Tag: fiction

Book review: When God Was a Rabbit by Sarah Winman

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Things happen. To everyone. No one escapes.

When God was a Rabbit by Sarah Winman is a story about the bond between siblings Elly and Joe spanning four decades. The story begins in 1968 and ends when they are adults in 2011. It is about growing up and how the good, bad, funny and weird that can happen in ordinary life shape us, and how people come in and out of our orbits through life and leave an impression.  When God was a Rabbit is also about how family in all its imperfections can provide a container for the the light and shade of existence.

I divide my life into two parts. Not really a Before and After, more as if they are bookends, holding together flaccid years of empty musings, years of late adolescent or the twentysomething whose coat of adulthood simply does not fit.

The first part of the novel covers Elly and Joe’s close childhood relationship, family connections, eccentric and sometimes dark friendships, and Elly’s relationship with her pet Belgian hare called God who was given to her by her brother. The vehicle of the rabbit God will resonate with anyone who had a special relationship with an animal and/or imaginary friends that had a magical realism quality to them in childhood.

She was of another world; different. But by then, secretly, so was I.

The second part of the story is set in adulthood. From Elly to her movie star aunt and lottery winning parents to her queer brother and odd ball friend Jenny Penny, the characters are beautifully flawed, generous, passionate, baggage laden uniquely ordinary people. Set partly in the UK and partly in the US, the passing of time is marked by pivotal public events like the death of John Lennon and Princess Diana and the 9/11 attacks. 

‘Do you believe in God, Arthur? I said, eating the last piece of sponge.

‘Do I believe in an old man in the clouds with a white beard judging us mortals with a moral code from one to ten? Good Lord no, my sweet Elly, I do not! Do I believe in a mystery; the unexplained phenomenon that is life itself? The greater something that illuminates inconsequence in our lives; that gives us something to strive for as well as the humility to brush ourselves down and start all over again? Then yes, I do. It is the source of art, of beauty, of love, and proffers the ultimate goodness to mankind. That to me is God.That to me is life. That is what I believe in.’

The rabbit as a deity provides humour in some of the darker moments of the novel and reappears as a symbol of the enduring power of relationships in the face of uncertainty. When God was a Rabbit is a lyrical beautifully crafted story – and what a fabulous title!

I am here but I am not yours.

Book review: Translations by Jumaana Abdu

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I have been making my way through the books shortlisted for the Stella Prize and recently finished reading Jumaana Abdu’s debut Translations. It is a novel with a beautiful cover and a story that is rich and complex.

In the weeks before leaving the city, she had wished her father’s house would collapse on her to grant her some relief. In the last days of her marriage, she had sat on their penthouse balcony and watched planes fly low overhead, gripped by a superb terror when for a moment it seemed a plane might stoop so low as to crash into her building, low enough to crush her, suffocate her, obliterate everything.

Set during a summer of raging bushfires in NSW, Aliyah and her nine-year old daughter, Sakina, move to a rural town and buy and old house, shedding their previous lives as Moslem women. The house, we discover as the novel unfolds, has its own complicated history.

The violence of a settler colony pushed me out of my land, only for me to come here where the same violence is ongoing. I do to you what was done to me. And those who forced me to escape slaughter were once forced to do the same. Like a chain of loss and expulsion, only none of us get back what was ours. It takes a hypocrite to flee from occupied land to a land of the occupied, or maybe just a desperate man, but you can’t say that you don’t expect me to take responsibility when I say that I expect it from Israeli children who were born and raised on the land I consider my own, which is also the only land they have ever known. The two thoughts can’t be reconciled, and yet I live here, I want to plant my feet here, and I also hate that feet are planted where I lived before, so I’m ashamed. I know what’s yours.

Needing help to develop the property in her image of a permaculture farm, Aliyah hires a farmhand. Shep is an extremely private and mostly silent Palestinian man and the areas imam. Aliyah also works as a nurse in the local hospital a few days each week where she befriends the local midwife, Aboriginal woman Billie and her family.

Aliyah took the blow. She turned away and pressed her hand hard across her eyes. This crisis, which should have swept the two women together, had instead torn open an honesty that marooned them almost two decades apart. Perhaps the closest they had ever been was the moment they had first met, drawing blood, and every meeting thereafter had been an attempt to regain an irretrievable intimacy.

During a storm Alyiah encounters a childhood friend, Hana, who has escaped a difficult home situation.  Aliyah takes her in and the two women and Shep try to navigate a curious triangle.

They became uncitizens. Aliyah ran the idea over and over in her mind, all down the highway splitting the bush either side of her like an emerald sea. She thought it in the prophetic tense, to frame it as a future so certain it was as though it had already happened.

Themes explored include friendship, faith, race, identity, belonging, colonialism, trauma, and living with natural disasters. Translations is a beautiful layered philosophical read that, like a permaculture garden, works perfectly as a cohesive whole and invites reflection.

Book review: Love Objects by Emily Maguire

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Love Objects by Emily Maguire is not an easy read. The novel shines a light on the dark side of class relations, the challenges of the mental health condition hoarding and what is means to care for family with mental illness.

As Nic said, second-hand clothes were like day drinking, government handouts and having a lawyer: classy if you’re rich, proof you’re trash if you’re poor.

Forty-five year old Nic, a childless department store check out chick living alone in her inherited childhood home collects random stuff. She falls after climbing onto piles of things to reach a hook to hang something she collected on the way home from work and injures herself badly. Unable to move she drifts in and out of consciousness. Childhood memories keep her company, triggered when she spies an old tiara under her bed.

People have died of sadness, Lena knew. Was this what it felt like, just before?

Lena is Nic’s niece. She lives hand to mouth at the Sydney university where she studies, hiding her economic disadvantage from her wealthy peers. She meets and has sex with rich boy Joshua not realising he is filming them. He posts the video on the internet and despite hiding Lena’s face, she is recognisable by a large scar on her arm.

No such thing as custody rights to your sister’s kid. No matter how destroyed you are by her absence.

Will is Nic’s nephew. After being released from jail for drug offences, he has a relationship with a woman who has children by someone else. He loves this life, but is cut adrift when the woman ends the relationship and he heads south to Sydney to see his sister and aunt. He is trying to deal with a rotten tooth that gives him a lot of pain but he cannot afford a dentist.

Will, she texted, how have we gone all these years and not known our aunty is completely and utterly batshit crazy?

Lena goes looking for Nic after she doesn’t turn up at a lunch date and finds her semi-concsious in her house so crammed with stuff that emergency services have to cut a path through the clutter to get her out. Nic is a hoarder. While Nic is in hospital the house is deemed a health hazard by a social worker and Lena agrees to deal with the contents so Nic can return home. Will arrives and helps Lena finish the job.

She puts today’s newspaper on the kitchen table, where it slips about for a few seconds before settling nicely. It would sit on the kitchen table until she had a chance to finish reading it, and if that hasn’t happened by bedtime she will put it with its colleagues in the hallway, waiting for a day when she has more time, better concentration.

Love Objects has a third person narrative divided between the three main characters – all of whom are dealing with their own losses, but the central focus is Nic’s hoarding disorder and how the three characters respond. Maguire offers great compassion to her characters through her compelling writing and this carries the reader through a difficult read.

Book review: The Last Devil to Die by Richard Osman

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The Last Devil to Die is the final in Richard Osman’s Thursday Murderer Club mystery series. Book 1, The Thursday Murder Club and book 2, The Bullet that Missed are also reviewed on this blog. In The Last Devil to Die the four intrepid pensioners Joyce, Elizabeth, Ron, and Ibrahim from Coopers Chase retirement village look into the murder of antiques dealer Kuldesh Sharma after he is shot in the head and a package he was meant to be looking after disappears. 

We complain about life so endlessly and so bitterly, and yet we cling to it so dearly? Surely that makes no sense?

Additional plot lines are threaded in. Our investigative elders grow suspicious when new resident Mervyn Collins tells them about his online relationship with a Lithuanian called Tatiana. He keeps trying to help her out financially, but the money keeps disappearing and his girlfriend never materialises. They decide Mervyn needs to be saved from himself and what they believe to be a relationship scam. Meanwhile former spy and leader of the oldies gang Elizabeth and her husband Stephen grapple with his advancing dementia.

But, however much life teaches you that nothing lasts, it is still a shock when it disappears. When the man you love with every fibre starts returning to the stars, an atom at a time.

The Last Devil to Die true to style is packed with Osman’s cheeky humour. He manages to make fun of the human condition and aging while still covering difficult topics with sensitivity. Osman crafts Joyce, Elizabeth, Ron, and Ibrahim as pensioners to aspire to be – feisty, fearless and friended to the grave.

That’s the thing about Coopers Chase. You’d imagine it was quiet and sedate, like a village pond on a summer’s day. But in truth it never stops moving, it’s always in motion. And that motion is ageing, and death, and love, and grief, and final snatched moments and opportunities grasped. The urgency of old age. There’s nothing that makes you feel more alive than the certainty of death.

I have now read and thoroughly enjoyed the entire Thursday Murderer Club series and am inspired to develop some outrageous retirement goals myself. I would live at Coopers Chase any day.

Book review: Theory and Practice by Michelle de Kretser

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Michelle de Kretser’s latest novel, Theory & Practice, opens as a conventional fiction narrative, but soon after it begins is abruptly interrupted by the narrator. Cindy proceeds to reflect on her life, first as a child in Sri Lanka and then as a young woman living in Melbourne in 1986 and tackling post graduate study on her idol, Virginia Woolf whom she calls ‘Woolfmother’.  As her studies progress, she struggle with Woolf’s flawed humanity and contradictions between her progressive public persona and her private racism and pretentiousness.

Instead of shapeliness and disguise, I wanted a form that allowed for formlessness and mess. It occurred to me that one way to find that form might be to tell the truth

For those of us who were of University age in the mid 80s when education was free, the work is both familiar and compelling. It was a time when learning was seeped in theories about how we ought to live, while life was experimental and relationships were complicated. This tension between what we believe about how we should live, and how we actually live runs throughout the story as our protagonist’s feminist ideals clash with her lived experience. But as humans we often abandon our moral principles in pursuit of self-interest.

While trusting in feminism’s transformative power, I retained a stubborn, dazed belief in love.

Cindy becomes friends with a couple called Kit and Olivia. Cindy and Kit become lovers and Cindy develops a distant and jealous dynamic with Olivia, behaviour that defies her feminist principles. Meanwhile she contends with a constant stream of passive-aggressive messages from her widowed mother who lives in Sydney and continues to exert maternal influence making Cindy feel guilty for leaving her to move to Melbourne.

I was twenty-four. The first thing I did in Melbourne was buy a vintage dress. The dress was made of lace, and had cap sleeves, an empire waist and a fitted knee-length skirt. It dated from the early sixties, when thousands of its kind must have been made. Now fashion had plucked it from oblivion and filled it with warm young bodies again. Powder-blue and rose and coffee-cream variants existed, but my dress was Intellectual Black.

Theory & Practice is unsentimental and bristling with the anxiety of youth. Fiction and non fiction collide throughout this novel which defies conventional form, blending fiction, essay and memoir.  Themes include identity, displacement, feminism and colonialism. Highly recommended, especially if you enjoy unconventional narratives and remember the 80’s.

Book review: Our Homesick Songs by Emma Hooper

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Our Homesick Songs by Emma Hooper is a book about place and the people who inhabit it. In Big Running, Newfoundland, where the community relies on the fishing industry, the fish have disappeared and the people begin to abandon their homes in search of work.

When they needed to remember where they were from, they could sing to see, to remember. They’d sing along, all together, sing and sing until morning.

Aidan and Martha Connor don’t want to move off the island so they job share on Canada’s mainland while also juggling home and children, Finn aged 10 and Cora aged 14, on the island.  Cora spends her time decorating the abandoned houses in the town by turning them into different countries – Italy, England, Mexico. When Cora goes missing, Finn becomes desperate to attract the fish back to Big Running in the hope it will reunite his family.

And sometimes the water was blue, more blue than sky, and sometimes it was dark and green and thick, and sometimes it was hardly any colour, changing and moving and pushing and pulling like breath.

Our Homesick Songs is a story of what happens to small communities when their primary natural resources disappear and is both heartbreaking and hopeful, in part due to the dual timelines. Finn in the present (1992-93) and his parents union twenty years earlier when fish were plentiful. 

All songs are homesick songs, Finn. Even the happy ones? Especially the happy ones.

Hooper elicits a compelling sense of place and atmosphere in this poetic story about family, love, being brave and keeping the faith. The reader can almost hear the plaintive mermaid song across the water. 

Book review: The Truth According to Us by Annie Barrows

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The Truth According to Us by Annie Burrows (co-author of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society) is about what happens to independent women in 1938 when they refuse to marry a suitor their father thinks they should say yes to.

It’s very demoralizing to be regarded as a problem rather than an individual.

When Layla Beck refuses to marry, her father cuts off her allowance and tells her to get a job. He thinks she’s spoilt. Her uncle helps her out, commissioning her to write the town history of Macedonia, West Virginia, as part of the federal writers project. The version of history she is to write is one sided, dictated by the towns families of influence. No one, including Leyla expects her endeavour to be a success.

I’ve learned that history is the autobiography of the historian, that ignoring the past is the act of a fool, and that loyalty does not mean falling into line, but stepping out of it for the people you love.

She is to board with Romeyns, a local family. The Romeyns household is comprised of twelve year old Willa and her younger sister, Bird, their father Felix and his sisters Jottie, Mae and Minerva. They are the unconventional remnants of a once respected family whose late father ran the local mill.

Whatever gave you the idea we were like everybody else?

Leyla soon begins to thrive, and decides to tell the real history of the town in all its technicolors. Her endeavours takes place against the backdrop of factory strikes and family secrets. What unfolds is the Romeyn family saga (the family become Leyla’s chosen family), and the local towns story, told from the perspectives of Willa, Jottie and Layla.

Ladies don’t smoke in public, Jottie said. In public included a lot of places, even our front room because of all the windows, so Jottie smoked like a stack in the kitchen.

I really enjoyed the unfolding of this tale, and the character building, as hidden truths were unearthed, both by Leyla for her project, and Willa determined to understand the adults in her life and unearth their secrets.

If you’re going to unearth hidden truths, keen observing is your shovel

Book review: The Burrow by Melanie Cheng

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The Burrow by Melanie Cheng is a novella about loss and grief in a family after the unspeakable happens. How does a family go on when a very young child dies in an accident whilst in the care of another family member?

There were clues: things she said in passing, a grisly observation about how a particular animal could die, or the prospect of a missing schoolgirl she’d heard about in the news being found alive (which was apparently close to zero). Comments so ghoulish they seemed out of place on the lips of a ten-year-old child

Six years ago, six month old Ruby drowned while being bathed by her grandmother, Pauline, who suffered a stroke.  Set in Melbourne at the tail end of the pandemic, the family, comprise on Jin, Amy and their ten year old daughter Lucie, are stuck in their grief. Their pet rabbit Fiver, was bought during a lock-down and becomes the focus of family members trying to avoid focussing on their own trauma and loss.

Perhaps this was the purpose of pets after all, she thought, to provide a buffer between humans who had forgotten how to talk to one another.

After Pauline has a fall, she is moved in with the family and joins in the focussed care of Fiver. In the novel Fiver reflects back fragility and the pandemic setting amplifies the families isolation and disconnection from one another and themselves. The Burrow is a quiet and sparsely written exploration of intergenerational grief.

Book review: Orbital by Samantha Harvey

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You know that sense of amazement when you gaze out an airplane window to the earth, or lie on the grass on a clear dark night and wonder at galaxies of stars? Orbital by Samantha Harvey is this sense taken to the extreme. It is a beautifully written meditation on the everyday and magnificence of life from the perspective of an astronaut. 

Our lives here are inexpressibly trivial and momentous at once, it seems he’s about to wake up and say. Both repetitive and unprecedented. We matter greatly and not at all. To reach some pinnacle of human achievement only to discover that your achievements are next to nothing and that to understand this is the greatest achievement of any life, which itself is nothing, and also much more than everything. Some metal separates us from the void; death is so close. Life is everywhere, everywhere.

The story revolves around six astronauts as they circle the planet sixteen times in a cramped spacecraft. Each of the astronauts, from a variety of countries, are loosely drawn so we do not get to know them in a deep way. But we do learn about the minute of their roles on the ship, the effect of weightlessness on their bodies and what they must do to counteract it, and how it feels to live like this. We see and understand their birdseye view as they witness from space what is happening on earth  in some detail, from their spectacular but strange vantage point where time is bent and distorted.

The earth is the answer to every question. The earth is the face of an exulted lover; they watch it sleep and wake and become lost in its habits. The earth is a mother waiting for her children to return, full of stories and rapture and longing. Their bones a little less dense, their limbs a little thinner. Eyes filled with sights that are difficult to tell.

A slim volume, Orbital is a poetic, immersive reading experience for which Harvey won the Booker Prize in 2024. The story left me with a sense of awe.

How are we writing the future of humanity? We’re not writing anything, it’s writing us. We’re windblown leaves. We think we’re the wind, but we’re just the leaf.

Book review: Salt and Skin by Eliza Henry-Jones

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Salt and Skin by Eliza Henry-Jones is a beautiful lyrical story with evocative descriptions of place that make the location a main character. 

Luda and her two children, Darcy and Min move to Seannay from Australia soon after Luda’s husband dies in a car accident. Seannay is a remote Scottish island and a place still steeped in the folklore of the witches who were found guilty of the crime of calling whales. The family are given accommodation in the ‘ghost house’ that has witch marks carved in the walls.

The ghost house is the only habitable place on Seannay, which is hitched to Big Island via a causeway. Seannay has no trees, just the house and turf and gorse and piles of stone and slate where other houses and byres had once stood. The ghost house is tiny and smells of damp sand and chalk. 

Luda is a photo journalist tasked with documenting how climate change is affecting the islands. On her first day she is photographing the cliffs when they collapse taking a small girl with them. Luda captures the moment on film just before the girl dies and the release of the images puts her offside with the locals.

Luda snaps a few frames. She inspects them and is impressed by the mood of the midwinter light, which she had expected to be flaring or dull. She lifts the camera back to her eye, trains it back on the cliffs. And then the world collapses.

Over time the family develop relationships with the locals including Theo, a foundling who washed up on the island years before and has webbed finger. The islanders think he is a selkie. Darcy falls in love with him.

This is what she knows: being haunted is not static. It is a fluid thing, a constellation of changing colours. Some days, she sense him everywhere. Other days, she barely thinks of him. On those days she will recognise his absence – her own self-absorbed carelessness – and it will be like a physical blow. She will stagger.

Salt and Skin is a family drama with the feel of a gothic novel. The story is infused with grief, loss, fury and tenderness, and explores a range of themes including myth, folklore and magic.