5 New(ish) Australasian Books for Your Reading List |
 | | Outside Readings bookstore in Carlton, Australia, this month.Alexi Rosenfeld/Getty Images |
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| The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. This week's issue is written by Natasha Frost, a reporter in Melbourne. |
Visitors to Australia and New Zealand would do well to carve out some time for their independent bookstores. A few immediate standouts: Unity Books in Wellington, Time Out Bookstore in Auckland, Readings in Melbourne (the Carlton branch is particularly good) and Gertrude & Alice in Sydney. |
I tend to seek out the section dedicated to local writers. It's here, from my experience, that you'll find the real gems — titles that you can't pick out at any airport bookstore and may never have heard of. |
Consider this shortlist of five books your whistle-stop tour of recent Antipodean reads that might have slid under your radar, some of which will soon be published internationally. |
To step into someone else's shoes, try … |
"Grand: Becoming My Mother's Daughter," by Noelle McCarthy |
Most New Zealanders have some familiarity with Noelle McCarthy's voice, whose Munster-inflected vowels have floated through its airwaves for much of the last two decades. |
That same brogue is instantly recognizable in her memoir "Grand." In just under 300 pages, it trips through a life lived at once too close to, and never far away enough from, her mother, who haunted the pubs of Cork City; who transformed, werewolf-like, at the first sip of Carling; and who fought tooth and nail to get her daughter into a "stuck-up school" with "an outlandish green uniform." (Disclosure: McCarthy and I both worked at Radio New Zealand in 2015 and 2016, though on different teams.) |
"Grand" hooked me like a fish. It is a tale of recovery and growth; deep, deep love; and almost insurmountable pain. In places, it is almost too raw to read — and the author's note at the end left me ruminating on the nature of memory and memoir for months down the track. Not for nothing has it been picked up internationally by Penguin Sandycove, whose representative called it "brave and astonishing," and which intends to publish it globally in July. |
For fans of true-to-life tragedy, try … |
When does a spell of "bad luck" cease to be believable? To what extent can we trust the account of someone we know to be highly traumatized? And how much tragedy can one person endure? |
In "Bodies of Light," Down, the children of social workers, recounts the life of Maggie, a woman repeatedly pushed to the margins, who grows up in care and finds herself springing from one precarious situation to the next. Told in a distinctive, unflinching voice, it is a hard read in places, with a strong sense of verisimilitude. (If you enjoyed "Educated," by Tara Westover, you might like this.) |
For Down, she said, writing the novel was "an exercise in balance: I didn't want to translate the grimness as 'trauma porn', nor did I want to sanitize it. And most of all, I didn't want to slide into voyeurism." |
For a South Seas saga to sink your teeth into, try … |
"Men Without Country: The true story of exploration and rebellion in the South Seas," by Harrison Christian |
In April 1789, a dispute over food rationing and crew punishment devolved into what is often described as the most famous mutiny in history: the desperate eviction of Captain William Bligh by the crew of the Royal Navy vessel HMS Bounty. Bligh made it back to Britain in one piece. His crew — or most of them — sailed on into the Pacific. Two decades later, almost all had died. |
This is the only book on this list that I haven't yet finished. But it is such a compelling read, and one that will interest anyone with a passing enthusiasm for adventure, maritime history and the desperate measures of desperate folk, that I couldn't bear to leave it out. |
A bonus: Christian, a former journalist, is a direct descendant of Fletcher Christian, who led the mutiny. Without giving too much away, he doesn't let his ancestor off lightly. |
For a family story that sprawls across cultures and borders, try … |
The siblings Greta and Valdin Vladisavljevic — call them G and V — narrate their lives in inner-city Auckland chapter by chapter in this pacey, spacey novel that seems made for a screen adaptation. (Spoiler: There's a wedding at the end.) The novel, which has been picked up by Hutchinson Heinemann, is set to publish in Britain early next year. |
Theirs is a family of Maori, Russian, Catolonian, Jewish-ish New Zealanders, with idiosyncratic moral compasses that translate to outbursts on national television, convoluted rent-sharing arrangements and a bounteous, if complicated, understanding of what it means to love. Reilly, for her part, describes it as a book about "eccentric queer Māori people" who are "essentially big nerds but still getting off with a lot of hot foreigners." |
So significant is the sense of place and character that once you're done breezing through it — you might cry, and you'll certainly laugh — you'll wonder when you get to hang out with your Auckland friends on the page all over again. |
If you're into sci-fi, try … |
Most pet owners have held extended — if one-sided — conversations with Fido or Fluffy. "Here is your dinner!" "I'm sorry I was late!" "No, you can't get on the bed." "It is too early to be making those noises." |
In "The Animals In That Country," her debut, McKay makes a daunting suggestion: What if the animals around us — every one, from the smallest gnat to the most gargantuan of whales — could talk back? And what if what they had to say was more wonderful and more horrible than we might ever imagine? |
This much-awarded pandemic novel, interspersed with flashing paragraphs of poetry, is a gripping read, by turns strange, harrowing and darkly funny, and with a pervasive Australian character. If you are considering getting a dog, perhaps leave it on the shelf. |
Here are the week's stories. |
 | | Peter Bol of Australia after winning the silver medal in an 800-meter race at the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham, England, last year.Ben Stansall/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images |
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 | | Students leading worship inside Hughes Chapel on the campus of Asbury University. |
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