Month: January 2024

Monday musings on Australian literature: Some New Releases in 2024

/ Whispering Gums / 41 Comments

This year we start with my first Monday Musings post appearing on Tuesday! This is due to conflicting new year traditions – my Blogging Highlights post on 1 January, and my first Monday Musings being New Releases for the coming year. When 1 January is a Monday, I’m in trouble! I could have left this until next Monday, but I already have a post that’s been waiting to go, and I don’t want it to wait any longer, so Tuesday it is!

As before, I have drawn from the Sydney Morning Herald, where Jane Sullivan and the team has again done a wonderful job of surveying publishers large and small. This year, I have also used The Guardian’s list put together by Canberra Writers Festival director, Beejay Silcox. As always, I have also sussed out a few of my own! Also, this is Monday musings on Australian literature post, so my focus is Australian authors in areas of interest or relevance to me. This means I’ve not included non-Australian writers, nor all the Australian nonfiction. To see those, click on the SMH link.

Now, there are many ways to do this sort of list. Kim (Reading Matters) has posted a list of new releases by publication month, but, as is my wont, I’ve arranged mine by author, under some broad form headings.

Links on the authors’ names are to my posts on those authors.

Fiction

As always, not every book listed last year, ended up being published that year so a couple appear here again. And, also as always, I have read a very small number from last year’s list, but a few more are on my TBR and will be read this year. Here’s this year’s selection:

  • Jenny Ackland, Hurdy gurdy (June, A&U)
  • Alan Attwood, Houdini unbound (May, Melbourne Books)
  • Shirley Barrett, Mrs Hopkins (June, A&U): posthumous 
  • Anne Buist and Graeme Simsion, The glass house (April, Hachette)
  • Donna M Cameron, The rewilding (March, Transit Lounge)
  • Brian Castro, Ruins and fragments (late 2024, Giramondo)
  • Shankari Chandran, Safe haven (May, Ultimo)
  • Melanie Cheng, The burrow (September, Text).
  • Chairman Clift, The end of the morning (May, New South): posthumous autobiographical novel
  • Miranda Darling, Thunderhead (April, Scribe)
  • Michelle de Kretser, Theory and practice (November, Text) 
  • Francesca de Tores, Saltblood (April, Bloomsbury): pseudonym for Francesca Haig
  • Brooke Dunnell, Last best chance (April, Fremantle Press)
  • David Dyer, This kingdom of dust (October, Hamish Hamilton)
  • Rodney Hall, Vortex (Picador, October)
  • Anita Heiss, Dirrayawadha (August, Simon & Schuster): First Nations author
  • Julie Janson, Compassion (March, Magabala): First Nations author
  • Gail Jones, One another (February, Text)
  • Melanie Joosten, Like fire hearted suns (March, Ultimo)
  • Yumna Kassab, Politica (January, Ultimo)
  • Malcolm Knox, The first friend (October, A&U)
  • Siang Lu, Ghost cities (May, UQP)
  • Catherine McKinnon, To sing of war (May, Fourth Estate)
  • Stephen Orr, Shining like the sun (March, Wakefield Press)
  • Liam Pieper, Appreciation (March, PRH)
  • Diana Reid, untitled novel (second half of the year, (Ultimo)
  • Alice Robinson, If you go (July, Affirm)
  • Jock Serong, Cherrywood (September, HarperCollins)
  • Jessica Tu, Honeyeater (July, A&U)
  • Karen Viggers, Sidelines (January, A&U)

SMH lists many books under Crimes and Thrillers, but this is not my area of expertise or major interest, so, do check SMH’s link if you are interested. I will, though, bring a few to your attention: .

  • Steven Carroll, Death of a foreign gentleman (April, HarperCollins): a new genre for Carroll
  • Garry Disher, Sanctuary (April, Text)
  • Sulari Gentill, The mystery writer (Ultimo, March)
  • Louise Milligan, Pheasants nest (March, Allen & Unwin): her first foray into fiction

Most of the sources I checked identified Debut Australian fiction and I think it’s useful to separate them out, so we don’t all wonder why the names don’t seem familiar:

  • Sharlene Allsopp, The great undoing (February, Ultimo): First Nations author
  • Katherine Allum, The skeleton house (June, Fremantle): Fogarty Literary Award winner
  • Susanna Begbie, The deed (May, Hachette): Richell Prize winner
  • Amy Brown, My brilliant sister (January or February, Scribner/Simon & Schuster): adult novel debut
  • Amanda Creely, Nameless (March, UWA): Dorothy Hewett Award shortlist
  • Belinda Cranston, The changing room (May, Transit Lounge)
  • Winnie Dunn, Dirt poor Islanders (March, Hachette)
  • Kyra Geddes, The story thief (May, Affirm)
  • Melissa Goode, Ordinary human love (May, Ultimo)
  • Kirsty Iltners, Depth of field (May, UWA): Dorothy Hewett Award winner
  • Katrina Kell, Chloe (February, Echo): adult novel debut
  • Finegan Kruckemeyer, The end and everything before it (July, Text)
  • Abbey Lay, Lead us not (March, PRH)
  • Bri Lee, The work (March, A&U): fiction debut
  • Murray Middleton, The degenerates (July, Text): full length novel debut
  • Deborah Pike, The players (April, Fremantle)
  • Raeden Richardson, No Church in the wild (April, Macmillan)
  • Linda Margolin Royal, The star on the grave (February, Affirm) 
  • Jordan Prosser, Big time (June, UQP)
  • Helen Signy, Maya’s dance (March, Simon & Schuster)
  • Ruby Todd, Bright objects (May, A&U): 2023 Victorian Premier’s unpublished manuscript award shortlist.

Short stories

  • Georgia Blain, We all lived in Bondi then (January, Scribe): posthumous
  • Ceridwen Dovey, Only the astronauts (July, PRH) 
  • John Richards, The Gorgon flower (April, UQP) 
  • Mykaela Saunders, Always will be (March, UQP): First Nations author
  • Ouyang Yu, The white cockatoo flowers: Stories (April, Transit Lounge)

Non-fiction

The newspapers include a wide range – and a large number – of new non-fiction books, and I found more in my own research, so I’m sharing a few that particularly caught my eye. Click the newspaper links for more.

Life-writing (very loosely defined, and selected to those focused mainly on the arts and activism)

  • Wayne Bergmann with Madelaine Dickie, Some people want to shoot me (March, Fremantle): First Nations memoir, focusing on native title
  • Tony Birch on Kim Scott (April, Black Inc “Writers on writers”)
  • Brooke Bland, Gulp, swallow: Essays on change (November, Upswell): memoir-in-essays “about family and friends, life and mortality, memory and forgetting”
  • Hermina Burns, Barbara Tucker: The art of being (February, MUP)
  • Samantha Faulkner (ed.), Growing up Torres Strait Islander in Australia (August, Black Inc)
  • Peter Goldsworthy, The Cancer Finishing School (March, PRH): “shares lessons from his incurable cancer diagnosis”
  • Jeremy Hill and Ronald Millar, No singing in gum trees: The honest life of Max Martin (no date, Wakefield Press)
  • Robert Manne, untitled political memoir (December, Black Inc)
  • Brenda Niall, Joan Lindsay: The hidden life of the woman who wrote Picnic at Hanging Rock (October, Text)
  • Brigitta Olubas and Susan Wyndham (ed), Shirley Hazzard and Elizabeth Harrower: The letters  (May, NewSouth)
  • Bruce Pascoe and Lyn Harwood, Black duck: A year at Yumburra (April, Thames & Hudson): First Nations memoir, about life on their farm
  • Magda Szubanski, untitled memoir (October, Text)
  • Tara June Winch on Alexis Wright (October, Black Inc “Writers on writers”)

History and other non-fiction (esp. social justice and environmental issues)

  • Larissa Behrendt, Weaving with words (November, UQP)
  • James Bradley, Deep water (April, PRH): eco-literature
  • Clint Bracknell and Kylie Bracknell, Shakespeare on the Noongar stage: Language revival and Hecate (May, Upswell): on Macbeth in Nyoongar language
  • Santilla Chingaipe, Black convicts: How slavery shaped colonised Australia (August, Scribner): examines the First Fleet, investigating the place of people of African descent in colonial Australia.
  • Simon Cleary, Everything is water (June, UQP): eco-literature
  • Anne Coombs, Our familiars: The meaning of animals in our lives (August, Upswell): “meditation on the awe-inspiring responsibility we take on with other living creatures”
  • Helen Garner, untitled nonfiction (July, Text): inspired by time spent with a grandson’s football team
  • Amy McQuire, Black witness: The power of Indigenous media (June, UQP)
  • Jasmin McGaughey and The Poets Voice (ed.), Words to sing the world alive (November, UQP): “leading writers discuss their favourite First Nations words”
  • Ellen van Neerven and Jeanine Leane (ed), Shapeshifting (October, UQP)
  • Amy Remeikis, The truth about nice (July, Hachette): on “the politics of civility – and its pernicious myths”
  • Clare Wright, The Yirrkala Bark Petition (October, Text): third in her Democracy trilogy

Poetry

Finally, for poetry lovers, I’ve sussed out a few more than were listed by the two newspapers, but even then haven’t listed them all. Poetry in Australian is flourishing, it seems:

  • Robert Adamson, Birds and fish: Life on the Hawkesbury (February, Upswell): posthumous
  • Alison Barton, Not telling (no date, Puncher & Wattmann): First Nations
  • Judith Beveridge, Tintinnabulum (August, Giramondo)
  • Judith Bishop, Circadia (May, UQP)
  • David Brooks, The other side of daylight (March, UQP)
  • Bonny Cassidy, Monument (February, Giramondo)
  • Nandi Chinna and Anne Poelina, Tossed up by the beak of a cormorant (Fremantle, July)
  • Robbie Coburn, Ghost poetry (January, Upswell)
  • Lloyd Jones, The empty grandstand (September, Upswell): New Zealander
  • John Kinsella, Spirals (March, UWA)
  • Jeanine Leane, Gawimarra gathering (February, UQP): First Nations
  • Nam Le, 36 ways of writing a Vietnamese poem (March, Scribner)
  • Kent McCarter, Fat chance (January, Upswell)
  • Kate Middleton, Television (February, Giramondo)
  • Jazz Money, The fire inside August, UQP): First Nations
  • Roslyn Orlando, Ekhō (February, Upswell)
  • Suneeta Peres da Costa, The prodigal (late 2024, Giramondo)
  • Nathan Shepherdson, soft meteorites (September, Upswell)
  • Elfie Shiosaki, Refugia (July, Magabala)
  • Anne-Marie Te Whiu (ed), Woven (February, Magabala/Red Room Poetry)

Anything here interest you?

Blogging highlights for 2023

/ Whispering Gums / 45 Comments

As is my tradition, I have separated out my annual Reading highlights from my Blogging highlights, mainly because combining them would result in one very long post. I always do my Blogging Highlights on 1 January, which this year clashes with Monday Musings, unfortunately. All being well, I plan to do my usual first Monday Musings of the year tomorrow.

Top posts for 2023

Until recently the top of the ladder has been dominated by older posts, but in recent years there has been a gradual shift to more recent posts making it to the top. Last year, two posts published during the year made the Top Ten. This happened again this year. One (no. 6) is an obvious candidate, but the other (no. 2) is, as I wrote yesterday, a bit of a surprise.

Here is my 2023 Top Ten, in popularity order:

  1. Jack London, “War” (March 2010)
  2. Ambelin Kwaymullina, “Fifteen days on Mars” (from Unlimited futures)(January 2023) (Australian)
  3. Epiphany in Harrower’s “The fun of the fair” (essay by Emily Maguire) (January 2022) (Australian)
  4. Audrey Magee, The colony (September 2022)
  5. Ernest Hemingway, “Cat in the rain” (September 2022)
  6. Bonnie Garmus, Lessons in chemistry (June 2023)
  7. Barbara Baynton, “A dreamer” (January 2013) (Australian)
  8. Anthony Doerr, All the light we cannot see (September 2016)
  9. George Orwell, “How the poor die” (October 2010)
  10. Mark Twain, “A presidential candidate” (August 2016)

Observations:

  • Four of these posts (London, Maguire’s essay on Harrower, Baynton and Twain) were Top Tens last year, with three being Serial Top Tenners (London, Baynton, and Twain). Do all – including the relative newbie, the essay on Harrower – relate to school/university assignments?
  • Five posts were published in the last two years, which is a record. Some surprise me, but I suspect the popularity of my Garmus and Doerr posts is related to their screen adaptations released in 2023.
  • Five of this year’s Top Tens are Top Ten debuts, including the Garmus and Doerr. The sudden appearance here of my rather old Orwell post might be due to a recent flurry of books about Orwell, including Anna Funder’s Wifedom, but then, why that one of all my Orwell posts? Maybe there’s another reason, maybe it’s been set as a text? I’m pleased to see Magee’s novel here, and guess it’s just because this novel has been popular, but what about my relatively new Ernest Hemingway post? Why that one?
  • In 2021, six of the Top Ten posts were for full-length books, but as I wrote last year that was clearly an aberration, as in 2022 – and again this year – we returned to my more usual motley mix of mainly short stories/essays.

I also like to see how the posts written in the year fare, so here are the Top Ten 2023-published posts (excluding Monday Musings, event and meme posts):

My skewed reading year shows up strongly in these stats. I am intrigued that there was so much interest in my posts on stories by First Nations North Americans, particularly given Australians represent by far the most numerous visitors to my blog.

My most popular Monday Musings posts were essentially the same as last year: Books banned in Australia (June 2019); Some new releases (the 2023 version); The lost child motif (February 2011).

Random blogging stats

The searches

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(Courtesy OCAL, via clker.com)

I love sharing some of the search terms used to reach my blog, Unfortunately, search term visibility is no longer what it used to be, but a few still get through for some reason. Certain browsers?

Some are probably assignment or book group related?

  • “david foster wallace word notes”
  • “key characteristics of australian literature in terra nullius by coleman”
  • “the colony audrey magee book club questions” and “the colony audrey magee what does title mean”
  • “characters in ripper by shelley burr”
  • “but being completely alone was a feeling”: searching this on my blog retrieves posts like Delia Owen’s Where crawdads sing and Tegan Bennett Daylight’s Six bedrooms, with Delia Owens being what they were looking for, as I quote this line, without the opening “but”.

Some are just general research:

  • “famous first sentences from Australian novels”

Then others seem to be looking for something very specific:

Book cover
  • ‘date of birth and “scott tucker”‘ and ‘husband and “scott tucker”’: these are probably looking for this Scott Tucker but they got Michelle Scott Tucker’s Elizabeth Macarthur’s biography instead.
  • “germaine greer care home” AND “germaine greer aged care”: we are still interested in Germaine Greer. Over the year I have had many hits from a site called mumsnet.com which linked to my 2022 Canberra Writers Festival post on her.
  • “very short stories convict fiction free”: this seems to find my Convict Literature tag, so tags do work!

Other stats

Overall, 2023 was another challenging year for me blog-wise and it shows in the stats. I only wrote 135 posts, which is the fewest number of posts per year that I’ve ever written and is well under my long term average of 153. However, my overall hits for the year increased by 17% on last year. Stats! Always a mystery.

The top ten countries visiting my blog vary slightly from last year: Australia (44%), the USA (27%), Britain, India, Canada, the Philippines, China, France, New Zealand, and Germany, in this order. The first four are the same, and then five of the next six are the same countries, in different order. However, Mexico dropped out to be replaced by New Zealand.

Challenges, memes, et al

I only do one regular meme, Kate’s (booksaremyfavouriteandbest) #sixdegreesofseparation, and in 2023 I did every month, except December. I occasionally do other memes – found under my “memes” category link – but you’ll find no others in 2023.

I also took part, to various degrees, in Bill’s (The Australian Legend) AWW Gen 5 – SFF, Nonfiction November (multiple bloggers), Novellas in November (Cathy of 746 books and Rebecca of Bookish Beck), the #YEAR Club (Kaggsy’s Bookish Rambling and Simon’s Stuck in a Book), Brona’s Aus Reading Month, Buried in Print’s MARM, and the William Trevor Reading Year (Cathy of 746 Books and Kim of Reading Matters). Most of these can be found via my “Reading weeks/months/years” category.

I do these because they align with my reading practice and goals. I’d love to do more, and I like the structured encouragement they provide for me to explore writers and works I would otherwise find hard to fit into my schedule.

And so, 2024 …

As always, thank you to all of you who commented on my blog this year – the regulars who hang in with me year in year out, and the newbies who have given me a shot. I hope you have enjoyed the community here enough to stay. I love those of you who comment. Thanks so much for being an active part of the community. But, a big thank you too to the lurkers. I really do appreciate your interest and support too.

I also want to thank all the hardworking bloggers out there. I’ve been a poor community member – again – this year, but I do appreciate you and enjoy reading your posts when I can. I look forward to more reading and great book talk in 2024.

Finally, huge thanks to the authors, publishers and booksellers who make it all possible – and who have proved yet again that the book is far from dead.

Roll on 2024 … a big year for my blog which will turn 15 in May. Meanwhile, Happy New Year everyone.