Angela Savage
Mother of Pearl
Transit Lounge
Tell us about your book. Mother of Pearl explores ideas of family, motherhood, exploitation, longing and loss in the context of international commercial surrogacy. Set in Australia and Thailand, the story is told from the perspective of three characters. Anna is an aid worker, recently returned home after more than a decade in south-east Asia and struggling to settle back into life in Melbourne. Her sister, Meg, holds out hope for a child, despite seven fruitless years of IVF. In rural Thailand, Mukda, a single mother, struggles to support her extended family.
The three women and their families’ lives become intimately intertwined in the unsettling and extraordinary process of trying to bring a child into the world across boundaries of class, culture and nationality. In writing the novel, I have resisted taking sides, leaving it to readers to find their own way through the complex ethical, political and emotional terrain of globalised assisted reproductive technologies.
What were you reading while you wrote it? Avalanche: A Love Story by Julia Leigh. Leigh’s lyrical yet unflinching account of her IVF experience deepened both my empathy for women who never have the child they long for, and my cynicism about the IVF industry and its largely false promises.
What will you read next? Lucky Ticket by Joey Bui. I have a stack of appealing fiction and non-fiction on my TBR pile; but having become a fan of Vietnamese-Australian Bui’s writing through Voiceworks magazine, I’m excited by the promise of her debut short story collection.
Ben Hobson
Snake Island
Allen & Unwin
Tell us about your book. Vernon Moore’s son has been jailed for beating his wife. Vernon thinks to let him rot in there – let him learn the hard lesson – until he finds out the local criminal element are bribing the guards to administer further beatings on his boy. So he decides to stand up for his son, despite his shame, and despite his wife’s insistence that he do nothing. And it all goes terribly wrong.
Snake Island is set in a small Victorian town in the early 1990s. The violence is messy – no slick, Hollywood production for something so nasty – and the characters are all morally grey. There are no certainties in life, and there aren’t in this book either. There are a lot of weighty questions at the heart of the narrative, but at the core of it all is: how do I live a good life?
What were you reading while you wrote it? No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy was a major influence. The unrelenting violence and moral questions of the novel inspired a lot of the philosophic wondering of my main character, Vernon Moore.
What will you read next? I’ll be finishing Where the Dead Go by Sarah Bailey. Gemma Woodstock is a brilliant character – dark, complicated, earnest, brave – and is one of my favourite fictional detectives.
John Marsden
The Art of Growing Up
MacMillan Australia
Tell us about your book. Australia in 2019 is about as middle class as a country can get. As a school principal, I get to see families from the inside. Every day I have numerous contacts with typical Australian parents and their children. The contacts are often intense and even intimate. They can be funny, tragic, dramatic, horrifying, exhilarating … how many adjectives are there in the English language?!
In western society, it seems like every generation makes quite a mess of parenting, but they do it in different ways. The current terror of children who are grubby, adventurous, bold, lively or lawless, or all of the above, has led to claustrophobic parenting. Apparently we want children to be sweet and cute.
I wanted to write a book that encouraged people to look honestly and thoughtfully at the way we treat children and teenagers. I wanted to pose some big questions: for example, are bumps, scratches and grazes worse than emotional injuries? Really?!
What were you reading while you wrote it? Totto-Chan: The Little Girl at the Window, by Tetsuko Kuroyanagi – sn extraordinary account by an extraordinary Japanese woman of her childhood in an alternative school in Tokyo during the second world war. It taught me that in a school, anything is possible, and helped me understand that when schools are run like factories, the graduates will probably resemble factory fodder.
What will you read next? From Here on, Monsters by Elizabeth Bryer. It seems fresh and intriguing – plus, cryptic crosswords, the Big Issue, and Josef K all get a mention in the first three pages, so I’m excited!
Diane Armstrong
The Collaborator
HQ Fiction
Tell us about your book. The hair stood up on the back of my neck when I heard the true story which inspired The Collaborator. In the darkest days of the second world war in Budapest, a powerless Jewish activist had the audacity to confront the most powerful Nazi, the dreaded Eichmann, and to negotiate with him for Jewish lives. Against all odds, he rescued over 1,500 Jews from certain death. But instead of being lauded as a hero, he was later reviled as a collaborator, and no one could have predicted the shocking consequences that followed.
It was the moral ambiguity of this story, and the controversy that has raged around this man to this day, that intrigued me. The Collaborator is also the story of Annika, an Australian woman whose journey in search of answers turns history on its head, and reveals the shattering truth about three generations of women whose lives have been poisoned by secrets.
What were you reading while you wrote it? While writing The Collaborator I was reading To the End of the Land by Israeli author David Grossman. It is one of the most intense, almost unbearably moving novels I have ever read, with brilliant characterisation and a plot that at times made me stop breathing.
What will you read next? On top of my waiting-to-be read pile is Boy Swallows Universe by Trent Dalton. I have long been a fan of his newspaper articles which are beautifully written with wit, power and insight. I was especially taken by the intriguing title which apparently comes from a Hindu legend about Krishna’s mother who sees the universe in her child.
Wai Chim
The Surprising Power of a Good Dumpling
Allen & Unwin
Tell us about your book. It’s a coming-of-age story focused on a Chinese-Australian migrant family living in Sydney’s inner-west. Anna is dealing with the love, pain, confusion and guilt that comes with having a mother who has mental illness. The book speaks to some of the less discussed aspects of Chinese culture, especially the stigma associated with mental health. I really wanted to explore the intersections of personal values and where they can come from, whether it’s family, culture, society or the individual themselves.
What were you reading while you wrote it? One of the books I read that really stayed with me while I was writing was A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. The work leaves you feeling so raw and vulnerable, and I deeply admire Yanagihara’s ability to lay bare the human condition and evoke such genuine emotion in her writing – really powerful stuff. It’s something that I hope to do in my own work.
What will you read next? I’m so keen to pick up the award-winning Between Us by Clare Atkins. Australian YA is chock full of such talented voices and Atkins’ book about asylum seekers and two teens caught in clashing cultures sounds incredible.
Meg Mundell
The Trespassers
UQP
Tell us about your book. The Trespassers is a murder mystery set in the pressure-cooker environment of a ship at sea. Fleeing a post-Brexit UK ravaged by sickness and recession, a group of workers boards a migrant labour vessel. They’re bound for Australia, a mythical land of sunshine and kangaroos, steady jobs and brighter futures.
The passengers set off full of hope, but something sinister has followed them aboard. In the ensuing chaos, three unlikely people are thrown together: a nine-year-old deaf boy who’s the sole witness to a violent crime; a nightclub singer who’s left her day job under dubious circumstances; and an anxious schoolteacher with a crush on a handsome sailor.
I wanted to write a cracking tale that also touches on some big themes: migration, exploitation, belonging. Despite the high body count, the story is driven by love – both the bone-deep love of blood ties, and the unexpected devotion that can flourish between strangers.
What were you reading while you wrote it? The Broken Shore by Peter Temple. I love Temple’s spare, poetic style, the hard-bitten tenderness of his characters, his sharp eye for detail and place, and the way he transcends genre. This book is both page-turner and literary tour de force, so a daunting example of what I aspired to do.
What will you read next? Act of Grace by Anna Krien (out in October). Anna is an absolute master, a writer of huge insight, compassion and intelligence, and someone who truly has the golden touch: she excels at long-form journalism, creative non-fiction, short fiction and poetry, so I can’t wait to read her first novel.
David Leser
Women, Men and the Whole Damn Thing
Allen & Unwin
Tell us about your book. My book is an attempt to look at the historical causes of the most pervasive form of violence on the planet today: violence against women. In the wake of the MeToo movement, I woke up to the global howls of distress from millions of women. This book is, therefore, both a personal investigation (read: mea culpa) and a deep examination of patriarchy and misogyny and how the models of masculinity that have been passed down through the ages have caused so much damage, not only to women, but to men and children as well.
The central hope within the book is not to tell women what to think or feel – men have been doing that for centuries. Rather it is to invite other men to reflect on the ways in which a patriarchal system has shaped and damaged all of us, and to consider ways of transforming our ideas of “manhood” so as to usher in a better world.
What were you reading while you wrote it? I read over 80 books – some more deeply than others – during the course of researching and writing my own book. Arguably, the most powerful of these books was Misogyny: The World’s Oldest Prejudice written by Jack Holland, the late Irish novelist, poet and journalist who captured in shocking detail the ancient and contemporary attitudes towards women that have inflicted so much damage.
What will you read next? I’m currently reading Jess Hill’s See What You Made Me Do and will then be plunging into Hannah Kent’s The Good People. Having just returned from County Clare in Ireland – where the visible and invisible words are often given equal weight – I’m looking forward to delving into Hannah’s gothic tale of a 19th century Irish village where fairies and folklore loom large in the collective imagination.
