Showing all posts about novels
There’s nothing wrong with marking a book did not finish
18 February 2023
Life’s too short to stick with, say, a movie or a book, that isn’t appealing, so ditch them, says Josh Gondelman, writing for Self magazine:
This is not, by the way, a criticism of the slow burn. It’s simply a permission slip to ditch the no burn. Gratification doesn’t have to be immediate, but it should be… eventual. With all the world’s art at our fingertips, there’s no reason to settle for something that leaves us cold. Unless, of course, you’re simply trying to bludgeon yourself into numbness with some kind of dull programming marathon. We all have to get to sleep somehow.
Yes, sleep. I often read books later in the evening, because, you know, I’m writing about books during the day, so I have to read later on. But if I find myself constantly nodding off while reading a novel, that’s pretty much an indication to stop and move onto something else.
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All That’s Left Unsaid, debut fiction by Tracey Lien
15 February 2023
There are ways to begin a writing career, and there are ways to begin a writing career. Your first novel being the subject of a manuscript bidding contest, and then making the shortlist of a major literary award once published, would probably rate as a pretty good start in the eyes of most pundits.
This is what happened to Sydney based Australian journalist and author Tracey Lien, and her novel All That’s Left Unsaid, published in September 2022 by HarperCollins Australia. So intense was enthusiasm for Lien’s manuscript, it was reported no fewer than nine publishing houses slugged it out for the publishing rights.
Frantic auctions for manuscripts are not uncommon, but they’re not exactly every day occurrences either. In 2021, American author Olivie Blake also found herself, and the manuscript of her book The Atlas Six — which she had already self-published — at the centre of a lucrative bidding contest that was sparked on TikTok.
But Lien’s story continues. Soon after being published, All That’s Left Unsaid was shortlisted in the debut fiction category of the 2023 Indie Book Awards. Needless to say, this is a novel that packs a punch. Ky Tran, a young woman is forced to return to Australia after her younger brother, Denny, is murdered in a busy restaurant, in the Sydney suburb of Cabramatta.
Despite the presence of numerous bystanders though, no one seems to know anything about how Denny died. With local police seemingly uninterested in the case, Ky sets about contacting, and talking to, each of the witnesses present when Denny was killed. But All That’s Left Unsaid is more than a murder story.
Lien’s novel lifts the lid on a troubled area of Sydney — also home to a large refugee population — during a difficult chapter in its history. The streets were awash with drugs and violence. Cabramatta is also where Australia’s first political assassination took place, when John Newman, a New South Wales State parliamentarian was killed outside his home in 1994.
Emma Finn, of London based literary agency C&W Agency described Lien’s manuscript as “electrifying and compulsive”, at the time the publishing rights were acquired. One can only wonder what might be next for Lien, and All That’s Left Unsaid. Blake’s novel The Atlas Six is in the process of being adapted for TV, and given interest thus far in Lien’s debut, a screen adaptation hardly seems like a surprise. Time will tell.
The winners of the Indie Book Awards will be announced on Monday 20 March 2023.
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Australian literature, books, literature, novels, Tracey Lien
Palimpsest by Florina Enache, Australia’s 2022 Novel Prize contender
12 February 2023
Image courtesy of Valerio Errani.
The winner of the 2022 Novel Prize is due to be announced any day now. The award is a collaboration between Australian publishing house Giramondo, and international counterparts Fitzcarraldo Editions in Britain, and New Directions in the United States. Celebrating works of literary fiction that “are innovative and imaginative in style,” the Novel Prize is presented every two years, for unpublished manuscripts, regardless of whether the author has prior published work or not.
The inaugural prize was won by Melbourne based Australian author Jessica Au for her second book, Cold Enough for Snow, in 2020, which also won this year’s Victorian Prize for Literature.
But in 2023 the big question is, can another Australian writer take out the award, and make it two in a row for Australian literature? While that may be wishful thinking, the odds are the same as in 2020, with only one Australian author, Florina Enache, on the 2022 shortlist, for her manuscript Palimpsest. As a coincidence though, another of the Novel Prize 2020 shortlisted writers, Glenn Diaz, a Manila based Pilipino writer, happened to be studying in Australia at the time.
Enache, who like Au calls Melbourne home, was born in Romania, and immigrated to Australia in 2005. Her first book, An-Tan-Tiri Mogodan, published by Adelaide Books in August 2019, is a collection of twelve short stories, depicting ordinary life in a totalitarian regime. An-Tan-Tiri Mogodan went on to be shortlisted in the 2020 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards for new writing.
Totalitarian regimes seem to be a recurring theme in Enache’s work. Palimpsest is set in the days prior to the observance of a holiday called National Day. Participation is mandated by the nation’s oppressive government, and citizens are required to attend observances, referred to as “the great spectacle”, in the capital city.
Should Enache follow in Au’s footsteps and be named winner of the Novel Prize, her manuscript will be published by the three Novel Prize collaborating book publishers. In addition, Enache — or whoever the winner is — will receive US$10,000 in the form of an advance against royalties.
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Australian literature, Florina Enache, literary awards, literature, novels
Sophie Cunningham, Emily Bitto, talk This Devastating Fever
1 February 2023
Australian author, and co-founder of the Stella Prize, Sophie Cunningham, discusses her latest novel, This Devastating Fever (published by Ultimo Press, September 2022), with Melbourne based author Emily Bitto, in a podcast recorded by the Wheeler Centre.
This Devastating Fever, Cunningham’s ninth book, tells the story of an author writing about the life of Leonard Woolf, the husband of British writer Virginia Woolf, and features a curious tie in with the once notorious Y2K bug:
Alice had not expected to spend most of the twenty-first century writing about Leonard Woolf. When she stood on Morell Bridge watching fireworks explode from the rooftops of Melbourne at the start of a new millennium, she had only two thoughts. One was: the fireworks are better in Sydney. The other was: is Y2K going to be a thing? Y2K was not a thing. But there were worse disasters to come. Environmental collapse. The return of fascism. Wars. A sexual reckoning. A plague.
Uncertain of what to do she picks up an unfinished project and finds herself trapped with the ghosts of writers past. What began as a novel about a member of the Bloomsbury set, colonial administrator, publisher and husband of one the most famous English writers of the twentieth century becomes something else altogether.
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Australian literature, books, Emily Bitto, novels, Sophie Cunningham
The Dublin Literary Award 2023 longlist
31 January 2023
Seventy books, published in thirty-one countries, have been named on the Dublin Literary Award 2023 longlist. After Story by Sydney based author and filmmaker Larissa Behrendt, Bodies of Light by Jennifer Down, winner of the 2022 Miles Franklin award, and Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au, are among Australian titles to be included.
Formerly known as the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, before being renamed in 2015, the Dublin Literary Award was established in 1994 to celebrate excellence in world literature. Awarded annually, novels either written in, or translated into English, can be nominated by participating libraries globally. A shortlist of ten book will be announced in March 2023, with the winner being named later this year, in June.
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books, literary awards, literature, novels
The War of the Worlds, invasion literature by H G Wells with an Australian connection
27 January 2023
When people think of The War of the Worlds, the novel written by late British author H. G. Wells, and published by William Heinemann in 1898, after being serialised in 1897, they think of science fiction.
Yet the story of the inhabitants of Mars crossing the interplanetary void to invade Earth — incidentally one of the earliest examples of alien invasion in English literature — isn’t only sci-fi and/or fantasy, The War of the Worlds is also an instance of invasion literature.
Also known as invasion novels, invasion literature was common from the later decades of the nineteenth century — following the publication of The Battle of Dorking, written by George Tomkyns Chesney in 1871 — through until the First World War.
Despite being set in England though, Wells drew inspiration for The War of the Worlds from another hemisphere all together, Tasmania, Australia:
Wells later noted that an inspiration for the plot was the catastrophic effect of European colonisation on the Aboriginal Tasmanians; some historians have argued that Wells wrote the book in part to encourage his readership to question the morality of imperialism.
Invasion literature played a part in influencing public opinion in Britain, and other then imperialistic European nations, through their unsettling premises. Stories such as The War of the Worlds, depicting a ruthless invasion of England by a technologically superior enemy, hopefully helped bring home the horrors of colonisation that were being inflicted upon other cultures.
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books, H G Wells, literature, novels, science fiction
Good books gone bad, the impact of audiobook narrators
26 January 2023
Usually a novel’s success hangs in a solid storyline, great characterisation, tension, originality, the list goes on. But as Australian writer and editor Fleur Morrison points out, novels in audiobook format face an additional hurdle when it comes to doing well: their narrator.
In other words, if a reader/listener doesn’t like the delivery or style of the narrator, that will affect their experience of the book. Comments about the audiobook narrator often feature in book reviews I see on Goodreads, and while most thoughts I’ve read have been positive, there’s undoubtedly one or two titles that have scored poorly on account of the narration.
Selecting an audiobook narrator certainly isn’t a matter to be treated lightly.
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audiobooks, books, literature, novels
More novels published in the 1990s are being studied at school
13 January 2023
The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, Lord of the Flies, Catcher in the Rye, and Vanity Fair, are among books commonly studied in high school. Despite their undoubted literary merit, many of these titles were published decades — and in some cases — centuries, ago. But things are changing, and now books written in the nineteen-nineties are beginning to make an appearance.
In the U.S. at least, according to research by The Pudding. The Things They Carried, written by Tim O’Brien in 1990, Woman Hollering Creek, by Sandra Cisneros from 1991, and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (also known as Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone), by J.K. Rowling, and published in 1997, are among relatively recent additions to some school reading lists.
Despite the presence of Harry Potter books though, not all inclusions were particularly popular commercially. Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies, a collection of short stories published in 1999, did not chart on the New York Times Best Seller list, and barely makes the top ten-thousand frequently read books list on Goodreads. Lahiri’s work did however win a number of literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2000.
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books, education, literature, novels
Voting open in Dymocks Top 101 books 2023 poll
13 January 2023
Voting is open for Australian book retailer Dymocks annual Top 101 books poll. Eligible titles span seven categories being bestsellers, fiction, fantasy and science-fiction, crime, romance, non-fiction, and young adult, and voters have the unenviable task of selecting just ten books for inclusion.
Good luck, and get voting.
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The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro, and another England
13 January 2023
Reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1988 novel, The Remains of the Day, twenty-years ago, changed the way British freelance writer Max Liu saw England. When Liu re-read the novel last year, he changed the way he saw the central protagonist James Stevens, the stoic butler of Darlington Hall, where much of the story is set.
It was one of the most profound reading experiences of my life. Partly, this was down to geography and timing. I grew up in Cornwall and, living hundreds of miles from home for the first time, I was ready to think about England and its meanings. This quietly subversive novel showed how the English obsession with class colours our emotions, speech and interactions. It changed the way I saw the country I thought I knew.
If you haven’t had the chance yet, check out the brilliant 1993 Merchant Ivory produced screen adaptation of the novel, starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson.
Seriously though, what of Ishiguro’s work isn’t thought provoking, or somehow transformative?
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