Acclaimed Brisbane-born writer was known for his work exploring his own childhood, great myths and colonial Australia
Sian Cain
Thursday 23 April 2023
David Malouf, the acclaimed Australian author of books including Ransom, An Imaginary Life and the Booker prize-nominated Remembering Babylon, has died aged 92.
After winning over Nigella and Gillian Anderson, what’s left – apart from writing another great book?
Rewind two years, when Green Dot was practically part of the summer scenery – wedged into beach bags, sunning itself on shelves and earning a reputation as the Australian debut of the season. Madeleine Gray’s first novel, a whip-smart, melancholy-funny story about a young comment moderator who has an affair with an older newsroom colleague, arrived with rare momentum. Word of mouth spread, booksellers championed it, and the celebrity praise rolled in: Nigella Lawson called Gray “a major talent”, while Gillian Anderson deemed her “a dazzling writer”.
A young millennial begins an affair with her fortysomething boss, in a debut that’s nicely ironic while avoiding nihilism
Why do smart women expect their lovers to leave their wives, despite overwhelming evidence that the contrary is more likely? Australian critic Madeleine Gray is the latest writer to explore this question, in an acutely witty debut that charts, in painful detail, the inexorable arc of an affair between a disaffected millennial and her older, married boss.
From classmates to co-parents, the changing dynamics of a female friendship are astutely observed in a novel that explores the boundaries between love, lust and companionship
Australian author Madeleine Gray’s award-winning debut novel Green Dotwas a smart, funny tale of a doomed office affair. Her new novel, Chosen Family, is a smart, funny tale of a complicated, life-changing relationship between two women.
A convincing family drama merges with our heedless despoiling of the planet in this futuristic novel of climate breakdown
Reading Australian James Bradley’s “cli-fi” novel as large areas of Asia and Texas are flooded ramps up the disturbing effect of its incrementally apocalyptic scenarios. Bird die-offs, mass fish deaths, wildfires and storms are just the beginning as Bradley zooms into the future via a sequence of linked narratives. The “clade” of the title is the set of all the descendants of Adam Leith, a climatologist; each chapter focuses on the next generation of Adam’s family (and naturally his name has symbolic resonance), enabling Bradley’s predictions for Earth to fast-forward at Koyaanisqatsi-like speed while the human actors replay their inherited traits of awkwardness, poor communication skills and attachment issues. The structure, at once intimate and epic, works well as a means of delivering human-scale stories against the backdrop of the most human story of all: our heedless despoiling of the home planet. Almost inevitably, there is something of the blockbuster movie about this: the beleaguered family battling to stay together as the world ends. But Bradley’s deft merging of near-future predictions and cutting-edge science into a convincing setting for his family drama enables us to focus on the interactions between the characters. The apocalypse is happening, even as our messed-up lives distract us.
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| Alice Pung |
When 16-year-old Karuna becomes pregnant, Karuna’s mother decides to lock her daughter inside their fourteenth-story public housing flat as a means to keep her safe. Karuna, who has spent years trying to escape her mother, now finds herself with her mother as her only company.
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| Alice Pung: ‘The way many immigrant children were brought up, the parents give you orders for your own good ... Some readers might consider [it] emotional abuse.’ Photograph: Black Inc |
Pung’s new book One Hundred Days is set in the mind of a 16-year-old whose mother traps her in their commission flat after she falls pregnant
When Alice Pung was a teenager growing up in the suburbs of Melbourne, she had friends at school who got pregnant and vanished. “I never saw them again, and I wondered what happened to them,” the author says.
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| Nevenka dress, bra top and pants, Skull & Pearl bracelets, Essen shoes.MICHELLE TRAN |
Alice Pung had finished her novel One Hundred Days – about a pregnant teen whose overprotective mother locks her in their housing commission flat – when her life started to follow suit.
Alice Pung was almost 40, not 16, and pregnant with her third child, not her first, when she moved in with her parents in Melbourne during lockdown last year, accompanied by her husband Nick and their two boys, aged six and two. But as with her new novel’s adolescent narrator, Karuna, Alice found herself at times stifled by her mother’s “practical kind of love”.
MADELEINE GRAY
October 14, 2021
It was to be the fate of this patient little girl to see much more than, at first, she understood, but also, even at first, to understand much more than any little girl, however patient, had perhaps ever understood before.
— Henry James, What Maisie Knew
I have long been interested in what children know, because I was once a child, and I did know things, and people assumed that I didn’t.
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| Emily Bitto Photo by Sarah Enticnap |
We’re on Zoom. Again.
Emily Bitto and I gaze at our screens, looking at each other’s pixelated faces — very much not the same as looking into someone’s eyes — both of us occasionally sneaking glances at each other’s pixelated surroundings. I’m sitting at my dining table, kitchen in the background; Bitto is in the study of her Brunswick West home, a hot-pink Jackie Marshall tour poster stuck to the door of a vintage standalone wardrobe, reminding me of a time when musicians toured and audiences danced. Bitto’s bleached short pixie haircut is even lighter in the afternoon sun.
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| Australian author Emily Bitto, whose second novel, Wild Abandon, is out now through Allen & Unwin. Photograph: Nicholas Purcell |
Stella Prize winner’s new novel with its Tiger King-style setting in rural Ohio is an exploration of hedonism in the face of capitalist decline
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| Both Emily Bitto’s novels are about the abandonment of order. |
FICTION: Wild Abandon, Emily Bitto, Allen & Unwin, $32.99
Emily Bitto’s debut novel, which won the Stella Prize in 2015, was called The Strays. This new book, her second, is called Wild Abandon, an equally suggestive but more intense and violent version of the same idea. They are both books about the abandonment of order, wherein an innocent character from an ordinary family is first attracted and then infected by perceived glamour that turns out, once experienced, to be both a driver and a product of disorder and dysfunction.
A breathtaking new novel from the Stella Prize-winning author of The Strays.
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| Michelle de Kretser |
About 15 minutes into our conversation, Michelle de Kretser turns the interview on its head: “We haven’t come to the question of form yet. What did you make of it?”
The two-time Miles Franklin award winner is on the verge of releasing her new book, Scary Monsters, and her apprehensiveness is palpable.
