Novellas

Novellas in November 2025

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Last Novellas in November I wrote two posts, besides my reviews, but this year I will only manage one. However, I just want to put it on record that I do appreciate the work put into it by Cathy of 746 Books and Rebecca of Bookish Beck), because novellas feature highly in my most memorable books.

These reading months tend to suggest you start with “my year in [whatever the topic is]”, so that is my focus for this post. Last year I had read nine – a small number I know compared to many of you. This year, which goes from 1 November 2024 to 31 October 2025, I’ve read even fewer, but they were good! I’m dividing them into two groups: Novellas, and Novella-length Nonfiction.

Novella

  • Melanie Cheng, The burrow (185pp.) (my review): shortlisted for the 2025 Stella Prize and other awards
  • PS Cottier and NG Hartland, The thirty-one legs of Vladimir Putin (115pp.) (my review): joint winner of the 2024 Finlay Lloyd 20/40 Prize
  • Michelle de Kretser, Theory & practice (184pp) (my review): winner of the 2025 Stella Prize and Prime Minister’s Literary Award
  • Shirley Hazzard, The bay of noon (182pp.) (my review)

Novella-length nonfiction

  • Helen Garner, The season (Memoir, 188pp.) (my review)
  • Gideon Haigh, My brother Jaz (Memoir, 87pp.) (my review)
  • Sonya Voumard, Tremor (Memoir, 129pp.) (my review): joint winner of the 2024 Finlay Lloyd 20/40 Prize

In addition to these, I have read a novella this month but it will appear in next year’s novella count. And I’ll soon be reading another novella-length nonfiction, but again that’s for next year’s count.

All of the above, with the exception of Shirley Hazzard’s The bay of noon, were published in 2024, which suggests that publishers are currently happy to publish shorter works – and, given some showing in literary awards, that judges see value in them. Meanwhile, Shirley Hazzard’s novel, now 55 years old, could be called a classic.

It’s interesting – and completely serendipitous – that the three novella-length nonfiction books are all memoirs. It’s made me think, however, that this shorter length is a good one for memoirs because it encourages a focus on the main driver for the memoir, and discourages the wallowing or padding that can sometimes happen? Indeed, Sonya Voumard made exactly this point about writing Tremor (see my post on a conversation with her).

And this leads me to making a brief final note on novel-length. I have read many wonderful long books, but I have a preference for short (and therefore usually tight) ones. Just as, anecdotally, there’s the view that readers want more bang for their buck when buying books, meaning they don’t want to pay around the same amount for a 100-page novella as for a 400-page tome, I want more bang for my reading time! In other words, I prefer to read three great novellas in the same time I can read one great tome. That’s three different authors’ perspectives and ideas versus one. This, in addition the fact that I do enjoy concision (which I seem unable to emulate!), is what appeals. The point is that getting lost in a book’s world and never wanting to leave it, while I do love that, is not my main criterion for enjoyment.

If you are taking part in Novellas in November, you clearly enjoy them too. And, you are probably interested in literary culture, so if you are interested in the history of book-lengths, check out this article “Novels and novellas and tomes, Oh my!” by American writer and editor, Lincoln Michel. It has an American slant but I found it most interesting nonetheless. (BTW, if you read to the end, you’ll see that he struggles to be concise too!)

Thoughts anyone?

Written for Novellas in November 2025.

Angus Gaunt, Anna (#BookReview)

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Last month, I posted on the winners of the 2025 Finlay Lloyd 20/40 Publishing Prize, of which Angus Gaunt’s Anna was one. I am thrilled with this prize, not only because I love the novella form, but because of the variety of stories we are seeing. So far the fiction winners have been an historical novel from Kim Kelly, a contemporary coming-of-age novel from Rebecca Burton, and an audacious “what if” story from PS Cottier and NG Hartland. Three very different books, and now Anna makes it four.

When I started reading Anna, I thought I was heading into a dystopian novel. It is told third person from Anna’s perspective, and starts with her walking in the woods. A young man is following her. The woods are not identified, and neither is the young man, but she recognises him as a guard from the place she’s just left. Through their initial interaction, we learn that “the war is over” and the gates had been opened. Therefore, she firmly implies, he has no jurisdiction over her.

Anna, we discover as her journey continues, is about 15 years old, and had been taken to a labour camp with her family about three years ago. Her parents had died but she’s hoping her remaining siblings are ahead of her, safe in the exodus she’d missed. We know nothing about the woods – but they do not sound Australian – nor do we know the time setting. It is cold. There are some generic animals and plants – deer, hares, mushrooms, berries. The story focuses on Anna’s thought processes and her survival. There is almost nothing about the sociopolitical situation that got her there. We do know that Anna and the guard speak different languages, which suggests an invasion or some sort of oppression of minorities, but Gaunt does not go there. The notes I made during my reading, include this: “Timeless, placeless, non-political, means not dystopian? More allegory?”

The judges don’t call it either of these, but on “why this book is different” they say:

Winter is only beginning to thaw in a remote forest as Anna treks for her survival, accompanied by someone she cannot trust. With distilled clarity, this short novel carries the reader on a journey from victimhood to self-possession.

So, it is about survival, or, more precisely, about the inner resources you need to develop to overcome a dire situation.

Anna is a moving and absorbing read. Gaunt quickly engages our sympathy for his protagonist, young and defenceless in the woods. The language in the first two paragraphs sets up uncertainty. It starts:

Anna had already walked further than she meant to, but did not want to go back, not yet. She was basking in the sun … also in the silence. She had not done something like this for a long time … (p. 9)

Then she stops and looks up, where she sees “a large predatory bird … floating on secret air currents, delicate wing tips spread”. “Predatory” but “delicate”. Should we be worried? Then she sees the young guard, later identified as Yevgeny. He’s very young, uncertain, and in a show of bravado he tries to shoot the bird, but fails. He’s never shot anything before. And so the narrative and its main characters are established. Anna is alert, sensitive, intelligent and has some nous and wisdom about her. The guard, also young, lacks confidence, experience and nous, and is confused about his role as a man, a soldier, a human. This makes him potentially dangerous but also vulnerable. We – like Anna – are on the watch for which way he might go.

And so the novel progresses as this uneasy, wary-of-each-other pair journey through the woods, looking for the railroad and its promise of civilisation. Early on, during a brief time when she and Yevgeny are not together and she has returned to the camp, Anna meets a dying man who gives her his last food. Then later, together, they come across a cottage containing a barely surviving couple.

This brings another literary form to mind, the journey narrative, the search for home, a new one or old one, and – perhaps – for self. In journey narratives, physical and spiritual or emotional challenges are faced, and people are met. The journeyer must rely on inner resources to overcome the challenges, including assessing whether the people met are to be trusted or not. This is what we watch Anna do. We are privy to her thoughts as she goes, as she draws together past knowledge and present experience, and we gain confidence in her ability to make good decisions. Nearly half way through the story, her mind drifts to the schoolroom. It is comforting, but she stops herself,

recognising that she was attracted by the emotion of it rather than its practical application. There was not room for emotion. She was glad of this thought. Feelings and emotion could only cloud the mind, waste precious resources. All resources were precious. Her mind was clear now. She had a choice to make and she made one. (p. 56)

Of course it’s not a straight line, and Anna, like any journeyer under stress, slips back several times before getting a grip once more.

Anna is beautiful to read, from the first sentence. The language is tight but expressive. The necessary tension is off-set by moments of tenderness and hope, not to mention some subtle foreshadowing. And the characterisation is warm and empathetic.

I concluded my post on last year’s winner, The thirty-one legs of Vladimir Putin, that it was an audacious “what if” story. Anna is also audacious, in a different way. It calls on the tropes of established forms, like allegory and the journey narrative, but makes them into something new, something that confronts issues like trust and power in a way that feels both modern and timeless.

Read for Novellas in November.

Angus Gaunt
Anna
Braidwood: Finlay Lloyd, 2025
110pp.
ISBN: 9780645927047

Review copy courtesy Finlay Lloyd.

Finlay Lloyd 20/40 Publishing Prize 2025: Winners announced

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In August I wrote a progress report on Finlay Lloyd’s 20/40 Publishing Prize, a prize in which I have special interest because I love novella-length writing and the publisher behind this prize, Finlay Lloyd.

So just a quick recap on the prize: 20/40 is a manuscript award, with the prize being publication. It is not limited to debut or young or women or any other subgroup of writers, as some manuscript awards are. However, it does have its own criteria, which is implied in its name. It is for prose writing that is between 20,000 and 40,000 words. Outside these criteria – prose and length – the submissions can be from “all genres … including hybrid forms”. The aim is to choose two winners, preferably one fiction and one non-fiction, as they did last year.

And now, the Shortlist and Winners

The shortlist, announced on Finlay Lloyd’s website, was:

  • Angus Gaunt, Anna: a novel which “steps with deep insight into the dire circumstances of a girl who has little more than her own inner resources to deal with sustained privation and the threat of violence”.
  • Kim Kelly, Touched: “a memoir that uses self-deprecation and humour to turn her own experience of intense panic attacks into a lively and profound reflection on the prevalent role of anxiety in so many of our lives.”
  • Monica Raszewski, Mystic Vera and Lottie the shadow puppet: another novel, this one “centred on eccentric, flighty, Vera who dances with happy abandon around her sister, Lottie’s flailing attempts to control her excesses.
  • Paul Toohey, Bad face: an historical novel “set on the late 19th Century US frontier, where totemic violence between settlers, cattle ranchers and rustlers, and native Americans is played out with vital gothic intensity”.

And the winners are Angus Gaunt’s Anna and Kim Kelly’s Touched. You can read more about them on the Winner Announcement page. The judges were last year’s winners – Sonya Voumard, Penelope Cottier and Nick – plus Finlay Lloyd author John Clancy and the publisher Julian Davies.

The judges liked Gaunt’s novel because “the extreme circumstances of this story are written with a quiet yet incisive humanity”. Gaunt as born and educated in England, coming to Australia in 1987. He now lives in Dharug/Guringai country on the northern edge of Sydney. He has been published and nominated for awards in Australia, England and Ireland.

They liked Kelly’s memoir because of its “breadth of understanding—of the author’s own crazily complex family, of the wider issue of anxiety across society, and of her own voyage as a highly competent yet vulnerable being in a worryingly unhinged world”. Kelly was one of the two inaugural winners of this prize with her historical fiction novella, The Ladies Rest and Writing Room (my review). She lives and works on Wiradjuri and Eora lands in central west NSW and Sydney. Kelly has written historical fiction, short stories and essays, and is completing a PhD in Literature at Macquarie University. She is also a book editor (as Kim Swivel).

I was able to attend the launch of the 2023 and 2024 winners, as they were held in Canberra. This year, however, because both authors have Sydney bases, the launch will be held there next week when I’m in Melbourne, so I will not be able to report on the winners’ conversation, unfortunately. However, I do have the books and plan to read both for this year’s Novellas in November. And, there is an excellent interview with the authors available RIGHT NOW on the above-linked Winner Announcement page!

I am thrilled that this prize has now passed its third year, and hope it continues for many years more. If you like the sound of these books, and would like to support them (and the prize), you can order the books at Finlay Lloyd (though great bookstores will carry them too.) The recommended retail price is AUD26, but you can buy them from FL at AUD23.40 each (plus postage).

Congratulations to Finlay Lloyd and this year’s winners.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Finlay Lloyd’s 20/40 Publishing Prize, progress report

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Nearly three years ago, I reported on a new literary prize, the 20/40 Publishing Prize which was being offered by the non-profit publisher, Finlay Lloyd. It has now been awarded in both 2023 and 2024, and preparations for announcing the 2025 winners are well under way.

Briefly, the aim of the award is to “encourage and support writing of the highest quality” by offering publication rather than cash. It has a specific criterion, however, as conveyed by its title: the works, which can be fiction or nonfiction, must be between 20,000 and 40,000 words. The submissions are read blind, and the judging panel includes the previous year’s winners. This means the judges for the 2025 award are Sonya Voumard, Penelope Cottier and Nick Hartland, alongside publisher, Julian Davies, and longtime Finlay Lloyd supporter (and writer), John Clanchy. 

The winners to date have been:

  • 2023: Rebecca Burton, Ravenous girls (fiction, my review)
  • 2023: Kim Kelly, Ladies’ Rest and Writing Room (fiction, my review)
  • 2024: PS Cottier and NG Hartland, The thirty-one legs of Vladimir Putin (fiction, my review)
  • 2024: Sonya Voumard, Tremor (nonfiction, my review)

Most awards, particularly those coming from a small organisation, take time to build – and some disappear into the ether. So I worried that this award might not last – not only because Finlay Lloyd is small but also because this shorter form is not popular with everyone. I am therefore thrilled to hear that the third annual winners are on track for announcement, and that Finlay Lloyd is now calling for entries for the 2026 prize.

This is where today’s post comes in. I don’t make a practice of announcing calls for competition entries, but this attracted me for a couple of reasons. First, I often wonder what difference awards make to authors and their sales. Well, while I don’t know what the initial print runs were, Finlay Lloyd says that The thirty-one legs of Vladimir Putin has been reprinted twice since its first run, and Tremor is about to go into reprint. This must be encouraging, surely, for writers?

The other relates to the fact that Finlay Lloyd wants to offer a fiction and a nonfiction award each year. This didn’t happen in 2023 because they did not receive enough quality entries, but it happened in 2024. Sonya Voumard’s Tremor is an excellent example of novella-length (is there a better description for this) nonfiction.

In my report on the Winners Conversation last year, I shared Voumard’s discussion about length. She said that there’s “the assumption that to be marketable you need to write 55,000 plus words”. She had the bones of her story, but had then started filling them out, when, in reality, it was just “flab”. The competition, and then Julian Davies’ editing guidance, taught her that she had a good “muscular story”. So she set about “decluttering”. The end result is interesting, because this book doesn’t have that spare feeling common to short works, which is not at all a criticism of spare writing. However, Tremor feels tight. It has little extraneous detail, but it’s not pared back to a single core. I found it informative but also a personal and moving read, and I bought a few copies as gifts last year. I would love to read more shorter-length works of nonfiction.

All this is precursor to sharing that last week, I received a Media Release from Finlay Lloyd, in which publisher Julian Davies says:

As 20/40 builds momentum, our enthusiasm for encouraging this compact scope for both fiction and nonfiction has continued to grow. The length of 20,000 to 40,000 words allows for the rich development of an imaginative story or factual concept while being tight enough to encourage focus and succinctness. It’s a form we love and believe is apt for our moment in the history of thought and invention.

Each year we support the winning authors through a close and probing editorial process that works towards finding the best possible version of their book. We also take delight in a design process where books are created that feel like artefacts, that ask to be picked up and engaged with.

Submissions for 2026 will open in December. The prize is open to emerging and established writers, but they must be Australian citizens, permanent residents, or valid visa holders. It is a prose prize, but is open to all genres – as the winners to date demonstrate – including hybrid forms.

The original NaNoWriMo might have ended, but that doesn’t mean November (or any month of your choice) isn’t a good month for giving writing a go, particularly if there’s a publisher out there waiting for your work. For more information, check the prize’s webpage.

Michelle de Kretser, Theory & practice (#BookReview)

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Michelle de Kretser’s latest novel, Theory & practice, is a perfect example of why I should follow my own reading advice, which is that as soon as I finish a book I should go back and read the opening paragraphs, if not pages. I like to do this because there often lies clues to what the book is really about. It certainly is with Theory & practice.

Theory & practice starts like a typical novel, whatever that is. We are in Switzerland in 1957, with an unnamed 23-year-old Australian geologist who is waiting for a bus to go up the mountain. Meanwhile, back in Australia “rivers of Southern Europeans are pouring into Sydney”. The story continues, with a flashback to his living in the country with his grandmother when he was six years old. During this time he steals her precious ring, and lets her blame her “native” worker Pearlie. The story, told third person, returns to 1957 and a potential tragedy when, writes the narrator, “the novel I was writing stalled”. And, just like that, we switch to first person.

I wrote to my American friend after I finished it, that I needed to do a bit of thinking. I saw an underlying thread concerning colonialism, I wrote, but how does that tie in with the idea of “theory and practice”, and with my glimmer of something about the messiness of life and how it can be represented in art. And, to make things more complicated – in this rather slim book – the narrator is writing a thesis on Virginia Woolf’s The waves, in which Woolf attempted to play with the novel form, calling her novel a “playpoem”. In Theory & practice, de Kretser also plays with the form, but by using fiction, essay and memoir in a way that nods a little to autofiction, but that feels more intensely focused on ideas than narrative.

So, here goes … With the jump to first person, our narrator introduces us to an essay titled “Tunnel vision”, by the British-Israeli architect Eyal Weizman, that she read in the London Review of Books. In this essay Weizman discusses what de Kretser characterises as “the application of Situationist theory to colonising practice”. She kept finding herself returning to the idea of “theory and practice” and her recognition that “the smooth little word ‘and’ makes the transition from theory to practice seem effortless” when she knew was not the case. She knew all about “the messy gap between the two”. Her novel had stalled because it wasn’t what she needed to write. What she needed to write about was the “breakdowns between theory and practice”.

We then shift gear again, and flash back to when the narrator is a child and learning the piano, learning both musical theory and piano practice. The relationship between the two might have been obvious to her teacher but it wasn’t to her.

“messy human truths” (p. 38)

Are you getting the drift? I thought I was, but the novel shifted gear again to 1986 when the narrator, at the age of 24, moves from Sydney to Melbourne to undertake an MA in English. Her topic is to be Virginia Woolf and gender, drawing on feminist theory. She soon uncovers a confronting thread of racism in Woolf’s diaries – a reference to “a poor little mahogany coloured wretch”. This was E.W. Perera, a Ceylonese barrister, politician and freedom-fighter man who, according to Woolf, had only two subjects, “the character of the Government, & the sins of the Colonial Office”. He made Woolf uncomfortable, though husband Leonard sympathised. The problem for our “mahogany-coloured” narrator is that Woolf’s discomfort makes her uncomfortable, but her thesis supervisor, Paula, won’t agree to her changing direction to explore racism. Our narrator’s solution, on the advice of an artist friend, is to “write back to Woolf”, to find or create her own truth in Woolf’s story.

Throughout the novel various parallels are drawn which illuminate the theme, even if they don’t resolve the mess. In her personal life, the narrator’s “practice” – a love affair with a man attached to another woman he claims to love – keeps butting up against her understanding of feminist theory and its key idea of supporting the sisterhood. Desire and obsession, she was finding, trumps theory every time. How to reconcile this? We are thrown into academia, with its politics and jealousies, and St Kilda’s colourful bohemian life, as she reaches for answers to questions both academic and personal.

Concurrently, there is the mother-parallel, one in which regular phone calls from her mother offering practical help and advice interrupt the text and narrative flow, and contrast with the Woolfmother whose abstract presence continues to complicate our narrator’s research and understanding. On the one hand, says our narrator, Woolf said ‘”Imagine” and opened the doors to our minds’, but on the other, she was “a snob and a racist and an antisemite”. Both are as complicated – “messy”, dare I say – as any mother-daughter relationship.

All this is told in prose that is captivating with its changing rhythms from the tersely poetic – “the evening felt jumpy, spoiling for a fight” – to realistic description, and natural dialogue.

Eventually our narrator manages to squish her “ideas about Woolf’s novels into the corset of Theory”, but, perhaps recalling her earlier awareness that “theory taught us … to notice what was unimportant”, it does not fill her with pride. It does, however, fulfil the university’s requirements and she can move on.

And so does the novel, making another leap to the end of the twentieth century, and on into the 21st century. She has more to say about the ways humans abuse others – as she’d been abused as a child, as Woolf and her sister had been abused, and as Donald Friend, in an interesting late discussion in the novel, abused young Balinese boys. Such is the legacy of sexism, racism and colonialism.

Now, how does this short but invigorating novel bring all this together? By reminding us, as the novel has done all the way through, that life is messy, that neither art (including the novel) nor theory can provide the answer, though they might provide insights. This is why, I’d say, de Kretser continues to play with the novel form, to find ways to convey the reality (not the realism) of life. I will end with a Woolf quote shared by de Kretser two-thirds through the novel, because I think she would apply it to herself:

“I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind & my eyes, refusing to be stamped & stereotyped.”

Kimbofo also loved this book.

Michelle de Kretser
Theory & practice
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2024
184pp.
ISBN: 9781923058149

(Review copy courtesy Text Publishing)

Melanie Cheng, The burrow (#BookReview)

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You may have heard the announcement by Sean Manning, of Simon & Schuster’s flagship imprint in the US, that he will “no longer require authors to obtain blurbs for their books”. Australian media academic Julian Novitz discussed the decision in The Conversation in a piece titled “Brilliant, moving, thought-provoking! Simon & Schuster is dispensing with book blurbs – will it make any difference?” I considered writing a post on this, asking for your thoughts on these blurbs. Do they influence you in any way? But I didn’t. Instead, I am using it to introduce Australian author, Melanie Cheng’s latest novel, The burrow.

As you can see from the cover of my edition, it is beautifully spare, but it does have two blurbs. At the top is Christos Tsiolkas’ “stupendously good” and at the bottom, Helen Garner’s “how rare this delicacy – this calm, sweet, desolated wisdom”. Tsiolkas and Garner are respected, robust writers who don’t flinch from uncomfortable truths, so their commendation carries some weight with me. However, there are readers who don’t like these authors. Will that turn them away from the novel? I’d be interested to know. Meanwhile, I’ll get onto the book, which, at 184 well-spaced pages, is surely a novella.

The back cover tells me that it’s about a family confronting “long-buried secrets”, and that it “tells an unforgettable story about grief and hope”. Oh, and that the family buys a pet rabbit. There’s not a lot to go on here besides the usual cliches about secrets, grief and hope, but I was interested because I have had Melanie Cheng in my sights for some time, and it has just been shortlisted for this year’s Victorian Premier’s Literary Award.

It does seem, however, that grief is following me around this year, as the heart of this novel concerns the drowning death of a six-month-old baby girl some four years before the novel starts. The family – parents Amy and Jin Lee, and their remaining daughter, 10-year-old Lucie – is surviving intact, but only just. The novel is set in Melbourne during the pandemic, just as lockdown restrictions are being relaxed, so the family is needing to confront the outside world a little more. Reminding me somewhat of Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard devotional (my review), our threesome is disturbed by two new additions, the pet rabbit bought for Lucie, and Amy’s mother Pauline who has broken her wrist and cannot live alone for a while. These two, along with the relaxing of lockdown, offer potential catalysts for change. Will it be for the good or will the family implode?

Cheng tells her story through the alternating third-person perspectives of the characters. The writing is beautifully spare, but also engaging and moving. Having experienced a devastating death in my own family – my sister, not my child – I am interested in how people traverse such grief, particularly when there is potential for blame and guilt. Every situation is different, but there are, I think, some universals – love, generosity, and communication (or lack thereof). The Lee family has some of each of these, but not enough, and hence the just-surviving-but-not-really-living state they find themselves in. It’s realistic, believable.

I am always impressed by writers who can unfold a story slowly, but in few words, and Cheng is one of these writers. What exactly happened is divulged gradually in such a way as to make us think about how it affected – and is still affecting – the person whose perspective we are reading. It lets us feel the different ways grief can stall us. It also gives us time to get to know the characters, and to understand and relate to them. For these reasons, the story is tricky to talk about because if I explain what happened, I undermine all Cheng’s good work, so I’ll leave the story here and get back to the two additions.

As actors in the story, the rabbit and Pauline are opposite ends of the spectrum. The rabbit is a quiet, largely passive presence which interacts minimally with the family but provides a focal point for their thoughts. He brings a “sparkle” back to Lucie’s eyes that had been missing for some time. However, as a prey animal he also reminds them of the fragility of life. A rabbit is an interesting choice, one that kept me thinking about in terms of his significance. The novel is titled “The burrow”, but it’s not a simple literal reference to the rabbit. A burrow is also referenced in the epigraph from Franz Kafka’s short story “The burrow”:

The most beautiful thing about my burrow is the stillness. Of course, that is deceptive. At any moment it may be shattered and then all will be over.

How are we to read this? The family has already been shattered, and at the opening of the novel it does feel as though all is over, that they are mainly going through the motions of living. But of course it’s not all over. Sure, they are not doing very well. They are isolated from others (and not just because of the lockdown which had given them “a reprieve”, excuses to not engage). But they are still together, and they haven’t completely given up. They buy the rabbit for Lucie when she shows interest in something; they invite Pauline back into their lives when it appears she needs them.

And this brings me to Pauline. She sweeps in, injecting much needed energy, whether they want it or not. She can’t help herself, and for death-focused Lucie it’s energising, “a good thing”. However, it’s also clear that Pauline is involved in Ruby’s death in some way, that it’s not only the pandemic that has separated her from the family for four years. Now, though, she might make the difference.

But, there’s no guarantee. The family suffers several setbacks, literal and metaphorical, on their journey – sickness, an intruder, conflict, and more. Their journey reflects that in Richard Adams’ classic, Watershed Down, which Pauline reads to Lucie and which she characterises as “the epic story of an odd group of rabbits and their quest to establish a thriving warren”.

There is so much to like about this book, and it starts with the characters. With almost as few brushstrokes as artist Phil Day used for the cover rabbit, Cheng has created characters who represent some big ideas and thoughts, who embody the humanity of unspeakable grief, but who are yet so very individual. It’s a great read, with an ending that captures hope and fragility at the same time.

Melanie Cheng
The burrow
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2024
185pp.
ISBN: 9781922790941

Review copy courtesy Text Publishing

Shirley Hazzard, The bay of noon (#BookReview)

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Shirley Hazzard’s novella, The bay of noon, has been in my sights for a long time, but finally, this Novellas-in-November year, I managed to get it out of my sights and into my hands. It’s the first of two novellas I read for the month, but the second to review. Such was my November (and we are now well into December!)

Published in 1970, The bay of noon was Hazzard’s second novel. It was one of six books nominated for the Lost Man Booker Prize in 2010. This was a special award created to, in effect, right a wrong which occurred when a change in the Booker Prize rules resulted in books published in 1970 missing out on a chance for Booker glory. The award was decided by public vote, with JG Farrell’s Troubles emerging the victor.

I’ve read three books by Hazzard before blogging, but since then I’ve just read one short story – “The picnic” – for the 1962 Club. In my post on that story, I referred to a review in The Guardian of Shirley Hazzard’s Collected stories. The reviewer Stephanie Merritt writes that “Hazzard’s recurring themes here – enlarged upon in her novels – are love, self-knowledge and disappointment”.

This is true of The bay of noon, which tells of a young Jenny, who, though born in England, had been sent to Cape Town with other young children to escape the Blitz. Post-war she was reunited with her older brother but, realising that her love for him was unhealthy, she leaves England to take up a job with NATO in Naples, bringing me to another of Hazzard’s recurring themes, that of young women leaving home to find their place. I understand from her biography that Hazzard herself worked for NATO in Naples in the timeframe this book is set, so she knows whereof she writes – which is not to say that she is writing her life. This is fiction, so while Hazzard draws on her own experiences, Jenny’s story is not hers.

Anyhow, we are in Naples, and it is some years after World War II, the mid 1950s in fact. Hazzard loved Italy, and her description of Naples at this time is imbued with a love born of knowing a place authentically, not as a sightseer. Naples is poor, and damaged both by war and a Mt Vesuvius eruption in 1944. Hazzard’s evocation of the city is a joy to read. A “through the looking-glass” city of both “apartness” and “continuity”, it also provides a moody, sometimes metaphoric, backdrop for our newcomer Jenny.

The storyline is straightforward. Knowing no-one outside of her work, Jenny follows up a letter of introduction to the charming and welcoming writer Gioconda, whose married lover, and Roman film director, Gianni, she also meets. Soon, however, through her work, Jenny also comes to know a Scotsman, Justin Tulloch, and a relationship of sorts develops between them. These relationships, and how they play out – with their mysteries and betrayals – form the nub of the story, but they are not what the novel is about. That is not so straightforward, but there are clues.

The title offers one clue, particularly, for me, the idea of “noon” as a time when the sun is at its highest, when the light is brightest, and so, perhaps representing a moment of clarity and, perhaps, also, of transition or change? Another clue is in the epigraph from Auden’s “Goodbye to the mezzogiorno” and in the opening paragraphs, both of which encompass ideas about memory and experience. The story is told first person through Jenny’s eyes, and there is a sense as the novel progresses of her working through an experience. Or, perhaps, not so much “working through” as allowing the passage of time to do its work. In the opening paragraphs, Jenny speaks of experiences building up “until you literally sink under them” but is also aware that, with the passage of time, memory, which was once “clouded with effects and what seemed to be their causes”, can become protective. As Auden concludes his poem:

… though one cannot always
Remember exactly why one has been happy,
There is no forgetting that one was.

But of course, not all memories are happy – and time can’t make them so. Gioconda, who had suffered loss, says

‘When people say of their tragedies, “I don’t often think of it now”, what they mean is it has entered permanently into their thoughts, and colours everything…’ (p. 67)

Just prior to this, she admits:

‘When I talk of it this way, now, to you, it all comes out as if there were some sequence, some logic, instead of moods, contradictions, alternatives. The design imposes itself afterwards. And is false, must be false.’ (p. 66)

It’s a curious but beguiling novel. The writing has a formal, intellectual – almost dispassionate, and sometimes elegiac – tone. It feels as though it belongs to a much earlier time, earlier in a way than the time in which it is set. This works somehow, partly because of Hazzard’s clear and measured prose, partly because the characters themselves seem to belong to an earlier time, and partly because Jenny is telling us the story from some time in the future.

As I read The bay of noon, I kept trying to place it within a wider literary tradition. It belongs, in part, to those stories about young people being taken under the wing by more experienced elders. Jenny observes the world she is drawn into, gradually becoming a more active and confident player in it. However, an Englishwoman, she remains an outsider, so retains her observer status which, over time enables her to see some realities she had missed in the first flush.

This is not a simple coming-of-age story, as it might look on the surface. Jenny is not an ingenue, but neither is she, at the start, experienced enough to understand the complex emotions and tragedies her older friends have experienced. Moreover, Hazzard has set the novel in a time that was itself complex, as Europe, and Naples specifically, was emerging from the war and – hmmm, was what? I wanted to say remaking itself, but that’s not the sense we get of Naples. It’s more one of being itself.

Towards the end, Jenny, reflecting on that past time in Naples, likens it to a

vineyard that had been left to flourish intact … among the deadly apartment buildings, not so much showing how it was as what has happened to it.

And that is the book’s ultimate meaning for me. It is not about who we are, what we hoped for, or where we have arrived, but about, in the closing words of the novel, “how we came”. Life, in other words, is a process, a journey that doesn’t always take us where we plan or expect.

Read for Novellas in November. Also read by Brona for the month. Read very late for the 1970 Year Club run by Karen (Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings) and Simon (Stuck in a Book)

Shirley Hazzard
The bay of noon
ISBN: 9781860494543
Virago Press, 2005 (originally published 1970)
182pp.

Novellas in November 2024, Part 2 (New to my TBR)

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November is over and, as I expected, I didn’t get to post much for Novellas in November. However, I did read a couple of novellas and started another short form work (ie nonfiction), and, more to the point, I did read some participants’ posts which resulted in my noting some “New to my TBR” options.

Last year I listed 8 “New to my TBR” options and, unusually for me, I actually read two of them. They were:

New to my TBR:

  • Jon Fosse, Aliss at the fire (translated by Damion Searles) (orig. pub 2003): Brona of This Reading Life was mesmerised by this book in which an elderly woman reflects on the disappearance of her husband some twenty-five years before, after taking his rowboat out into the fjord.
  • Pascal Garnier, Boxes (translated by Melanie Florence) (orig. pub. 2012?): Kimbofo of Reading Matters didn’t like this as much as other books she’s read by Garnier, but I’m intrigued. Strangely, given my interest in Fosse’s book, it’s about, says kimbofo, “a middle-aged man reeling from his young wife Emma’s sudden disappearance”. It appears that journalist Emma fails to return home from a work trip and is presumed dead.
  • Paul Griffiths, Tomb guardians (2021): Lisa of ANZLitLovers makes this story – about the guardians of the tomb from which Christ’s Resurrection took place – sound both interesting and entertaining.
  • Jean-Patrick Manchette, No room at the morgue (translated by Alyson Waters) (orig. pub. 1973): host Cathy of 746 Books attracted me to this one by describing it as French noir which “blends a taut mystery with a trenchant sense of ennui and regret”.
  • Hiroko Oyamada, The factory (translated by David Boyd) (2010): Karen of Booker Talk posted on this and caught my attention, partly because it’s Japanese, but more because factory settings intrigue me and she describes it as unsettling and bordering on the absurd. 
  • Evelyn Waugh, Love among the ruins (1953): Judith Stove commenting on my Part 1 post, recommended this dystopian novella. She write that “Waugh covers a lot of themes – the ‘ruins’ of the title, criminal rehabilitation, and the transformative power of love – as well as the assisted-death industry. Plenty of themes with relevance to our time!” It’s a while since I’ve read Waugh, and this appeals and sounds manageable in my time-poor life!

There are probably others but given my track record for actually reading books I spy, I think this is enough. Maybe some of them caught your eye too? I see that two caught host Cathy’s eye. Check out her post to see which ones! I must say that she reminded me that I’d also been attracted to Kate’s post on Carys Davies’ Clear, but I am not going to (formally, anyhow) add it to my list. It’s long enough.

Regardless, has Novella November affected your TBR pile this year?

Written for Novellas in November 2024. Thanks as always to Cathy and Rebecca for hosting this special month.

PS Cottier and NG Hartland, The thirty-one legs of Vladimir Putin (#BookReview)

/ Whispering Gums / 19 Comments

Earlier this month, I posted on a conversation with the winners of the 2024 Finlay Lloyd 20/40 Publishing Prize, P S Cottier and N G Hartland, who wrote The thirty-one legs of Vladimir Putin, and Sonya Voumard, who wrote Tremor. On the surface, these books look very different, but conversation facilitator, Sally Pryor, found some similarities suggesting both explore ideas related to identity, one’s place in the world, and how we can be captured and defined by the systems within which we live. Having now read Cottier and Hartland’s novella, and having started Voumard’s memoir, I can see she has a point.

If you didn’t read my conversation post, you may be wondering what the heck this book with its curious title is about. Besides the fact that it’s a novella, which I love, I was attracted to it from the moment I saw it on the shortlist because the description said it “spirits us away on a comedic journey into a world where the reality and absurdity of political power are increasingly indistinguishable”. That sounded just too delicious and I was glad to see it win.

Ok, so I still haven’t told you what it’s about, but be patient, I’m getting there. The novella was inspired, said Cottier and Hartland, by the idea that there are such things as Putin “body doubles”. There is even a Wikipedia page about this “theory” so it is a thing, as they say! The titular “thirty-one legs” belong to 16 of these body doubles whose stories are told in the book. Sixteen, you ask? That doesn’t compute from 31? True, but one of the doubles only has one leg! How can that be, you might also ask, how can a “double” of two-legged Putin only have one leg? Good question, and I won’t give it away, but let’s just say that the idea epitomises the absurdity of the notion.

Now, this is a collaborative novel, and if I understood correctly from the conversation, Cottier and Hartland started by “pushing out” individual Putins. In fact, the novella reads rather like a set of interconnected short stories because each Putin stands alone, with minimal connection between them except they are all Putin doubles and most of them assume there must be others. However, there is a narrative arc to the whole. Each Putin tells us something about their recruitment and its impact on their lives, with some threads recurring through the different Putins, depending on their location and personality. Two Putins also bookend the story. Surfing Putin, Dave McDermott in Western Australia, opens the book in the Prologue and concludes it with his own story, while English Putin Samuel Chatswood starts off the stories proper, and returns with the penultimate story. Each chapter is titled with the name and location of a Putin, so we have, for example, “Maja Dahl, Oslo, Norway”, “Richie ‘The Putin’ Rogers, Cirencester, England”, “Joppe Stoepke, The Hague, Netherlands”, and “Andrei Galkin, Rostov-on-Don, Russia”.

The set-up, or plot, is simple. People from around the world who look like Putin have been recruited to act as Putin doubles should they be so needed. This recruitment has happened over twenty years, but the book is set post the Ukraine invasion, so our doubles suspect they will not be called upon to play Putin. Some are quite edgy about this, while others are more phlegmatic. For all of them, though, being paid – because paid they are, monthly, from an anonymous bank account – comes with questions, if not challenges.

Our first fully-fledged Putin, Samuel Chatswood from London, sets the scene. He tells us about his fears about being a double. Not only is he frequently teased about his resemblance to Putin and asked “why anyone would want to invade Ukraine?”, but he’s anxious because he has been increasingly getting dark looks from strangers since the Skripal poisoning. However, having recently spied another lookalike, he is “comforted” by the idea that “whatever suspicion and recriminations are possible, they are less likely to entangle me if I’m not the only Putin lookalike”. He also heralds the denouement, when he returns to find that such comfort might have been misplaced.

We meet all sorts of Putins, from the fearful, through the deluded, and the thoughtful, to the confident or more upbeat, but all ponder what being a Putin double means for them. For some their own identity gets lost in the role, and some are confused, or at least perplexed, about what’s expected of them. For others, like the resourceful Chilean, Sebastian Soto, it’s a business proposition, while several capitalise on their lookalike-ness. Steve Pinebrother in “International Waters”, for example, not only makes money, secretly, as a double but, publicly, as a performer on a cruise ship. Each one is beautifully individuated, and I find it hard to pick a favourite. There’s much humour in many of their stories, but there’s pathos too, particularly with those who get lost in – or fearful about – their roles. Life is not simple when you accept money without clarity, eh?

“the butterfly of truth does not need questions to emerge from its cocoon of facts”

So, what’s the takeaway. An obvious one is contemporary culture’s focus on appearance and its willingness to monetise looks without much substance behind it. But another is murkier. This novella, I’m tempted to say, could be read as an allegory of the changing world order. No matter where the Putins live, recent changes are unsettling them. The ground is shifting and they (we?) don’t know how to react. Do they bury their heads in the sand, believing it will be alright? Do they wait for the inevitable or, try to withdraw? Or do they take action, and if so, what action can they take? For French Putin, Hugo Fournier,

It matters not, I conclude, what is reality and what is an extravagant theory from a feverish mind. The answer of course is that I should trust no one. I am the only Putin who can, and will, look after me.

Is such isolationism the answer? Through their various Putins, Cottier and Hartland pose serious questions, including, what do we believe and what we can or should we do?

The thirty-one legs of Vladimir Putin is an audacious “what if” story. Its episodic approach works well in the novella form. Were the book much longer, the conceit would, I think, start to lose its freshness. As it is, there are enough Putins to provide a variety of stories, without becoming repetitive. The tone is light enough to be highly entertaining, but the content is informed and thoughtful enough to engage our minds. This book would make a perfect Christmas stocking stuffer, which is not to say I put it on a par with chocolates and scratchies, but that it is small in size, well-priced, physically lovely, and a thoroughly absorbing read.

Read for Novellas in November.

PS Cottier and NG Hartland
The thirty-one legs of Vladimir Putin
Braidwood: Finlay Lloyd, 2024
115pp.
ISBN: 9780645927016

Review copy courtesy Finlay Lloyd.

Novellas in November 2024, Part 1

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This November has been – well, about as busy as usual. I am secretary of an association for which, in November, we present our annual lecture and also hold our AGM. It all takes time and energy. I am therefore planning to combine my Novella in November (run by Cathy of 746 Books and Rebecca of Bookish Beck) comments into a couple of posts.

These reading months tend to suggest you start with “my year in [whatever the topic is]”. For last year’s (2023) post, I was horrified to discover that I’d only read one novella in the preceding twelve months, Jessica Au’s Cold enough for snow (my review). But, in fact, I realise now that I told a lie, as I had read another, Gwendolen Brooks’ Maud Martha (my review). Regardless, that was an easy benchmark to beat and beat it I did. Of course, I’ve still only read a fraction of what many bloggers have read, but here is my alphabetically-ordered list of books read for this “novella” year – that is, between 1 November 2023 and 31 October 2024:

  • Jane Austen, Lady Susan (my review)
  • Rebecca Burton, Ravenous girls (my review): joint winner of Finlay Lloyd’s inaugural 20/40 Prize
  • Rebecca Campbell, Arboreality (my review): novella or connected short stories, which won the 2023 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize
  • Michael Fitzgerald, Late (my review)
  • Elizabeth Gaskell, Cousin Phillis (my review): read for Bill’s Gen O week
  • Elizabeth Gaskell, Lizzie Leigh (my review): read for Bill’s Gen O week
  • Kim Kelly, The Ladies’ Rest and Writing Room (my review): joint winner of Finlay Lloyd’s inaugural 20/40 Prize
  • Thomas King and Natasha Donovan, Borders (my review): short story turned into an under 200pp short graphic novel which makes it a novella to my mind
  • Patrick Modiano, Sundays in August (my review)

In addition to these, I have read a novella this month (but have not yet posted my review) and have also nearly finished another, but both of these will all appear in next year’s novella count.

As I understand it, Cathy and Rebecca are not posing weekly prompt questions this year, which suits me as these can sometimes become repetitive. So, given that freedom, I am going to conclude this post with some comments made by Rebecca Campbell in an interview posted in the online journal The Artisanal Writer. The whole interview is worth reading, particularly if you liked Arboreality. She was asked

Another writer might have broken the personal narratives into linked short stories or added content to meet the length expected for a novel. You chose instead to give us a form we don’t get to read often enough. What drew you to the novella form for this particular piece of fiction? 

It’s an interesting question, as the book can be (and has been) described as linked short stories. However, Arboreality does have an overall narrative trajectory and it has some continuing characters albeit, by the end, the early ones are in memory rather than still living. Anyhow, Campbell answered:

This is where genre expectations are important. Novellas have always been an important part of science fiction, probably a holdover from its origins in pulp magazines. They’re still published regularly in periodicals, and markets for them are growing at both major and small presses.

Readers like novellas, and they are of an appealing length for writers. The novella maintains some of the focus of the short story, but allows a writer more space to explore the world they’ve created, something that’s particularly important in a genre obsessed with world-building. 

Arboreality is one of two novellas I’m publishing in 2022 (the other is The Talosite from Undertow Publications). After years of writing short fiction, I found my stories growing longer and more elaborate, so this form was the next natural step for me. I was also inspired by novellas that combined the focus of the short story with a sense of breadth, as though we are only seeing a fraction of a much larger world that is more compelling because it’s incomplete. On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan and Great Work of Time by John Crowley in particular let me see how flexible and evocative the form can be, despite its brevity.

I have heard other writers talk about the novella form appealing to them.

I particularly liked Campbell’s point about how novellas can combine the focus of the short story with a sense of breadth resulting in our “only seeing a fraction of a much larger world that is more compelling because it’s incomplete”. While some sense of resolution is usually needed, I’m not one who must have closure, so this openness appeals to me. Certainly, I loved On Chesil Beach. What do you think about this idea of “incompleteness”?

Written for Novellas in November 2024 (linked in opening para).