Tag: AWW2018

Australia, Australian Women Writers Challenge, Author, AWW2018, Book review, Charlotte Wood, Fiction, literary fiction, Picador, Publisher, Setting

‘Pieces of a Girl’ by Charlotte Wood

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Pieces of a girl

Fiction – paperback; Picador; 192 pages; 1999.

Many people will know Australian writer Charlotte Wood as the author of the award-winning The Natural Way of Things, which was published in the UK in 2016.

Pieces of a Girl is her debut novel, published by Pan Macmillan Australia in 1999 after it won the 1998 Jim Hamilton Award for an unpublished manuscript.

The blurb on my edition describes it as “one of the most moving and original novels to have emerged from Australia in recent years” — almost 20 years later, I’d have to concur.

Enigmatic novel

This elusive, fragmentary and enigmatic novel is written in rich, hypnotic prose that has a dream-like quality to it (not dissimilar to her follow-up novel, The Submerged Cathedral, which first introduced me to Wood’s beautiful writing). The structure of the book also adds to that dream-like feeling, because it depicts the inner world of a 32-year-old woman called Ivy, whose memory shifts between different time periods, including the present day, in line with her mood and state of mind.

Ivy is a picture researcher who is obsessed with anatomical photographs. She is married to a much older man, an academic who seems more interested in the orangutans of Borneo than in her. He’s so dismissive of her work, which he sees as a hobby, he moves her study from the downstairs dining room into the poky unused bedroom up in the eaves, where he invariably thinks it should remain hidden.

The focus of the novel switches between Ivy’s current uneasy life with Professor Linford, her childhood with a domineering and mentally troubled mother, and her teenage years in the care of an “accidental” father called Victor.

Spoiler alert!

I’m going to break one of my usual rules and introduce a spoiler here, because chances are you may never get to read this book (it’s currently out of print and used copies are hugely expensive). But jump to the final paragraph if you don’t want to know what happens.

For much of Ivy’s childhood, her mother tries to pass her off as a boy.

Wrapskin it is called, when she swathes me in the clothes of a boy. Time for wrapskin when we dress me in the morning gloom, her fingers picking wrapskins from the bed like flowers, wrapskinning me in them.

It is this thwarting of identity that causes Ivy to feel as if she’s unworthy of love, to feel as if she is merely “pieces of a girl” and may partly explain why she is so obsessed with anatomical pictures of the human body.

It’s only when Ivy, unhappily married and in need of answers, goes in search of Victor that her past and present collide — with an unexpected, but also satisfying, resolution.

Sadly, Pieces of a Girl is no longer in print. I sourced my used copy online a couple of years ago. I’ve just checked on Bookfinder.com to see what availability is like and I’m afraid that used copies range in price from £15 to more than £200! Maybe check your library first…

This is my 10th book for #AWW2018

Australia, Australian Women Writers Challenge, Author, AWW2018, Book review, Harper Collins, Hazel Baron, Janet Fife-Yeomans, Non-fiction, Publisher, Setting, true crime

‘My Mother, A Serial Killer’ by Hazel Baron and Janet Fife-Yeomans

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My Mother, A Serial Killer

Non-fiction – Kindle edition; Harper Collins; 228 pages; 2018.

Hazel Baron was nine when she first suspected her mother was a murderer.

So begins My Mother, A Serial Killer, by Hazel Baron and Janet Fife-Yeomans, which tells the real life story of an Australian woman who murdered her husband in the 1950s, then killed two other men she knew. She only came to justice after her eldest daughter, Hazel Baron, turned her into police.

Dulcie Bodsworth was a community-minded wife and mother, who was well respected as a talented cook and caterer. But underneath her likeable exterior lurked a manipulative and conniving individual.

In 1950, when her second husband, Ted, a former railway ganger now crippled by rheumatoid arthritis, was holed up in hospital in rural Victoria, Dulcie took up with Harry, a man 19 years her junior “to help with the kids” (there were four children, including Hazel, the co-writer of this book). Circumstances were dire (this was before the welfare state) and the family were living in two old army tents on the NSW side of the Murray River, opposite the town of Mildura.

On the night that Ted was discharged from hospital, Dulcie put the kids to bed with warm milk (a rare, and memorable, treat) and Aspro tablets, to help them go to sleep after such an exciting day.

Hazel’s mum shook her awake the next morning. The flap to the tent was ajar, the shaft of light showing that her dad’s bed was empty. Dulcie was bending over her, her face all teary: ‘Hazel, Hazel. Your father’s gone. He wasn’t here when I woke up. I think he fell in the river and drowned last night.’
[…] On the banks of the river, Ted’s faithful dog, Toby, howled into the morning air.

A few days later Ted’s body was found upstream. An inquest recorded a verdict of accidental death.

But Hazel wasn’t so sure. Why had her mother taken her and her siblings out of school immediately after her father’s disappearance? Why were they not allowed to talk to the police? Why had Dulcie told the police that Harry was Ted’s brother but then later claimed he was her brother? And what were Dulcie and Harry arguing about all the time? When she heard them talking about “getting our story right”, what did they mean?

On the run

In the years that followed, Dulcie and Harry dragged their young family from one town to another, mainly in a bid to avoid Ted’s relatives.

By 1955, they were living on a sheep station, outside Wilcannia in north-western NSW, where Dulcie took a job as housekeeper. Her second victim was the manager of that station, Sam Overton, whom she killed by putting arsenic on his lamb chops.

She wanted him out of the way in the mistaken belief that Harry would then be able to take over the farm. His death was attributed to natural causes — acute gastroenteritis and inflammation of the middle layer of the heart wall.

Her third victim was Tommy Tegenza, the town drunk, whom Dulcie had befriended. At the time Dulcie had the lease to operate the dining room in one of the three hotels in Wilcannia.

She knew Tommy had £600 and managed to convince him to leave it to her in his will. She staged an accidental fire in his room — a shed out the back of the hotel — and he was burned alive. In a weird twist of fate, the money from his will did not go to Dulcie, but helped cover his enormous bar bill.

Brought to justice

As well as looking at Dulcie’s complicated, shambolic and often impoverished life — from her first marriage to her third — and examining in great detail how she went about killing three men who simply got in her way, My Mother, A Serial Killer also charts how she was brought to justice.

Hazel, who got married against her mother’s wishes and became a nurse, had been suspicious of Dulcie ever since her father’s death. When she finally went to the police (because she was frightened that her mother had turned her malicious and deadly attention toward’s Hazel’s own husband), her whole life got turned upside down. She had to go into hiding.

The investigation was not straightforward. But eventually, this mundane-looking middle-aged mother was charged with three murders and sent to prison. She served thirteen and a half years and later became a consultant on the TV series Prisoner (or Cell Block H, as it was known in the UK). One of the characters, Lizzie Birdsworth, is based on Dulcie.

My Mother, A Serial Killer is a heart-rending account of a daughter’s anguish, but it’s also a tribute to her courage, tenacity and honesty — all written in a forthright style, with only the bare minimum of tabloid flourishes. It’s one of those amazing stories that seems too outlandish to be true. I found it completely fascinating.

You can read an abstract of his book on the News.com.au website and listen to Janet Fife-Yeoman’s talk about the book on the Nightlife podcast. It is available in the UK in Kindle edition only.

This is my 9th book for #AWW2018

Ali Cobby Eckermann, Australia, Australian Women Writers Challenge, Author, AWW2018, Book review, Ilura Press, memoir, Non-fiction, Publisher, Setting

‘Too Afraid to Cry’ by Ali Cobby Eckermann

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Too Afraid to Cry

Non-fiction – paperback; Ilura Press; 212 pages; 2012.

Ali Cobby Eckermann, a poet of indigenous heritage, was not a name familiar to me until she won the international Windham-Campbell Literary Prize for Poetry in 2017.

Five years earlier she had published her memoir, Too Afraid to Cry, which I purchased on my recent trip to Australia.

It’s a rather brave and beautiful book, one that charts the very personal impact — both good and bad — on a young child taken from her aboriginal family and raised within a white one, what we now know as the Stolen Generations. (You can read more about that shameful part of Australian history in this Wikipedia entry.)

In stripped back, almost skeletal (and sometimes pedestrian) prose, Cobby Eckermann tells us what it was like to never quite know where she belonged, how she buried her problems in drink and bumbled her way from one disaster to another until she decided to trace her birth mother and reconnect with the aboriginal family she never knew.

While detail is often scant and the reader is left to fill in the blanks — Too Afraid to Cry is very much a broad brushstrokes type of memoir and some chapters are only a page long — it’s a wonderful tale of perseverance and hope.

A search to belong

Cobby Eckermann was born in 1963. She was adopted as a baby and grew up in a loving family with three other adopted siblings on a farm in northern South Australia. But she was molested by a family friend and later abused by her foster brother’s friend, secrets she kept to herself and which clearly took a toll on her psychological well-being.

At school she was bullied and suffered racist taunts, but she was a promising athlete and a good student. As a teenager she succumbed to drink and was prone to violent outbursts. She left with no qualifications aged 17, moved out of home and spent the next two years in an abusive relationship.

When she returned home she found out she was pregnant. She gave birth to a baby boy, whom she adopted out, and then she spent the next decade working a series of often manual jobs, until she retrained as an office manager and found work managing an arts centre in outback Australia.

She found her birth mother, Audrey, in 1997 and her son, Jonnie, in 2001.

Her writing career, which took off in 2009 when she entered a poetry competition, is not detailed in this memoir. But her poetry is dotted throughout. This poem is possibly my favourite and a good one to end on:

Circles and Squares

I was born Yankunytjatjara my mother is Yankunytjatjara her mother was Yankunytjatjara my family is Yankunytjatjara I have learnt many things from my family elders I have grown to recognise that life travels in circles—Aboriginal culture has taught me that.

 

When I  was born I was not allowed to live with my family I

grew up in the white man’s world

We lived in a square house we picked fruit and vegetables

from a neat fenced square plot

we kept animals in square paddocks we ate at a square table

we sat on square chairs

I slept in a square bed

 

I look at myself in a square mirror and did not know who

I was

 

One day I meet my mother

 

I begin to travel I visit places that I have already been but

this time I sit down with family

 

We gather closely together by big round campfires we eat bush tucker feasting on round ants and berries we eat meat from animals that live in round burrows we sleep in circles on beaches around our fires we sit in the dirt on our land that belongs to a big round planet we watch the moon grow to a magnificent yellow circle that is our time

 

I have learnt two different ways now I am thankful for this

is part of my Life Circle

 

My heart is Round ready to echo the music of my family but

the Square within me remains

 

The Square stops me in my entirety.

This is my 8th book for #AWW2018

2018 Miles Franklin Literary Award, 2018 Stella Prize, Allen & Unwin, Australia, Australian Women Writers Challenge, Author, AWW2018, Book review, Fiction, literary fiction, Literary prizes, Michelle de Kretser, Paris, Publisher, Setting, Sri Lanka

‘The Life to Come’ by Michelle de Kretser

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Fiction – hardcover; Allen & Unwin; 384 pages; 2018. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

I realise we’re only a quarter of the way through 2018 but I think it’s safe to say that Michelle de Kretser’s The Life to Come is going to be in my top 10 at the end of the year.

There’s something about de Kretser’s silky prose combined with her superbly drawn characters and her forensic eye for detail that makes this novel — her first since winning the Miles Franklin Literary Award with Questions of Travelin 2013 — truly sing. Throw in fierce intelligence and sparkling wit and you have an absorbing book that I raced through — all 384 pages of it — in a matter of days.

A story in five parts

The Life to Come isn’t a conventional novel. It is divided into five parts, each of which could be read as a standalone novella or (quite long) short story. Some characters flit between parts, but on the whole, these are separate (and richly vivid) character studies about people living in contemporary Australia who have found their lives play out in ways they didn’t expect.

There is Ash, a British academic now living in Sydney, whose girlfriend Cassie is bewitched by his exotic Sri Lankan heritage; Pippa, a Sydney-based writer, who longs for success and struggles to like her well-to-do in-laws; her old friend Celeste, a Perth-born translator now residing in Paris, who has taken a younger lover who doesn’t quite love her back; and Christabel, another Sri Lankan, who has reunited with her childhood friend Bunty and is growing old with her in a house next door to Pippa.

There’s no central plot and yet each part thrusts you into the stimulating and fascinating inner — and outer — worlds of interesting and complex people, all striving to live authentic, successful and happy lives and sometimes falling, failing or following unexpected tangents. It’s very much about finding small pleasures in our day to day existence and there’s much subtle commentary about the struggles of leading a creative life and of finding your place in the world if you (or your parents) come from somewhere else.

A laugh-out-loud funny satire

The blurb on the back of the UK edition calls The Life To Come a “delicious satire on the way we live now and a moving examination of the true nature of friendship”. I would entirely agree.

Not only does this novel feel immediate and of the moment, layered with meaning and insight into modern living in one of the world’s most affluent countries, it’s also laugh out loud funny in places. I particularly love the way in which de Kretser skewers the complacency (and bullshit) of contemporary Australian life on almost every page. Nothing escapes her barbed wit, her uncanny ability to show the preposterous nature of so many “first world problems” and the naivitey of people who don’t realise how good they have it.

For instance, in one scene, a character asks why Australians are so obsessed with food. The response goes something along the lines of “there’s nothing else of importance in the country” (I’m paraphrasing because I read an advanced proof that I’m not supposed to quote from). In another scene, a character dismisses someone for liking latte coffee when flat whites are now all the rage.

To be honest, I feel I’m going to have to read The Life to Come again because it’s so richly detailed I’m sure I’d discover things I missed first time round. It’s such a warm and wise novel,  I would love to see it take home the Stella Prize, for which it has been shortlisted, when the winner is announced tomorrow (12 April).

This is my 7th book for #AWW2018, my 3rd for the 2018 Stella Prize shortlist and my 1st for the Miles Franklin Literary Award 2018

2018 Stella Prize, Australia, Australian Women Writers Challenge, Author, AWW2018, Book review, Claire G. Coleman, dystopian, Fiction, Literary prizes, Publisher, science fiction, Setting

‘Terra Nullius’ by Claire G. Coleman

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Fiction – Kindle edition; Hachette Australia; 304 pages; 2017.

Claire G. Coleman’s Terra Nullius is a damning portrait of colonial settlement in Australia.

Told through a series of intertwined narratives, it seems to mimic the history of aboriginal dispossession at the hands of white settlers, but a clever twist about a third of the way through indicates the story is about something else entirely — and the revelation is unsettling if you’re not expecting it.

(I’m not going to be more specific than that; I already fear I’ve given too much of the plot away.)

Shortlisted for the 2018 Stella Prize, this novel gets full marks for originality, but I’m afraid I didn’t really warm to the story. Whenever I put it down, I was loath to pick it up again. And yet I so wanted to love this book. I bought it long before its prize listing because it had received such great reviews and I had saved it up for months, waiting for the right time and place to begin reading it.

Why I didn’t love this book

I think my main issue is that I didn’t really connect with any of the characters, even those I liked and would normally want to cheer on, such as Jacky Jerramungup, the fugitive on the run from the homestead where he’d been held as a slave. Perhaps it’s because all the characters were poorly drawn; they lacked depth and had little to no interior life, making it hard to understand their motivations or beliefs. Some were even horrendously clichéd, such as the horrid bad nun, Sister Bagra, who treats the stolen children in her care with cruelty and inhumanity.

And for a book that has an important message to impart — about “otherness” and subjugation of indigenous peoples — a message that needs to be told, it just felt too heavy-handed, too obvious. I suspect that was deliberate because the author thought there was no room for nuance in the story she wanted to tell.

I also thought the novel was too long, too repetitive and the pacing was too slow. The bulk of the narrative is a chase story — a man on the run from the law — but it seems to take forever to get to the climax. The editor in me reckons it could easily have been told in half the number of pages and perhaps it might have been even better as a short story.

What I did appreciate

But what I did like was Coleman’s writing, which is stripped back and almost devoid of adjectives unless they’re absolutely necessary. Her descriptions of the landscape, in particular, and the Australian climate are vivid and wonderfully alive. She describes dawn as “tentative tendrils of light”, rugged woodland as full of “dripping trees and scratching, tangling, grabbing bushes”, the heat as being strong enough to “melt the new paint off your walls”.

And I appreciate the way she takes history — including all the ugly bits that have shaped white and black relations in Australia — and presents it as something new, as something revelatory, as something that should make all of us sit up and listen: what if this had happened to us and not them?

So yes, there’s no doubt that Terra Nullius is a powerful book and an important one, but while I appreciate the author’s aims and her motivations, it just didn’t work for me.

This is my 6th book for #AWW2018 and my 2nd for the 2018 Stella Prize shortlist.

Australian Women Writers Challenge, Author, AWW2018, Book review, Fiction, Heather Morris, historical fiction, holocaust, Poland, Publisher, Setting, Zaffre

‘The Tattooist of Auschwitz’ by Heather Morris

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The Tattooist of Auschwitz

Fiction – hardcover; Zaffre; 288 pages; 2018.

I’ve read a lot of Holocaust novels in my time (and quite a few this year, it would seem), but The Tattooist of Auschwitz, by Heather Morris, is a rarity: it’s about finding love in the most hellish of places and ends on such a joyous note it’s hard not to be deeply affected by it.

It is based on the true story of Lale Sokolov, a Jew from Slovakia, who was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1942.

Here, Lale is ordered by SS officers to tattoo numbers on the arms of his fellow prisoners, a horrid task he finds deeply upsetting to carry out. But the privileged position of Tätowierer — the tattooist —  affords him specific “luxuries” (a room of his own, for instance, and extra rations) and gives him access to certain areas of the camp, which means he can exchange money and jewels stolen from Jews for much-needed food to keep others alive.

Love affair behind the razor wire

Lale, it seems, is a bit of a wheeler and dealer, a cheeky chap with a ready smile and a willingness to help others, but he’s also a romantic. One day, in the queue of new arrivals waiting to be tattooed, stands a frail young woman called Gita. Lale scratches ink into her arm and falls quietly in love.

The novel traces Lale’s courtship of Gita, who was sent to nearby Birkenau, and their subsequent love affair conducted via smuggled letters and clandestine visits outside her block.

Some two years later, when Gita is shipped out of the camp, Lale thinks he will never see her again, but events conspire otherwise. The circumstances of their coming together in the immediate aftermath of the war are nothing short of miraculous — and it would be a hard-hearted reader indeed who did not feel deeply moved by their reunion. I finished this book with tears coursing down my face — not from sadness, but from joy.

A secret brought out into the open

The circumstances in which The Tattooist of Auschwitz was written are no less miraculous. Lale’s son Gary wanted someone to tell his parent’s story. He introduced writer Heather Morris to his father, who was then in his late 80s and living in Melbourne, Australia, where he and Gita had married and settled down to start a family and run their own business.

Over the course of three years, Morris visited Lale two or three times a week to hear his tale, which he’d kept secret for more than 50 years. When Lale died in 2006, Morris hoped to turn his story into a film. More than a decade later, she transformed the screenplay into a novel, and it’s been a bestseller ever since.

It’s not a perfect novel, but it’s heartfelt and the writing style, simple and to the point, moves the story along at a good pace. There are vivid descriptions of the horror and misery of the camps, but this is juxtaposed by small acts of kindness and resistance. It’s a story that shows that even in the darkest of places good things can happen and, as clichéd as this sounds, love can conquer all.

You can read more about the book and Lale’s life in this article on the BBC News website.

This is my 5th book for #AWW2018

2018 Stella Prize, Australian Women Writers Challenge, Author, AWW2018, Book review, Fiction, Indonesia, literary fiction, Literary prizes, Mirandi Riwoe, Publisher, Seizure, Setting

‘The Fish Girl’ by Mirandi Riwoe

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The Fish Girl

Fiction – Kindle edition; Seizure; 110 pages; 2017.

Winner of the 2017 Seizure Viva La Novella Prize and shortlisted for the 2018 Stella Prize, Mirandi Riwoe’s The Fish Girl is a lush, fable-like novella set in Indonesia.

It tells the coming of age story of Mina, a young village girl whose life is changed forever when her fisherman father sends her away to become a servant for a Dutch merchant. Sent to work in the kitchen under the bold and fierce tutelage of head cook Ibu Tana — a woman so large she has to come down the staircase sideways — Mina finds herself learning new dishes and discovering new tastes: her sense of wonder is palpable.

[…] in the Dutch house Mina eats well, tastes sauces and sweets she never knew existed. She wishes her mother could try these wonderments, and vows to take her some food wrapped in banana leaves when she returns to the village for a visit, even if she has to steal morsels from behind Ibu Tana’s back. One of the first things she learns to cook is pisang epe. Ibu Tana teaches her to fry the banana with palm sugar until it is brittle and sweet, how to recognise when to take it from the pan. Mina learns to knead dough for Dutch desserts and Chinese dumplings, how to slice the shallots and garlic so finely that, when fried, they become as wispy as wood shavings.

Slim and pretty, she is soon promoted to serving the food to the Master and his regular guests, one of whom — a fat, jolly sea captain — takes a shine to her. Before long she is asked to give him Malay language lessons and he bestows her with lavish gifts, including  a wooden box filled with frangipani flowers and a delicate gold anklet.

But Mina, who is young and naive, is unaware that this attention might come at a price: she is more interested in Ajat, the beautiful boy who drives the horse and cart when she is sent to buy goods from the Chinese produce store.

They’re quiet on the short drive to the produce store. Her arm rubs against his as they sway along the dirt road and she watches for finches in the trees, on the curiously shaped roofs of the Dutch houses. Sometimes she glances down at Ajat’s fingers, dark and tapered, controlling the reins. She peers at the vein that ropes up from the heel of his hand and across his forearm. He doesn’t smell of the sea anymore. His scent is sweeter, of sweat and horse. His knee bumps against hers once in a while. They trundle down the road towards the beach and she leans forward, yearning for a touch of the salt water on her toes. Ajat presses her back.

The course of true love never did run smooth, though, and Mina is betrayed in a brutal, devastating way, leaving this reader somewhat shell-shocked.

Many of you might know that The Fish Girl was inspired by Somerset Maugham’s short story The Four Dutchmen, which is about a native girl who breaks up the lifelong friendship between a ship’s captain and his three companions. I’ve not read that story myself, so it certainly didn’t hinder my enjoyment of Riwoe’s novella, but I suspect it might enrich or enhance the reading experience if I had. (Sue, at Whispering Gums, has reviewed both and this seems to confirm my theory.)

What I loved about The Fish Girl, aside from the lush descriptions of food and landscapes and the achingly beautiful way Riwoe writes about life through Mina’s eyes, is that it perfectly encapsulates worlds colliding, whether that be Mina’s traditional upbringing coming up against colonialism or the Dutch sea captain’s love of a Javanese girl coming into conflict with his companion’s lowly view of native women.

The story is tender and sweet, brutal and charming. I read it in one sitting and was bereft when I came to the end. It is a worthy contender of the Stella Prize.

This is my 4th book for #AWW2018 and my 1st for the 2018 Stella Prize shortlist.

Australia, Australian Women Writers Challenge, Author, AWW2018, Book review, Hachette Australia, History, Non-fiction, Publisher, Setting, Tanya Bretherton, true crime

‘The Suitcase Baby’ by Tanya Bretherton

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Non-fiction – paperback; Hachette Australia; 327 pages; 2018.

I do like a gruesome true crime book, especially one that is well researched and uses the device of the novel to tell the story in a compelling and authentic way. Tanya Bretherton’s The Suitcase Baby, the bulk of which I read on a 3.5-hour domestic flight between Melbourne and Perth earlier this month, ticked all the right boxes for me.

This is the story of an impoverished Scottish immigrant convicted of the murder of her three-week old baby in Sydney in 1923. It is, by turns, a heart-breaking and eye-opening read, not least because it is a timely reminder of what happens when society imposes one set of rules on women and another on men.

In Sarah Boyd’s case there were so few options open to her that she took the gruesome decision to kill her own baby.  She strangled and suffocated her daughter, wrapped her up in cloth, placed her in a suitcase and threw her into Sydney Harbour. Days later the suitcase washed up on a Mosman beach and was discovered by a party of children, on a Sunday School excursion, who alerted authorities.

The crime and its outfall

Bretherton, who is a sociologist and historian, charts the criminal investigation and murder trial that follows. She also looks at the family history of Sarah Boyd and her accomplice, best friend Jean Olliver, a flapper, whose life as a single woman scandalised society at the time. (Flappers, the author points out, were on the rise and often viewed as nothing more than prostitutes because they weren’t to be trusted leading lives independently from men.)

The author takes care to put the case into context, to show how gender played a role in the crime and its subsequent judgment and media interest.

The most astonishing thing about this story is that it was not an isolated incident. In the 1920s “water babies”, as they were dubbed, frequently washed up on the shore or were spotted bobbing in the harbour. Others were found in public places, such as lavatories, train stations and parks, showing the desperate lengths women would go to avoid public humiliation and condemnation for bearing an illegitimate child.

Poverty, too, played a crucial part in this situation. If you were a woman with a child to look after it generally meant you could not work. Sarah, who was an immigrant, had no immediate family to offer support, financially or otherwise. (She already had a toddler, whose father had deserted her, so with a newborn to look after she was obviously in a desperate bind.)

The historical context of a crime 

The Suitcase Baby reads very much like a crime novel. It’s not particularly fast-paced and the crime is solved within a matter of chapters, but this isn’t so much a who-did-it police procedural, but a why did she do it and was her trial and subsequent punishment fair?

It’s this look at the historical context of the crime that makes the book such an intriguing one. I very much appreciated the ways in which Bretherton carefully examines the social, economic and political frameworks of the time and the often alarming ways that men tried to control women and women’s bodily functions because “they knew best”. (Bretherton highlights some “scientific” studies that looked at the size and “floppiness” of a woman’s vagina to indicate her likelihood of going insane — yes, really.)

My only quibble is that there are no footnotes in the text and yet the back of the book has them listed — I hadn’t clocked they were there until I got to the final page. They would have been super helpful to read as I went along, because I often wondered what Bretherton was basing her statements on.

The Suitcase Baby is currently only available in the UK as a Kindle edition, but it will be published in paperback on June 28.

This is my 3rd book for #AWW2018.

If you liked this, you might also like:

Eugenia: A True Story of Adversity, Tragedy, Crime and Courage by Mark Tedeschi: an astonishing true crime book about Eugenia Falleni, a woman who had been living as a man for 22 years, who scandalised Australia in the 1920s when she was charged with the murder of her wife. The case is actually referenced in The Suitcase Baby because they shared the same Crown prosecutor.

Literary prizes

2018 Stella Prize shortlist

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I’ve just got back from a three-week sojourn to Australia, so please forgive the lateness of this post. While I was swanning around Victoria and Western Australia, the shortlist for the 2018 Stella Prize was announced on International Women’s Day.Stella Prize badge

The shortlisted titles are:

The prize is for Australian women writers and only books, both fiction and non-fiction, published in 2017 were eligible. You can read the full announcement on the official website.

I plan on reviewing as many of the titles as I can. Do keep coming back to this post as I will update the hyperlinks above as and when I review each title.

The winner of the $50,000 prize will be announced on 12 April.

Australia, Australian Women Writers Challenge, Author, AWW2018, Book review, Fiction, horror, literary fiction, Lois Murphy, Publisher, Setting, Transit Lounge

‘Soon’ by Lois Murphy

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Soon

Fiction – paperback; Transit Lounge; 246 pages; 2017.

It might only be two months into 2018, but I think it’s fairly safe to say that Lois Murphy’s Soon will be the strangest — and most intriguing — book I read all year.

This deliciously creepy debut novel defies categorisation: is it dystopian? literary fiction? horror? The answer, I suspect, is a combination of all three.

I’m not much of a one for fantastical, supernatural tales, but there was something about this story, which compelled me to keep turning the pages long into the night. (Lisa, at ANZLitLovers, who reviewed this book last year, felt the same way.)

An isolated town

The setting is Nebulah, a fictional town in outback Western Australia. Woodford, the nearest town, is more than two hours drive away and that town is a long way from anywhere else, too.

One winter’s evening in 1998 a ghostly mist descends on Nebulah. This mist, swirling with apparitions and evil spirits, has the power to kill anyone caught in its path. The only way to escape it is to hide indoors, with all the doors and windows locked, until the sun arrives the next morning to burn it off.

We’d run for the house as the mist around us started to transform itself into figures, howling faces and reaching arms, elongated grasping fingers snatching at us, gleeful. Thankfully it was still hazy enough to evade — we wrenched ourselves through it and I slammed the door as it streamed after us up the porch steps, screeching with delight at this unexpected opportunity. As I flicked the locks it was pressed against the windows, a chilling kaleidoscope of bones and teeth against the glass.

This nightmarish situation has confounded all the scientists. No one seems to know where the mist came from and what its purpose is. But now a once humble community of 500 or so people has dwindled to just a handful — and the only reason these people have stayed behind is that they have nowhere else to go.

The story is narrated by Pete Macintosh, a tough character, who has a soft spot for two women who have remained in town: Li, a Cambodian refugee, who has a successful business growing organic fruit; and Milly, a widow still grieving for her husband who died more than a decade ago.

Pete is a former policeman, cancer survivor and widower with an  estranged adult daughter. In other words, he’s a bit of a loner. But he has a community spirit and he cares deeply for his neighbours.

A menacing mist

The story charts a year in the life of the town and shows how the mist — perhaps a metaphor for pollution or changing economic circumstances — affects the stalwarts who stay behind.

The characterisation is superb. We get a real insight into the fears (and hopes) of not just Pete and Li and Milly, but we meet well drawn subsidiary characters along the way, including Denham, the disbelieving policeman from Woodford; Alex, the clairvoyant from out-of-town who warns Pete to leave by winter solstice; and Anne, the visiting student, who is bewitched by the mist and wants to examine it more closely, putting her life and the life of her friends in mortal danger.

The story, as I am describing it, probably sounds ludicrous, but there’s something about Murphy’s literary prose style that makes the whole idea of a menacing mist, alive with the town’s dead people, seem totally authentic. I never once felt I had to suspend belief.

And the tension and suspense that builds up is almost unbearable, as the taut narrative races towards a heart-palpitating climax that had me wanting to bolt my front door and draw all the curtains against the night. The denouement is powerful, memorable — and as near to perfect an ending as one could expect.

If you haven’t guessed already, Soon is a terrifying tale that will make your heart race. It’s atmospheric, spine-chilling, dark and twisted, and probably the most original novel I’ve read in a long while. But it’s more than just a macabre horror story: there’s commentary here about what happens to country towns when industry comes to an end, how society treats those without money to fall back on, and the importance of friendship and a shared purpose as the glue that holds communities together.

Note that Soon hasn’t yet been published in the UK, though you can buy a Kindle version from Amazon. I ordered my copy direct from the Australian book store Readings.com.au

This is my 2nd book for #AWW2018.