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Reckoning by Magda Szubanski
Magda Szubanski is, as you know, a performer, a comedian, and a personality. But there is plenty about Magda and her life that I was unaware of, and Reckoning is a beautiful and moving story of a serious, thoughtful and complex person. The opening sentence is a cracker: 'If you had met my father you would never, not for an instant, have thought he was an assassin.'
It turns out Madga's father was—incredibly—a teenage member of the Polish resistance against the Nazi occupation during the Second World War. In his own words, he was judge, jury and executioner. It would haunt him for his whole life.
Magda's Polish heritage is just one of many strands to her story. Magda, I discovered, is about my age and, like me, she grew up in the outer eastern suburbs of Melbourne in the 1970s, during the era of sharpies and bad fashion. From the early pages of her story, which is told with disarming franknesss, you feel you're connecting with a real person rather than a media celebrity—which is why so many of us have to warmed to Magda over the years.
Reckoning is also a bittersweet memoir of talented outsider who finds fame, acceptance and a measure of comfort in the limelight, but who privately lives with her own struggles and anxieties. Her account of a long battle coming to terms with her own sexuality, of coming out to her family, and eventually to the nation, will bring a tear to many eyes.
I rarely read books I deem to be 'celebrity biographies', suspecting they'll be confected, or a thinly veiled marketing exercise. I'm very glad I made an exception for Reckoning.
—Paul Barclay, Big Ideas
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Something for the Pain by Gerald Murnane
Now look ... Murnane is a thing ... intimidating I know. Should have won a Nobel Prize by now. I know. Like Les Murray but with more semi colons. I know.
As a writer he's difficult. Like an abstracted Patrick White.
As a man he's cranky, reclusive, deeply strange. Eccentricity comes close. He's an other-worldy creature.
But this book, this little volume, is an absolute gem.
It's literary, lucid, full of love for horses and racing and full of the strange highly-ordered madness of Murnane, full of a selfless disclosure.
It's marvellous. Funny, moving, beautiful. A brilliant book.
—Jonathan Green, Sunday Extra
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The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood
Instead of the most charming or the easiest read, I decided to opt for the year's most unsettling book. The Natural Way of Things got under my skin. I can't yet bear to reread it, but I don't need to because the images have stayed so strongly in my head.
Those images start out murky and confusing, and become more vivid as the book goes on.
In the beginning, there are two women trapped in a strange building, wearing clothes that feel like punishment. They've been drugged. Yolanda and Verla wake up and don't know why they're there. We don't know either.
Then we meet the other women, 12 in all, as their heads are shaved and they're marched out into the sun. We see the gaolers, Teddy and Boncer. They too are waiting—futilely—not for Godot but for a corporate saviour who shows no sign of sorting things.
What have they done? It's not about who they are, they're told, it's what they are. They're women, all of whom are caught up in some sort of sexual scandal. A gang rape. An affair that came into the light. Accusations not believed. All publicly judged.
So they're punished. But Yolanda, especially, is not about to give in. She becomes an avenging goddess of the rabbit traps. Another woman becomes a sort of sacrifice.
It's a nightmare Australia that is both fantasy and too familiar. There's a bush beauty in it, and stories whispered at night. It's also a book—and this is quite a twist—inspired in part by a radio doco made here on RN, about the Hay Institute for Girls in NSW.
—Kate Evans, BooksPlus
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The Girl On The Train by Paula Hawkins
This book has had a lot of hype—and that does often lead to disappointment—so I'm going to tell you that this is a story where the main character is herself disappointing. Rachel is a thirty-something Englishwomen who you would find hard to like if you knew her in real life. You wouldn't really want her to be your friend, and you wouldn't want to live with her.
She's a hopeless sad case with, well, pretty well no redeeming features. The skill of the storytelling is that you have great empathy for her. You really do care about her—and, because this book is a thriller, you're always dying to know what's really going on and who's responsible. The sub-genre that it falls into is one known as the 'amnesia thriller', where something terrible has happened that the protagonist can't remember. I won't say anymore about the plot or the main character because that would spoil it for you.
It's not capital-L Literature, but it is an intriguing story that makes for a great holiday read. It's one of those populist, zeitgeisty books that you can't help but think, 'I wish I'd written that.' You'll get through it in no time too, so make sure you've got something else to follow it up with.
—Amanda Smith, The Body Sphere
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Shark by Will Self
We are in the world of the anti-psychiatrist Dr Zack Busner. It is the 1970s and he is treating patients who have been traumatised by their experiences in the Second World War.
The novel is set on a day when a colleague arranges for Busner and his patients to take LSD. The drug experience plunges some of the patients into waters of great clarity and pushes others over a cliff.
The brilliance of the book lies in the skill with which Self uses modernist techniques (think of James Joyce in Ulysses) to tell a complex, dreamlike story.
—Michael Cathcart, Books and Arts
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The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante is a pseudonym, but that hasn't stopped her becoming one of the most talked-about novelists of the year. Ferrante's Neopolitan novels, a series of books following the friendship of two women who grow up together in the slums of Naples in the 1950s, have been a worldwide success. The final novel in the series, The Story of the Lost Child, was published in English this year.
The stand-out for me is The Lost Daughter from 2008—it tells the story of Leda, a middle-aged professor of English literature who is separated from her husband, and whose adult daughters live in another country. Leda goes on holiday to the beach, where she becomes strangely involved with an extended family from Naples and confronts her own failures as a mother.
I don't think I've ever encountered in fiction a woman's sensibility quite like the one Ferrante creates—her characters are filled with rage, with desire, with a fierceness, and always with an intense ambivalence around mothering. In The Lost Daughter the relationship between mother and child is a kind of desperate psychological warfare, a fight to the death—not the way we usually like to imagine motherhood.
There is nothing sentimental in this or any of Elena Ferrante's novels, nothing glib or comforting. Except, of course, the comfort that's always given by great novels, no matter how brutal—and that's the comfort of recognition.
—Sarah Kanowski, Books and Arts
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The Trains Now Departed by Michael Williams
I hold railways with my own religious-like fervour. I've travelled on them all around the world on just about every continent, although not quite every country.
Michael Williams' book is full of his own beautiful words, but he does quote at the very beginning that most lyrical of travel writers, Paul Theroux:
'There is an English dream of a warm summer evening on a branch-line train. Just that sentence can make an English person over 40 fall silent with the memory of what has become a golden fantasy of an idealised England: the comfortable dusty coaches rolling through the low woods; the sun gilding the green leaves and striking through the carriage windows; the breeze tickling the hot flowers in the fields; birdsong and the thump of the powerful locomotive; the pleasant creak of the wood paneling on the coach; the mingled smells of fresh grass and coal smoke; and the expectation of being met by someone very dear on the platform of a country station.'
Now, to me, a dream does not get much better than that. But of course, Michael Williams has 16 of these great dreams in his book ... The other great thing that comes through in Michael's book is his picture of trains as something that complements and even beautifies the English landscape. Remember that for a long time the English writers of the Romantic period (I'm thinking primarily of Ruskin) hated trains because they said they despoiled the landscape. But the way that Michael talks about it in his book, and they way that I've witnessed it, is that there's nothing that compliments the landscape more than trains.
—Andrew West, Religion and Ethics Report
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Sweet Caress by William Boyd
Boyd has a delightfully light knack for sentence structure and a sense of balance, concision, and deliberate tempo. Take the very first sentence of the prologue: 'What drew me down there, I wonder, to the edge of the garden?'
Immediately we have voice and intrigue, both pivoting on wonder. The voice, we learn, belongs to Amory Clay, born in 1908 and looking back on her long life and the century it has traversed. The young Amory we meet grows into a thoroughly modern woman; a professional photographer and a sexual adventuress in '20s Berlin and '30s New York.
She's also a fictional character, which I point out because Boyd goes to great lengths of evoke a documentary authenticity—to the extent of inserting images that purport to be reproductions of photographs by Clay. They are, in fact, a selection of found photos collected by Boyd over the years and are published uncredited.
Much of Clay's trajectory criss-crosses with the flashpoints of the 20th century, including social and geo-political shifts as well as the military conflicts, the First and Second World Wars and the Vietnam War. Each makes deep wounds on the men Amory loves; their full horror only truly understood in retrospect.
Does Boyd succeed in writing from a female perspective? I was reminded of Frank Moorhouse's oft-returning character Edith Campbell Berry... a wonderfully constructed woman, but a construction nonetheless.
—Cassie McCullagh, The List
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Born to Rule by Paddy Manning
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and I fell out bitterly several years ago.
I've written him off several times in print and on air since his disastrous stint as Liberal leader in 2009... so it might surprise you to hear that my favourite book this year was a moderately sympathetic biography of Turnbull.
At first glance, I thought I'd hate the book, but it's really an interesting yarn about a truly fascinating character.
We all know about this larger-than-life figure who has dominated journalism, corporate law, merchant banking and now politics. Remember that this is a bloke—and Manning spells this out in riveting detail—whose mother abandoned him at age eight. Malcolm Turnbull, contrary to conventional wisdom, was not born with a silver spoon.
This book is a lively page-turner, full of interesting tidbits. I learnt a lot, and I've even changed my mind about the bloke.
—Tom Switzer, Between the Lines
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The Signature Of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert
'You can't be serious! Liz Gilbert—didn't she write Eat, Pray, Love?' I hadn't read the book, nor seen the film starring Julia Roberts, but I had the unwarranted conviction that they were both not for me. Vanilla turned beige, surely.
So why was my partner, Dr Jonica Newby, recommending that I read Gilbert's recent novel The Signature Of All Things? Why should I spend precious time on our annual visit to the Amalfi Coast with a book by a woman known for chick-lit?
'Well, just try the first few pages,' replied Jonica, ever the diplomat, 'and if you aren't struck by it, turn to something else.'
So I did start; and I was enraptured. What was plain was that Gilbert had made the most of the incredible 18 million sales of Eat, Pray, Love to venture on a scientifically-based saga, a long book she really wanted to write. It begins with a rough boy meeting Sir Joseph Banks and ends with her heroine, nearly 200 years later, engaging with Alfred Russell Wallace OM FRS in a spectacular discussion of evolution by natural selection.
Along the way we have thrilling adventures worthy of Indiana Jones, thwarted romance reminding one of Emily Bronte on a stormy night, and racial upheavals that make Gone With The Wind seem trite. No, I mustn't exaggerate. This is writing of cool control and intellectual focus and you don't lurch into dark areas of misery, however bleak the personal or national histories become. Gilbert lifts the narrative every time to give her decidedly unglamorous leading lady a life of flair and engagement. I have enough ghastliness every day on the national news and in the newspapers without wanting to spend my leisure time grinding my teeth. This writer is no Polly Anna but she knows how to signify the joy of being alive and using your brain at the same time.
—Robyn Williams, The Science Show
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Waiting for the Past by Les Murray
My favourite poetry of the year was Les Murray's endlessly inventive, moving, provoking Waiting for the Past.
But I've also been reading, with huge admiration, the Collected Poems of Edna St Vincent Millay and Jen Hadfield's brooding, incantatory Nigh-No-Place.
The biggest surprise of my year was finding myself riveted by two 'nature' books. These were Helen Macdonald's H Is for Hawk—a wildly original mix of self-help, literary biography and raptor training—and Meadowland: The Private Life of an English Field by Herefordshire farmer John Lewis-Stempel. Magical, musical writing, jammed with odd facts.
—Andrew Ford, The Music Show
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The Man Who Knew Too Much by David Leavitt
Of the many books that try to tell the Alan Turing saga, only David Leavitt's The Man Who Knew Too Much seems to me up to the job. In many ways, this book reminds me of The Man Who Loved China, another portrait of a great intellect who matriculated at Cambridge at exactly the same time. Leavitt's book on Turing is as beautifully written as Winchester's on the great Sinologist Joseph Needham.
Last year I interviewed Jack Copeland, a Turing expert, on the scientist who was the most spectacularly martyred homosexual since Oscar Wilde. Copeland seemed embarrassed by the issue of Turing's sexuality and kept changing the subject, whereas Leavitt puts it right where it belongs—at the centre of Turing's story. Not just the centre of his personal life, but as a key to his life in science.
Much of Leavitt's book was incomprehensible to me: there are many pages involving cryptography and more explaining the fundamentals of computing and artificial intelligence. I simply rifled through them to get on with the narrative of the brilliant, eccentric and tragic Turing.
Leavitt's portrait of a genius who, having helped destroy Hitler, felt it necessary to destroy himself, is harrowing. To explain the issues, the technologies, the politics, the human contradictions, seems an impossible task. Yet Leavitt brings it off brilliantly.
—Phillip Adams, Late Night Live
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The Other Side of the World by Stephanie Bishop
This is the kind of book that stays with you for weeks after you've finished it. The feelings linger, so intense and powerful is Bishop's writing. She brilliantly explores the suffocating feeling of new motherhood, the bleakness of cumulative exhaustion and the power of belonging and home.
If you're a fan of brilliant women writers including Sylvia Plath and the Brontë sisters, Bishop is an emerging Australian writer who channels this style effortlessly. She describes the banality of full-time mothering, the emotional exhaustion of having small children, and the physical and psychological manifestations of homesickness in a way other writers have failed to grasp.
The book centres around Charlotte, who is struggling with motherhood and with losing the time and enthusiasm to paint. Her husband Henry wants things to be as they were; he struggles with how miserable his wife is and becomes fixated with changing their life.
This story is about a relationship that is damaged. It is really an exploration of Charlotte and Henry—their relationship is so frustrating yet so compelling. It is also very slow, which is not usually something I enjoy, but it is testament to how well it is written that it is addictive.
—Patricia Karvelas, RN Drive