the military language of her Soldier and Sailor — it's lighter, more flexible, vernacular.
There's an industrial hum throughout the book as well. Something's coming down the line, on tracks that thrum with power — and her language sparks and is polished with all the energy of life's machinery.
This is a novel where the plot is apparently about the commonplace — just getting through the first few years of a child's life — but she soaks it with tension and beauty and rage and movement and humour, so it's impossible to look away, and impossible to forget.
— Kate Evans
Soldier Sailor appeared in our Best Books of August, check out the full review and other great books from that month here.
Prophet Song by Paul Lynch
Bloomsbury
When I first read Prophet Song as one of the six 2023 Booker Prize shortlisted novels, I immediately knew it would win — and indeed it did.
The fifth novel by Irish writer Paul Lynch, it's set in a dystopian Ireland where a populist government has taken control and civil liberties are diminishing by the day. It is lyrical and electrifying, but this novel struck me because of its focus on the domestic rather than the militaristic or political.
Zeroing in on Eilish Stack — a microbiologist with four children and a husband who's been disappeared by the new regime — Prophet Song chronicles her efforts to hold her family together in the face of forces beyond her control. She's implored to escape the encroaching violence but, for Eilish, this prospect is akin to "tearing off your feet".
Paul Lynch told ABC RN's The Book Show that his purpose as a writer was to "get as close to myth" as possible, and in this novel he might just have achieved this coveted goal.
— Sarah L'Estrange
Prophet Song appeared in our Best Books of August, check out the full review and other great books from that month here.
Firelight by John Morrissey
Text
This debut collection of short fiction from John Morrissey offers a sly, teasing narrative voice, elegantly staged dialogue and an eye for the absurdities and indignities of contemporary life.
At times recalling Will Self — both authors share a droll narrative voice, interest in office space and alternative timelines, fabulist narrative and colonisation — there are a number of highlights throughout the collection.
Autoc, a tale of future "alien" contact, invites the reader into all manner of sinister magic: the atmosphere of the 19th-century macabre, the question of imperialism, and an unnerving dreamlike atmosphere reminiscent of the lecture hall scene in Dario Argento's Inferno. Five Minutes is a beautifully executed metafiction examining familial angst, bureaucracy and the probable outcomes of a giant centipede attack. Ivy mixes urban ennui with slacker wit, gradually transforming into a meditation on rapture.
Much of the wonder of these stories lies in their suggestiveness. Morrissey is capable of relating the bizarre with lucidity and a calmly sardonic touch. The narratives are elusive yet vividly realised, leaving their endings and implications to the reader's imagination.
They could be described as speculative fiction but, in truth, they are more firmly anchored to that genre's underlying fabric: ourselves, and our inescapable strangeness.
— Declan Fry
Tom Lake by Ann Patchett
Bloomsbury
My copy of Tom Lake is looking increasingly worse-for-wear. Ann Patchett's ninth novel, with its green-blue floral cover, has been borrowed by my ABC colleagues over and over again since its July release.
The popularity makes sense. This is a book about summer love, cherry orchards and family ties, beautifully written by one of America's best-loved writers. It's a big warm hug of a book, with just enough bite to stop it drowning in sweetness.
Tom Lake is the name of a summer stock theatre, where our narrator Lara spent a season as a 20-something actress. It was there that she fell in love with Peter Duke — a magnetic, passionate actor who would go on to become a Hollywood star.
It's no spoiler to say that the romance was short-lived. Lara tells the story years later, as she and her three adult daughters pick cherries on the family farm. Lara didn't make it as an actress, and she married someone else. Her life is quiet, and quietly miraculous.
It's in this quiet contentment that Patchett does something revelatory. Tom Lake celebrates the joy that can be found in an ordinary, imperfect life. And isn't that something we can all aspire to?
— Claire Nichols
Tom Lake appeared in our Best Books of August, check out the full review and other great books from that month here.
The Sitter by Angela O'Keeffe
UQP
The Sitter is the second novel by Australian author Angela O'Keeffe that takes the art world as its subject to dazzling effect. The first, Night Blue, anthropomorphised Jackson Pollock's famous painting Blue Poles, so don't expect a straight narrative in this new book.
The Sitter is an inventive conjuring of the post-Impressionist French artist Paul Cezanne's wife and model, Hortense Cezanne.
It's not, however, a straightforward re-writing of her life; instead, long dead Hortense appears as a presence in the French hotel room of an Australian writer who's researching her life for a novel. Hortense is not a ghost. In fact, the best way to think of this presence is as the manifestation of the writer's obsession.
This book is so exciting because Hortense becomes the observer of the writer rather than the perennially observed artist's subject. It's a slender, satisfying read that will send you to the paintings featuring Hortense and lead you to wonder what she's thinking as she looks out from the canvas.
— Sarah L'Estrange
Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood
Allen & Unwin
Grief can linger in your bones or pare you right back to them. Bare, skeletal, stony. Rattling around inside the noise of a busy life.
Accomplished and assured writer Charlotte Wood (The Natural Way of Things, The Weekend, many more) has taken that lonely sound and placed it inside her unnamed narrator — a woman who is searching for respite and heads to a nunnery and retreat in regional New South Wales.
She is not herself religious, and while she's longing for some sort of reflective space, she's scratchy with irritation at the rituals and bad food and seemingly pointless gliding about of the other women. Her irritation is itself a pleasure — funny, eye-rolling, cutting through any earnest piousness as we sink into her inner world.
There's plenty of outer world to be going on with, too: a murder; a celebrity nun; ferocious and difficult memories; sharply worded encounters with this community of nuns — and a mouse plague.
This mouse plague takes those bones of grief and plunges our hero — and us, as readers — back into the body. You can feel the curve of a foot as it encounters a small furry body in a shoe (gah!), or the horrifying wiggle in the small of her back as she gets into a car and then launches out of it again, an entire enmeshed cushion of small bodies writhing against our imagination.
Fine, intelligent writing.
— Kate Evans
Stone Yard Devotional appeared in our Best Books of October, check out the full review and other great books from that month here.
Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun by Jackie Wang
Semiotext(e)
Many may know Jackie Wang as the author of Carceral Capitalism (2018), an incisive examination into contemporary incarceration techniques. Few may know of her beginnings as a punky zine writer — her 2009 personal zine On Being Hard Femme provided a fun and expansive provocation on gender that I still stand by today. So I was pleasantly surprised to discover that zine, as well as other early writings, have been collected into something Wang refers to as "an almanac of extreme girlhood".
In the introduction Wang laments her assimilation into so-called respectable institutions: "I no longer know how to live as though the impossible were possible. I only know what I'm supposed to do to lead a successful life. I have a PhD from Harvard now. I put money away into a retirement account while I write from the comfort of a tenure-track job."
Within this volume of collected writing — nudged on by her friend, the poet Bhanu Kapil — is a kind of double-edgedness: while it grieves the loss of a more carefree, reckless and ultimately naïve time (it can also be said that this loss is engendered by how capital has completely permeated our lives), it's similarly a guidebook to possible existences. It's Proust's "retrospective illumination" put into practice.
— Cher Tan
Alien Daughters Walk into the Sun appeared in our Best Books of November, check out the full review and other great books from that month here.
Women and Children by Tony Birch
UQP
It might sound strange to describe a novel centred on violence as "tender". But that's certainly the case with Tony Birch's stunning fifth novel.
The book is set in 1965. Eleven-year-old Joe Cluny lives with his mum, Marion, and his sister, Ruby, in a safe and loving home. He's getting into trouble at his Catholic school and spending long days with his beloved grandfather, Charlie.
Then one night, violence arrives on the family's doorstep. Joe's aunt, Oona, is bruised and bleeding, after being beaten by her partner. And while the wider community has learned to look away from domestic violence — Ruby, while leading her beaten aunt through the street, observes that Oona has become an "invisible woman" — the Cluny family will confront it.
The tenderness is found in a series of small, perfect moments: Joe and Charlie sharing a buttery bacon sandwich; Ruby cleaning her aunt's bruised body. Birch's prose is clear-eyed and unpretentious, taking readers right to the heart of the story. And what a heart it is.
— Claire Nichols
Women and Children appeared in our Best Books of November, check out the full review and other great books from that month here.
What I Saw, Heard, Learned by Giorgio Agamben
Seagull
Italy's foremost philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, was a friend and collaborator of everyone from Pier Paolo Pasolini and Italo Calvino to Ingeborg Bachmann and Jacques Derrida.
This year, Seagull Books (publishers of great work like Hélène Cixous' Well-Kept Ruins, and Hussein Barghouthi's Among the Almond Trees) offered their latest title from the 81-year-old.
What I Saw, Heard, Learned is a series of startling, wise and often beautiful aphorisms and reflections. One chapter reads: "What water taught me: delight, when our foot no longer finds its hold and our body almost unwillingly gives in and swims." Or how about this? "Writing, I learned that happiness lies not in poetizing, but in being poetized by something or someone we cannot know."
The book is an intellectual and spiritual summa from a thinker who has meant much to many. Remarkable and thrillingly evocative, it closes with a moving account of Agamben being given a page of writing he made at the age of eight or nine by his mother, a piece that foreshadowed "the secret core of my philosophy".
Like the parables of Walter Benjamin or Zhuangzi, the memory approaches a kind of Daoist enlightenment, accepting that every work is only a failed iteration of some more fully realised ambition.
As Agamben writes, if "I really tried to cross the threshold of silence that accompanies every thought, I wouldn't have written a thing."
— Declan Fry
Tune in to ABC RN at 10am Mondays for The Book Show and 10am Saturdays for The Bookshelf.