Sisonke Msimang
The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela
Text
Your book in your own words: The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela is about this incredible woman who was totally unapologetic about how she lived her life, and yet who was eclipsed by her brilliant but ultimately less radical husband. It’s also a book about their incredible glamour – Nelson and Winnie Mandela were the precursors to Barack and Michelle Obama. They were sophisticated and in love in a way that we seldom see depicted when it comes to Africans, and so I was keen to capture the romance and passion that fuelled their politics. Ultimately, however, it’s about the failure to forgive her sins – and they were considerable.
I wanted to look at how seldom our societies forgive women, and black women in particular, when they stumble. I wanted to talk about how a country that is famous for collectively forgiving murderous white men for presiding over 50 years of white supremacy can’t seem to forgive Winnie Mandela her transgressions.
What were you reading when you wrote it? I read a lot of Winnie’s own words. Her 1985 book Part of My Soul Went with Him and her prison diaries 491 Days: Prisoner No. 1323/69. It was incredible realising that she was this forthright so long ago, when most people find it hard to be that direct today. 491 Days is also a testament to how she was brutalised, and how much the anger of her torture propelled her forward. I also re-read Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place because its intimate tone and style were similar to what I wanted to use to tell this story.
What will you read next? I’m looking forward to reading Growing Up African In Australia, edited by Maxine Beneba Clarke, Magan Magan and Ahmed Yussuf, which just came out. I suspect it might turn out to be a handbook for my kids, since I have only been there four years, and they are very much young black Australians.
Andrea Goldsmith
Invented Lives
Scribe
Your book in your own words: Invented Lives is set in the 1980s. Galina Kogan, a 25-year-old Soviet Jew, migrates alone to Australia. Forbidden ever to return to the USSR, she treads the uncertain terrain of exile in her new country.
In Melbourne, Galina meets the Morrow family. Andrew is a mosaicist, much her own age, and a deeply shy man. Sylvie, his mother, is squeezed into the too-small world of marriage and home duties; she extends the confines of her life through a collection of letters. His businessman father, Leonard, is a man who has always inhabited two worlds.
I’m fascinated with the way we all invent ourselves, how we balance our public selves with the private. It’s always happened, and long before the digital age. Galina and the Morrows experience lives that are both messy and fulfilling. They have pasts that won’t leave them alone and present circumstances that threaten to trip them up. They are, it seems to me, intensely human.
What were you reading when you wrote it? I always have at least three books on the go: poetry, non-fiction and fiction. Throughout the writing of Invented Lives, I read The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, translated by Judith Hemschemeyer. Akhmatova took me into the Soviet years with often breath-stopping imagery. So too did Nadezhda Mandelstam with her classic memoirs Hope against Hope and Hope Abandoned. And I read The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, because he is a master of fiction and what every writer needs.
What will you read next? I’m about to start the new Jock Serong book Preservation. His last book, On Java Ridge, a compelling, prescient tale about asylum seekers and those who decide their fate, was a gripper. I’m keen to see what he does with historical fiction.
Richard Cooke
Tired of Winning: A Chronicle of American Decline
Black Inc
Your book in your own words: It’s a chronicle of America’s current state of decline, written in instalments. America is too big and strange for a grand theory treatment, so instead I’ve used a hybrid form that draws on essays, comment pieces, long-form reportage and critical appraisals, paced across 20 different states and myriad topics. The mid-term elections are at the heart of it, but it’s also about guns, opioids, climate change, fascism, history, race relations, urban blight, poetry and the paintings of George W Bush. Together the pieces are designed to make a mosaic, occasionally an ugly one.
What were you reading when you wrote it? Apart from topic-specific research reading – like Demolition Means Progress (about Flint, Michigan) – I read poet Claudia Rankine’s two “American lyrics”, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely and Citizen, because I wanted to watch a writer experiencing the United States episode by episode. Surprisingly, my most pertinent guide turned out to be JG Ballard. The Atrocity Exhibition is 50 years old next year, and feels more “modern” than most books written today.
What will you read next? I want to revisit Alexis Wright’s non-fiction. With the exception of Tracker, it’s neglected for some reason I don’t really understand. Dominic Kelly’s book on thinktanks, Political Troglodytes and Economic Lunatics is excellent so far. I’m also looking forward to Vietnamatta by Stephen Pham. Writing formally innovative essays is incredibly difficult, and he has that rare ability.
Jocelyn Moorhouse
Unconditional Love
Text
Your book in your own words: My book is a memoir about my life as a mother and a film director. It is also about being a creative woman married to a creative man, and how storytelling has always been such an important part of our life together. When both my parents died in such a short time period it hurled me into an intense year of grieving, and of taking stock of their lives and how much they meant to me. This also made me examine my relationship with my beautiful kids, two of whom have severe autism. In the book I explore my family and my filmmaking from Proof and Muriel’s Wedding to The Dressmaker.
What were you reading when you wrote it? I was reading my old diaries and my parents’ letters.
What will you read next? I am going to read The Good People by Hannah Kent. I have heard it has spooky paranormal creatures and possibly changelings in it. I love the idea of changelings, and other primal creations of human fear.
Wayne Macauley
Simpson Returns
Text
Your book in your own words: Simpson Returns is a small book that tries to tackle some big issues. Its basic conceit is that Simpson and his donkey (of Gallipoli fame) never died. Instead they’re found wandering the landscape of contemporary Australia, doing the care-and-compassion work our leaders have wiped their hands of. The book is a journey narrative, where my central character – along with his aged and decrepit donkey, Murphy – encounter various people who’ve fallen through society’s cracks. After nearly a century as a wandering revenant, Simpson is pretty adept at listening to and helping these people, transporting them “down through hellfire to the beach”. As absurd and comical as the conceit may sound, my hope is that it will guide a reader towards asking questions – not least whether we are the friendly, relaxed, egalitarian and compassionate society we’ve traditionally claimed ourselves to be.
What were you reading when you wrote it? I could not have taken the imaginative leap without first grounding myself in some facts. Peter Cochrane’s Simpson and the Donkey not only fills in the historical details but also asks some important questions about how the Simpson story ended up assuming almost mythical status in the modern Australian consciousness.
What will you read next? All right, this is cheating: I have already started reading my next Australian book. It is Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria, and I don’t know how I could have been so stupid as to have put off reading it this long. I’m only 70 pages in, but it is already mind-blowing.
Jaclyn Moriarty
Gravity is the Thing
Macmillan
Your book in your own words: Gravity is the Thing is the story of Abigail, owner of the Happiness Café and single mother of a four-year-old boy named Oscar. When she was 16, Abigail’s brother disappeared. That same year, she started receiving chapters from a self-help book called The Guidebook in the mail. Now, 20 years later, she has been invited to attend a retreat on an island in Bass Strait, to learn the “truth” about The Guidebook. I think this is a story about the self-help industry, single motherhood, missing persons, ambiguous loss and flight.
What were you reading when you wrote it? I wrote this novel over 15 years, and I’m always reading (frantically, compulsively) so I was reading many, many books – children’s, young adult and grownup. For research, I also read self-help books and these affected me by filling half my head with extreme cynicism and the other half with a fierce belief that mind-blowing success, in every aspect of my life, was just around the corner.
What will you read next? Either Melina Marchetta’s The Place on Dalhousie or Kerry Greenwood’s Flying too High. The Greenwood is the second Phryne Fisher mystery, and I just read the first and fell in love with Phryne: her stylish sass, her savvy and her healthy sexual appetite.
Jessica Rowe
Diary of a Crap Housewife
Allen & Unwin
Your book in your own words: Diary of a Crap Housewife is all about being gentle on yourself. We put way too much pressure on ourselves to be perfect in all parts of our lives. That’s impossible – and no fun! My book is a rallying cry to women that you are good enough. I write honestly about my talent (or lack thereof) for cooking, about what’s really important when it comes to mothering and family, along with other tales about reinvention, mental health, cats and fashion! It’s about embracing our imperfection and finding the joy in being vulnerable.
What were you reading when you wrote it? Boy Swallows Universe by Trent Dalton. I adored this book – it’s such a beautiful coming of age story which made me weep. It’s honest and raw – and I hope my writing is just as honest!
What will you read next? Not Bad People by Brandy Scott, which I’ve already started reading as I always have to have a book on the go! It’s a fabulous portrayal of how female friendships can unravel.
Sophie Cunningham
City of Trees: Essays on Life, Death and the Need for a Forest
Text
Your book in your own words: City of Trees wasn’t conceptualised as a book. It began as writing that responded to my experiences over five years, a period during which I travelled a lot. I took to walking, to photographing and thinking about the trees I saw wherever I went, and was struck by the way learning about them opened up a way of thinking about the various landscapes I found myself in – urban and rural – and the environmental changes I saw being wrought. More unexpectedly, though, was that the trees had a lot to say to me about culture more generally. In some ways I’ve come to think of the book as a walking meditation. The planet is undergoing profound and often traumatic change. It’s also glorious. I don’t think humans can separate themselves from this change – good or bad, ugly or beautiful. I want to honour what we have and what we’re losing.
What were you reading when you wrote it? The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson. There is so much to love about that book, but its relationship to City of Trees was to make me think harder about narrative, structure and the way we tell stories.
What will you read next? The Bridge by Enza Gandolfo. The bridge in question is Melbourne’s Westgate Bridge, which collapsed in 1970. It’s an important part of Melbourne’s history, a moment I remember quite clearly from when I was a small child. Enza is the perfect novelist to explore the reverberations of this shattering event.
Melina Marchetta
The Place on Dalhousie
Penguin Random House
Your book in your own words: The Place on Dalhousie is about two women who refuse to move out of a house they both can lay claim to: one lives upstairs and the other downstairs. It’s about the community they build both inside the house and around them.
What were you reading when you wrote it? Susie Steiner’s Missing, Presumed. Apart from a great mystery premise, Steiner’s DI Manon Bradshaw is one of the best crime protagonists I’ve read for a while because she can walk that line of strength and vulnerability so convincingly.
What will you read next? Jaclyn Moriarty’s Gravity is the Thing. Because she’s an amazing writer and never fails to cast a spell on me when I’m reading her work.
Miriam Sved
A Universe of Sufficient Size
Picador
Your book in your own words: A Universe of Sufficient Size is about a family coming to terms with its past. Also about chaos and mathematical discovery and tipping points and friendship. It follows two timelines – Budapest 1938 and Sydney 2007, with smatterings of Brooklyn in the 1950s.
In 1938, Eszter and her friends are a group of young Jewish mathematicians, revelling in their work and each other while also trying to find a way to get out of Nazi Europe. In 2007 Illy is struggling to maintain her well-ordered world when her mother gives her a notebook about the past, about people Illy has never heard of, including the woman she’s named after.
Illy circles the truth of what happened with growing dread, unaware of how her kids are also being pulled into the orbit of their grandmother’s mysteries. The book is inspired by my grandmother’s stories about her life before the war in Budapest.
What were you reading when you wrote it? I tried to read a lot of good historical fiction. I loved Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan for its rich evocation of a historical moment while keeping the focus on the characters, making it their story rather than the story of their time.
What will you read next? Too Much Lip by Melissa Lucashenko – I loved Mullumbimby, I love Lucashenko’s authorial voice, and I think this story sounds like a ripper.
Felicity McLean
The Van Apfel Girls are Gone
Harper Collins
Your book in your own words: The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone is part suburban noir, part coming-of-age story, and wholly blackly comic. Set in 1990s suburbia, in an eerie river valley with an unexplained stink, the story takes place over a single, sweltering summer – the summer the three Van Apfel sisters disappear.
Friend and neighbour Tikka Malloy is our narrator. But Tikka is only 11 and one sixth, and far too close to the action for her version of events to be considered completely reliable. Tikka explains that Hannah, Cordelia and Ruth Van Apfel vanished during their school’s outdoor concert. But as the Van Apfel girls’ oppressive religious home life is revealed, and as suspicions are raised about a local schoolteacher, it fast becomes obvious that something more sinister may have happened.
Twenty years later, Tikka is back in the valley, and she’s no less obsessed with the Van Apfel girls. Their disappearance might be an inexplicable mystery but its effect remains palpable.
What were you reading when you wrote it? I slept with Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock on my bedside table in the hope that some of its enigmatic dreaminess might seep into my subconscious. Like Lindsay’s novel, The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone is a story of lost innocence. Unlike Miranda, however, Cordelia Van Apfel was no Botticelli angel to begin with.
What will you read next? Growing up African in Australia edited by Maxine Beneba Clarke. Clarke’s memoir, The Hate Race, should be compulsory reading and I expect Growing up African in Australia to be just as vital. My husband was born in Zambia and in order to read my copy of Clarke’s new one, I might first need to wrestle it from my husband’s hands.
