Novellas in November

Finlay Lloyd’s 20/40 Prize 2024: Shortlist announced

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And, the interesting literary awards keep coming. In November 2022, I announced the creation of the new 20/40 Publishing Prize by the local-to-my-region independent, non-profit publisher, Finlay Lloyd. A year later, in October 2023, I announced the inaugural shortlist, and soon after that, the winners, Rebecca Burton’s Ravenous girls (my review) and Kim Kelly’s Ladies’ Rest and Writing Room (my review). I am absolutely thrilled to see that the shortlist for this year’s award has just been announced.

But, before I get to that, a little explanation re my opening sentence. Like the Barbara Jefferis and the Mark and Evette Moran Nib Literary Awards, this award, too, has different and specific criteria, though in this case they are not so much about content as form. The 20/40 prize is a manuscript award with the prize being publication, neither of which criteria is particularly unusual. Further, it is not limited to debut or young or women or any other subgroup of writers, as some manuscript awards are. Submissions can be fiction or non-fiction, but must be prose (albeit “all genres … including hybrid forms” are welcome). What makes this award particularly special – to me anyhow – is that it is for shorter works, that is, for works between 20,000 and 40,000 words (hence the award’s name, the 20/40 Prize). The original aim was to make two awards – one to a work of fiction and one to nonfiction. However, last year the fiction submissions were so strong, said the judges, that both winners were fiction. Let’s see what happens this year …

And now, the 2024 Shortlist

Here is the shortlist, with a description from the announcement, plus further information I have found on the previously published authors.

  • Alicia Marie Carter’s Minotaur toes pulls no punches in taking the reader deep into the searing, visceral reality of the ensnared existence of a young woman, manipulated in prostitution: Carter is a writer, editor, teacher and podcaster who has had short stories, poetry and personal essays published in various literary journals, has won awards for her short fiction, and had a novel, Songs at the end shortlisted for the Penguin Literary Prize 2021.
  • PS Cottier and NG Hartland’s The thirty-one legs of Vladimir Putin spirits us away on a comedic journey into a world where the reality and absurdity of political power are increasingly indistinguishable: Cottier is a Canberra-based “poet who occasionally writes prose”, among other things, with an impressive body of work to her name; Harland is also a Canberra-based writer about whom I have found little except some references to prose writing.
  • Susan Saliba’s There is something that waits inside us empathetically explores the search for solace of a girl caught between the example of her high-achieving aunt and her eccentric, dysfunctional mother: Saliba is an English and Creative Writing Teacher, and an award-winning writer of young adult and children’s fiction.
  • Sonya Voumard’s Tremor shows us that beyond our societal expectations and judgements about normality, individual lives with disability can follow atypical, often difficult, but ultimately inspiring paths: Voumard is a writer and lecturer, primarily in non-fiction, who first came to my attention when she was longlisted for the Stella Prize in 2017 with The media and the massacre (which kimbofo reviewed from her won journalistic perspective).

Last year’s submissions were judged blind. This is not explicitly stated in this year’s shortlist announcement, but Julian Davies did say in an email announcement earlier this year that “Consistent with the ethos behind the prize, and last year’s guidelines, all entries will be read blind by the panel so that the quality of the writing guides the panel’s decisions rather than any extraneous influence”. I am clarifying this as I know it appeals to many readers and writers.

The judging panel for the 2024 prize comprised author Kevin Brophy (whose The lion in love I’ve reviewed), the publisher and author Julian Davies (whom I’ve reviewed a few times), author and poet Rashida Murphy, and last year’s winners, Rebecca Burton and Kim Kelly (aka Kim Swivel). The ongoing plan is for the previous year’s winners to be on the next year’s panel.

The winners will be announced on 26 October, just in time, again, for Novellas in November. The media release says, “it is intrinsic to a publishing prize that when the shortlisted entries are announced, the winning books are already in the final stages of being prepared for publication”. In other words, we should be able to buy them at the end of this month. Watch this space. I have so many novellas I want to read for Novellas in November …

It is heartening to see Finlay Lloyd’s commitment to their prize. I hope it continues long into the future.

Novellas in November 2023: Week 5, New to my TBR

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You will of course have realised that November is somewhat over, but in the blogosphere we are pretty flexible – at least I think we are – so I am going to do this final Novellas in November post more than a week into December.

The final theme for the month is that we talk about the novellas we’ve added to our TBR since the month began. I strongly resist adding any new books to my TBR, but my willpower failed me – partly because I am partial to novellas.

So, here goes, in alphabetical order by title, some of the books that captured my attention around the month:

  • Rebecca Campbell, Arboreality: Bill Holloway (The Australian Legend) posted on this before NovNov but it is a novella, it attracted my attention and I am in fact reading it right now.
  • Michael Fitzgerald, Late: Lisa (ANZLitLovers) posted on this and I also have it in my review pile to read. It sounds right up my alley, and I have bought it as a Christmas gift for a family member too.
  • Natalia Ginzburg’s The dry heart: Claire (Word by Word) posted on this one, describing it as “this brilliant, page turning feminist classic, originally penned in 1947”. How could I not be in?
  • Margo Glantz, The remains: Claire (Word by Word) posted this before NovNov but it is a novella so I am including it here. She commenced her post by describing it as an “incredible literary masterpiece. A lyrical elegy of tempo rubato.” This and the rest of her review captured my attention.
  • Hans Keilson, Comedy in a minor key: Cathy (746 Books) wrote that this is about “citizens risking their lives to harbour Jews in Nazi-occupied Netherlands but deals with this serious theme with a lightness of touch.” I know some readers don’t like a light touch applied to deadly serious subjects like this, but I do. Sometimes a light touch makes a bigger impact, in fact.
  • Elizabeth Lowry, The chosen: Bookish Beck reviewed this, not in the month, but, during the month, she paired Thomas Hardy’s wife Emma’s memoir Some recollections with Lowry’s novella. Lowry’s book, says Beck, “examines Thomas Hardy’s relationship with his first wife, Emma Gifford”. I like Hardy, so this of course caught my attention
  • Janet Malcolm, The journalist and the murderer: Cathy (746 Books) wrote on this before NovNov, but it caught my attention because I have been wanting to read Malcolm ever since I discovered that Helen Garner admires her. Any one Helen Garner admires is of interest to me. In this book Malcolm apparently explores the relationship between journalist and subject, particularly when that subject is a murderer.
  • Joyce Carol Oates, Black water: Lisa (The Short Story Editor) recommended this book on my NovNov week 2 post calling it “the most quintessential novella on my shelf”. I have read an Oates novella, Beasts (my review), but not this one.

Eight books, one of which I am reading now. I’m not sure how many more I will read, but at least I have now got them on my list?

Has Novella November affected your TBR pile this year?

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Novellas in November 2023: Week 4, The short and the long of it

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This week’s question is the Novella version of Nonfiction November’s Book Pairings. It goes like this

Pair a novella with a nonfiction book or novel that deals with similar themes or topics.

I am doing several pairings with Jessica Au’s novella Cold enough for snow (my review), because although it’s a “little” book, it’s so rich.

  • Mother-daughter trip instigated by a daughter, novella-novel pairing: Larissa Behrendt’s novel, After story (my review), is about a daughter taking her mother on a literary tour of England. Behrendt’s novel, however, had a clearer resolution than Au’s complex “little” book in which the issues to be resolved are more subtle and internal.
  • Mother-daughter migration stories, novella-memoir pairing: I’m pairing three books here, Susan Varga’s Heddy and me (my review), Anna Rosner Blay’s Sister, sister (my review), and Halina Rubin’s Journeys with my mother (my review). These three hybrid biography-memoirs are all about post-war migrations, and in each the daughter is challenged by her mother, though in different ways. Sometimes it’s that the mother is hesitant to share a painful past, while in others the mother is a challenging personality. In Cold enough for snow, the issue seems to be a sense of distance or difference that the narrator feels with her migrant mother, and their respective expectations, and a desire to work that through.
  • Mother-daughter disconnect, novella-novella pairing: Elisa Shua Dusapin’s Winter in Sokcho (my review) is about a daughter who struggles to live up to her mother’s expectations and those of the society she lives in. Both daughters seem uncertain about their relationship with their mothers, and both have decisions to make about the way forward in their own lives. Both novellas have open endings.
  • Daughters questioning their relationships with their mothers, novella-memoir anthology pairing: Rebellious daughters (my review), edited by Maria Katsonis and Lee Kofman, contains stories about rebellions against mothers (and also some against fathers and grandmothers). Not all are resolved but as I wrote in my post, in most of the stories, age and experience eventually bring rapprochement: daughters come to understand their mothers (or whomever) a little more, while their mothers likewise learn to accept the daughter they have. In Au’s book, there is a sense that the daughter has come to understand her mother more but also to understand that there are limits to this understanding.

Do you have any pairing ideas?

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Novellas in November 2023: Week 3, Broadening my horizons

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This week’s question is new to me, and I like it. It goes:

Pick your top novellas in translation and think about new genres or authors you’ve been introduced to through novellas.

I love this question because it feels like I’ve read almost more novellas in translation than English language novellas. Is this because translation is such a difficult and expensive task that publishers tend to commission translations for shorter books more than for longer ones? But no, I don’t really think so. Just look at all those big Russian classics that have been translated – and translated more than once. My guess is something more simple, that perhaps some literary cultures value novellas more than others.

This idea is supported by something I read only a few months ago in Trove. The article, which appeared on 6 July 1907 in Sydney’s The Australian Star, cites an English writer named Basil Tozer, who had made a “plea for shorter novels”. He commented that

The habit of loading a story with indifferent descriptive passages still prevails to a great extent, though it might with considerable advantage be dispensed with. A beautiful woman loses her charm when every good point she possesses, from the creamy smoothness of her complexion to the alluring, curve of her eyebrow, is described separately and in detail; and in the same way a glorious scenic panorama metaphorically falls flat when every square mile of it is analysed and dissected. 

He says these “faults” are “commonest among young writers” but also occur “among some of our novelists who have served a long apprenticeship”. He doesn’t name these offending writers, but he does name the opposite, French writers like Daudet, Hugo and de Maupassant, whose writing includes no “superfluous verbiage”. These are, he admits, three of France’s most polished fiction writers, but even “the rank and file” French novelists “seldom err upon the side of overloading their work with unnecessary vocables and third-rate descriptive passages”. He argued that British novels would be strengthened if they were more condensed. That was over 100 years ago, but I wonder – without much evidence to support it – whether there really is something cultural in this?

Whatever … I can say that of the translated fiction I’ve read over the years, novellas represent a large proportion. This started way before blogging, and is not because I specifically chose to read novellas. They just seemed to be the books most often recommended to me.

So, before blogging, my favourites included Albert Camus’ The outsider (French, and which I did first read in French, as L’étranger, at school), Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich (Russian), and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Chronicle of a death foretold (Colombian). These three have stuck with me over a long time. Marquez’s has such a mesmerising opening, “On the day they were going to kill him…”

Since blogging, I have read so many compelling translated novellas that I find it hard to choose, but I’ll name three, in alphabetical order by author, that have captured my interest:

Yuri Herrera, Signs preceding the end of the world
  • Yuri Herrera, Signs preceding the end of the world (Mexican, my review), because it deals with the Mexican-USA migration issue, but with an almost mythical tone that overlays it with a bigger story about crossings and transitions.
  • Patrick Modiano’s Sundays in August (French, my review), because of the carefully structured journey we are taken on, one that leaves us at the end with so many questions to think about, while also revealing enough about what had happened that we know its impact on the protagonist.
  • Sayaka Murata’s Convenience store woman (Japanese, my review), because of the way Murata gets into the head of her mystified outsider in a culture that values conformity.

I found it hard limiting myself to three but, it had to be done or I’d go on forever.

In terms of how these have broadened my horizons, well, there’s the obvious thing to do with reading different cultures. Herrera’s and Murata’s books deal with issues I know to be significant in their cultures, but it means something to read about them from artists working within the culture rather than from the perspective of the news. Modiano’s exploration of disappearance, loss and memory is less obviously a specifically French issue, but it does I think have roots in a postwar European sensibility.

Each book uses the novella form a bit differently, but each is characterised by a sustained tone which can denote a novella. By this I mean that novels, being longer, will often vary the tone because not to do so could become oppressive, whereas the intensity of a sustained tone (whatever that tone may be) is part of what makes a novella. I’m generalising of course, but this seems to be the case in the novellas I love.

As for the other part of the question. I don’t think I’ve been introduced to new genres through novellas, just to different ways of writing those genres, but I have certainly been introduced to many great new writers – like the three above, for a start. But, moving away from translation, I have been introduced to other writers too through their novellas, such as Edith Wharton through her intense Ethan Frome. From that introduction, I went on to fall in love with Edith Wharton.

Novellas … any whichway, I love them.

What about you?

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Kim Kelly, Ladies’ Rest and Writing Room (#BookReview)

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Early in the month I reviewed the first of the two winners of Finlay Lloyd’s inaugural 20/40 Publishing Prize, Rebecca Burton’s Ravenous girls (my review). It was set in Sydney in the 1980s. Now, as promised, I bring you the other winner, Kim Kelly’s Ladies’ Rest and Writing Room. It is also set in Sydney, but in the early 1920s. Some of you will know Kim Kelly, as she has published around 12 novels, mostly historical fiction. Not only that but she was longlisted for the ARA Historical Novel Prize 2022 and shortlisted for the Viva La Novella 2021 prize with her novella, The rat catcher: A love story.

So, she has written novellas, before. A check on her GoodReads page revealed others, including what I think is her best known book, Wild chicory. So, she, like Rebecca Burton, is comfortable with the novella form (or length).

Finlay Lloyd describes the book on their website like this:

Two young women, brought up to expect conventional lives, are thrown together in unexpected circumstances. Each has suffered a devastating loss that challenges their belief in life and themselves. It’s rare to come across a work of deep psychological insight conveyed with such verve and lightness of touch.

As I said in my opening paragraph, Ladies’ Rest and Writing Room is set in 1920s Sydney. The title is explained in the first of two epigraphs. It comes from an advertisement in the Sydney Morning Herald, in 1922, for the Ladies’ Rest and Writing Room in Farmer’s department store. This “artistic room” was intended as a place of respite for busy shopping ladies. It was also where they could also write any “urgent notes” for “the very next mail”. Writing facilities were provided for the purpose. The room was, of course, intended for the well-heeled, as you paid a “nominal charge of 8d.” to avail yourself of its charming “rose shades”. The second epigraph comes from Sappho, which might or might not tell you something!

The story is told in from alternating third person perspectives of two young women. One is the apparently entitled Dotty, who comes from a wealthy business family and who uses the Room in the opening chapter. She is introduced, however, on the street outside where she plays chicken with a tram every Tuesday on her way to Farmer’s and its titular room. Why does she do this? We soon come to understand the pain this young woman, who seems on the outside to have it all, is dealing with. And it’s to do with World War 1, if you haven’t already guessed from the time setting.

The other young woman is down-on-her-luck Clarinda, who has just started work as the Room’s attendant. She went to school with Dotty, but Dotty, in her grief, doesn’t notice her, which doesn’t surprise Clarinda after her shooldays’ experiences with Dotty. Clarinda has her own sadness, partly stemming from losses in the War, but also from the fact that due to her father’s tragic death she and her mother are now on the proverbial hard times.

The narrative takes place over a few weeks encompassing Christmas, and comes to a head when Dotty’s pain becomes too much for her, resulting in a crisis in the Corset Salon (next door to the Ladies Rest and Writing Room). Clarinda steps in to protect Dotty, and, through what ensues, both young women grow. Clarinda treats Dotty with compassion and forgiveness, while Dotty wakes up to sadnesses in others.

What I most enjoyed about the book is its evocation of post WW1 1920s Sydney. Kim Kelly knows the place and the time well, and, despite the shortness of the novella form, she vividly captures a city and people in flux – the grief of wartime loss, the changing workforce as men return home after the war, the increasing migration, the excitement of change in the air, but with old social values and class structures still in place.

Clarinda, for example, was grateful for having finally landed a decently paid job:

It certainly beat unreliable casual waitressing at three shillings a luncheon, or three and six per dinner service, or sixty hours per week as a shop assistant at considerably less than two pounds, both of which she’d done, piecing together a living. All the better paying more respectable clerical positions for which she was qualified, were being given to returned soldiers, and that was fair enough, except that nothing fair had happened for Clarinda since her brothers were ripped from this life and …

So much is told in these words.

Kelly is also adept at characterisation, creating two well-differentiated characters in Dotty and Clarinda. They immediately come to life on the page, which is particularly important in a novella where there’s no time to waste. We care about them both, because we are privy to what’s going on for them, and thus to their isolation, even if those around them aren’t.

The writing and plotting are assured. Kelly is clearly experienced in writing historical fiction where description and rhetorical language are used to create the sort of atmosphere and tone needed to drive a plot forward. Kelly does this very well, and I quickly became engrossed in these two girls’ lives. It’s a novella that wears its heart on its sleeves, and I wondered at times whether some pulling back might have challenged us readers to delve into more of the complexities, and maybe leave us with more questions than answers. But, that would have been a different book. As it is, Ladies’ Rest and Writing Room is beautifully accessible and will hopefully attract more people to the novella form. It and Ravenous Girls would make excellent stocking stuffers for busy readers in your lives. And I don’t mean this condescendingly! I am referring to their perfect stocking-stuffer size!

As with all Finlay Lloyd books, the design is gorgeous, with an appealing monochromatic cover featuring a woman’s hands writing a letter. Very different to your usual historical fiction cover.

Ladies Rest and Writing Room is a good read about a significant and complicated time in our history. Like Ravenous girls, it is a compassionate book, this one about navigating deep loss and the grief that attends it, and, even more, about the importance of generosity in dealing with others. I wish these two books well and thank Finlay Lloyd for sponsoring such an appealing, targeted prize.

Read for Novellas in November. Lisa (ANZ Litlovers) and Theresa (Theresa Smith Writes) have reviewed both winners in one post, but I have done them separately.

Kim Kelly
Ladies’ Rest and Writing Room
Braidwood: Finlay Lloyd, 2023
122pp.
ISBN: 9780994516596

Novellas in November 2023: Week 2, What is a novella

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The thing about these annual memes is that the questions became somewhat the same, which is fair enough as new bloggers appear on the scene as do new ideas. However, my challenge is whether I have anything to add to what I have written about novellas before? The answer is not a lot, but I did listen to the beginning of the 20/40 winners’ interviews on the Finlay Lloyd website. I didn’t listen for long, because it’s a combined interview and I haven’t finished reading the second book. My preference, where possible, is to gather and write my own thoughts before I hear other ideas (including those of the authors).

However, the interview started on the topic of novellas, and the two winners did have some interesting things to say about them which add to what I’ve said before. I’ll recap those ideas first by (re)sharing the Griffith Review’s Julianne Schultz on novellas. She said they are

stories that are longer and more complex than a short story, shorter than a novel, with fewer plot twists, but strong characters. Condensed tales that are intense, detailed, often grounded in the times, and perfectly designed for busy people to read in one sitting.

Most of the novella definitions out there say things like this – in more or less words, and with different emphases here and there. In the 20/40 Prize interviews, authors Kim Kelly and Rebecca Burton put their own interesting spins on it.

Kelly said novellas are books you can read in a couple of hours, without racing but also taking your time. Yes! Good call, I thought, because I do like to take my time with what I am reading, and this works well with novellas. I can take my time but not take forever! Kelly also commented on the value of novellas from the writer’s perspective. As a busy person, she says, she has little time for writing, but once a story “presents itself as a novella” she can see the finishing line and get there faster! I love insights like that into the practicalities of a busy writer’s life.

The interviewer and, more relevantly, the publisher, Julian Davies, made a point about structure, suggesting that a novella is long enough for the writer to develop something but not so long that such development can get away from them. Burton picked this up, saying that, with a novella, writers have time to develop but can still retain “a fleetingness”, a sense of “capturing a moment in time, a breath, a mood”.

Kate Jennings, Moral Hazard

Somewhat less poetically, Kate Jennings, as I recorded in my in praise of the “taker-outers” post, described novellas as “sinew and bone”, which Davies captured in the interview by using my favourite cliche, “less is more”.

I agree with all these definitions, but I’d like to add that novellas can also offer writers the possibility of experimentation. Writers can try things out without getting lost in excessive verbiage, or they can simply be experimental without being constrained by any expectations of form. I’m thinking, for example, of Ida Vitale’s Byobu (my review) or of Kate Jennings’ Snake (my review).

For this week 2 of the meme, we are also encouraged to suggest works that best capture the ‘spirit’ of a novella. I have done that before (Little Treasures and Classic Australian novellas), but let’s just say that in recent years I could add some new memorable books like Sayaka Murata’s Convenience store woman (my review) and Jessica Au’s Cold enough for snow (my review) which are condensed, intense, detailed tales focusing on a limited set of characters. But I could also add experimental books like Byobu, that aren’t that at all.

What about you?

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Patrick Modiano, Sundays in August (#BookReview)

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Disappointingly, I ended up missing my bookgroup’s discussion of the book I had encouraged us to read, Sundays in August by 2014 Nobel prize-winner Patrick Modiano. I have no-one else to blame but myself, since I did the schedule and should have remembered that I was going to be in Hobart for my brother’s exhibition. C’est la vie.

I recommended this book for a couple of reasons, one being high praise from Kim (Reading Matters) and the other being to include translated fiction in our reading diet. Also, the book intrigued me. Kim described it as a “jewel heist”, albeit qualified by “with a difference”. That seemed unusual subject matter for a Nobel prize-winner. Having now read it, however, I see that he is a skilful writer. I loved reading it. But the subject matter?

According to Wikipedia, Modiano (b. 1945) is “a noted writer of autofiction, the blend of autobiography and historical fiction”. He has published over 40 books, and in them, Wikipedia continues, has “used his fascination with the human experience of World War II in France to examine individual and collective identities, responsibilities, loyalties, memory, and loss. Because of his obsession with the past, he was sometimes compared to Marcel Proust”. I’m not sure about the “was” here, as he is still alive. Anyhow, it is this obsession with the past, with its associated exploration of memory and loss, that made Sundays in August (Dimanches d’août) so fascinating. I am drawn to stories about the past that are told in well-controlled melancholy tones, stories that involve a later reflection on what had happened and the implications for the protagonist’s present. (By the way, this does not appear to be one of Modiano’s autofiction works.)

The novella is set in Nice, and starts with a first person narrator (identified partway through the book as Jean) spotting someone he’d known seven years ago. The man is Villecourt, and he is selling leather goods in the market. Neither man, in fact, has done well in the years since they’d met. Both are alone, and not living the apparently secure lives they had been. We quickly realise that this is not a case of old acquaintances happily re-uniting. Instead, there is palpable tension. After they meet for a drink, Jean makes clear he wants nothing more to do with Villecourt, while Villecourt tries to keep the contact going. He does little to ingratiate himself, however, reminding Jean that he, Villecourt, was the only man someone called Sylvia had loved. He also says that he and Sylvia had not been married. Why had she lied to him about that, Jean thinks to himself?

In this way, in the first few pages, we are drawn into a mystery involving these three. Soon after, the aforementioned jewel – a diamond, with a “long and bloody history”, called the Southern Cross – is introduced, and we learn that Jean and Sylvia had been on a mission to sell it. Then, a little further down the track we meet the mysterious Neals, who seem to live in a grand home named Château Azur, and who all too soon offer to buy the diamond.

It sounds like a simple story involving a love triangle and a heist, but in fact, it is a complex crime story in which it behoves readers to attend carefully for hints and clues about what’s really going on. These are conveyed through the narrative, as Jean tries to “rejoin the invisible threads”, and through gorgeously written imagery that creates an oppressive, foreboding atmosphere, occasionally lightened by the Riviera’s bright sun, and blue skies and water.

“blurred … dissolving”

As we read, the ground constantly shifts beneath our feet. People appear and disappear, and sometimes shapeshift. Virgil Neal, for example, sounds American, then he doesn’t, then he does again, before finally turning out to be someone else. Cars and buildings, too, aren’t always what they seem. Nonetheless, through cleverly managed flashbacks and foreshadowings, we gradually start to see – or, think we see – the set-up. It is all complicated, however, by that tricky beast, memory. Jean writes:

I don’t know anymore whether we met the Neals before or after Villecourt arrived in Nice. I have searched my memory, looking for points of reference, but am unable to sort out the two events. Anyway, there’s no such thing as “events.” Ever. It’s a false term, suggesting something definitive, spectacular, brutal. In fact it all happened gently, imperceptibly, like the slow weaving of a design into a carpet…

Soon after this reference to meeting the Neals, Jean says

The word “meet” doesn’t apply, any more than “event.” We didn’t meet the Neals. They slipped into our net.

Who slipped into whose net is the question. And how many nets were there? Jean will probably never know it all, but by the end he’d learnt that “our anxiety didn’t come from our contact with that cold stone with glints of blue – it came from life itself”.

Typical for a novella, the book is tightly written. Every word counts, and is worth noticing. I loved, for example, that Jean was a photographer who now can’t seem to remember the necessary details, and that Sylvia’s last name is (ironically?) Heureux. These little details aren’t casual, and make us readers think and question at every step, as we are alternately unsettled then proffered glimmers of light.

Sundays in August is an accessible, noir-ish tale about loss and the emptiness that accompanies it. It explores life’s shadows and uncertainties, shows how innocence can be so easily taken advantage of, and it doesn’t wrap everything up neatly, leaving us to ponder the possibilities. I won’t spoil the ending, but it is spot on, and explains, at last, the title, leaving us on a little up despite it all. I’ll be reading more Modiano, if I can.

POSTSCRIPT: I believe we know the main culprit in it all, but the question is, who else was in on it and who else was taken in. It would take more reads to work through that, but in the end I think we can’t ever know it all because we can only know what Jean saw and tells us.

Read for Novellas in November.

Patrick Modiano
Sundays in August
Translated from the French by Damion Searls
New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2017 (Orig. French pub. 1986)
156pp.
ISBN: 9780300223330 (Read on Kindle)

Rebecca Burton, Ravenous girls (#BookReview)

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When I announced the two winners of Finlay Lloyd’s inaugural 20/40 Publishing Prize, a few days ago, I said I planned to read them for the Novellas in November challenge/meme/reading month. (What do we call these things?) So here, now, is my post on the first I’ve read, Rebecca Burton’s Ravenous girls.

Rebecca Burton, as I’ve said in previous posts on the prize, is an editor, and author of two young adult novels, Leaving Jetty Road and Beyond Evie, both published by HarperCollins Australia. This book, I’d say, is a cross-over. It could be read by YA readers, but its subtle perspective of looking back from some years later, means that it is particularly geared to adult readers.

Finlay Lloyd writes on their website that

Stories of family dysfunction often expose us to relentless failure. And while Ravenous Girls is about the tensions and growing distance between two sisters—the elder burdened by anorexia, the younger by self-doubt—it is distinguished by its lithe and tender understanding of the complexities of growing up.

It is, I suppose, a story of family dysfunction, but in the sense that most families, dare I say, can be dysfunctional to a point. By this I mean that many families face trauma and challenges that can affect how well they function. Which is the chicken, which is the egg? It’s probably not worth much going there – and this book doesn’t. Nonetheless, there is a bit of backstory to why things may be the way they are.

So, Ravenous girls. It’s told first person from the point of view of 14-year-old Frankie, which puts her slap-bang in the coming-of-age category, and like most her age she is unsure about who she is. She feels “the wrongness of me”, which includes sometimes being “too much me”. She is challenged by her friend “racing away” from her, as can often happen at this time of life, with neither the racer-ahead nor the left-behind having the tools – the experience – to manage it gracefully. Frankie feels the loss deeply, just when friendship is most needed.

Meanwhile, Frankie’s family life is challenged by the fact that Justine, her seventeen-year-old sister, is, as the book opens, about to enter an Eating Disorders Unit as a live-in patient. The third person in this family is Iris, their mother. She – and all of them – still suffer from the premature death of husband and father some eleven years earlier. I have seen this happen – a mother’s grief over the early death of her husband derailing family relationships. That seems to be part of the situation here.

The story primarily covers the months over the summer holidays when Justine is in hospital. Frankie, at loose ends because friend Narelle has secured a holiday job, visits Justine every day. She observes Justine, and thinks about what is happening to her and why. She and her mother attend, with Justine, a poorly-handled family therapy session, and she also attends a family support group. Neither of these provide much help or support. She doesn’t see either Justine or her family in these, so she continues to try to work it out for herself. She sees her mother’s tiredness and pain, and she sees there is no space for her own concerns when Justine’s needs are so great, which is something Justine, bound up in her own growing-up challenges, doesn’t appreciate.

What elevates this reading from what could have been a “woe is me” tale are the occasional foreshadowings or hints from later Frankie, telling us what she now knows, or in some cases, still doesn’t know. These references play several roles, from recognising their naiveté at the time (“It astonishes me now that this is the way we thought”) or her own self-absorbed inattention (“maybe if I’d listened more carefully”) to sharing lessons learnt or hinting that character development had occurred (“But now I think that I may have been a monster too”). Burton handles these later reflections adroitly – they add richness and depth without spoiling the conclusion or losing the tension or reducing our care for the characters.

The novella is set in 1985/1986 Adelaide, and Burton captures the era well – the political happenings from Queensland’s Joh Bjelke-Peterson to America’s Unabomber, the technology (cordless phones appearing, but certainly no mobiles!), the films and music. I could ask why the novel is set then, which is my usual question for novels set in the past, but, for a start, an earlier time-period is necessary to enable the inclusion of that perspective, I’ve mentioned, of the much older Frankie.

There are references during the novella to Frankie and her mum reading books about anorexia and other recovery memoirs – as readers will do when confronted by difficult situations. I liked this comment – or warning – about such memoirs:

It didn’t occur to me that what was truth for one person might not be true for another – or that the truth as people wrote about it wasn’t always the truth as they’d experienced it.

Fortunately, Ravenous girls isn’t a memoir!

As with all Finlay Lloyd books, the design is gorgeous. It has their unique shape, a dust jacket despite being a paperback, and a stylish but minimalist overall design aesthetic with elements that carry through to the other winner.

Before I close I must mention the title, Ravenous girls, which relates to anorexia and the hunger its sufferers experience. In anorexia, as we know, the hunger, and hence the title, is not purely literal. For Justine, as she articulates to Frankie, it’s about “wants”: “I don’t want to want the things I want, you know?” “Ravenous” perfectly encapsulates the intensity of need explored here.

Ravenous girls is a compassionate book that sensitively charts the emotional ups and downs that are part of the anorexia landscape, and explores the helplessness about understanding what is such an individual and complex mental condition. It also conveys something more generally relatable about family relationships – sisterhood and daughterhood, in particular – and about how darned hard it is to grow up. But, grow up we do.

Read for Novellas in November. Lisa (ANZ Litlovers) and Theresa (Theresa Smith Writes) have reviewed both winners in one post, but I am doing them separately. Watch this space.

Rebecca Burton
Ravenous girls
Braidwood: Finlay Lloyd, 2023
103pp.
ISBN: 9780645927009

Novellas in November 2023: Week 1, My year in novellas

/ Whispering Gums / 17 Comments

I love novellas and have written on and reviewed novellas almost since this blog started, because I love the form, but I have only tinkered around the edges of Novellas in November (run by Cathy of 746 Books and Rebecca of Bookish Beck). Last year, I wrote a Monday Musings on Classic Australian novellas and the year before I did one on Supporting Novellas (here in Australia). Otherwise, I have written a few novella reviews for the month. But I have not focused on the weekly themes suggested by Cathy and Beck. I may not again, because I might become a bit repetitive, but I’m going to start at least.

However, this has been a very strange reading year for me, so I won’t have a lot to say, which is probably good, as it means my posts will be short for you to read! For Week 1, which just runs from 1 to 5 November, the theme is “My year in novellas”. It asks us to write about novellas we’ve read since last November.

Well, I’ve only read one, and that was Jessica Au’s quiet, meditative, award-winning Cold enough for snow (my review). It was the inaugural Novel Prize winner, and also won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards prize for fiction (as well as being the overall winner). It’s been shortlisted for more prizes, including, most recently the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards fiction prize. It’s one of those books that’s perfect for the novella form, because it’s an intense, concentrated book rather than a plot-driven page-turner. It says a lot that it has held its own so well in the “novel” world – in terms of awards and overall critical reception – despite its short length. (See publisher Giramondo’s site for its awards to date.)

Cold enough for snow tells the story of a mother-daughter trip to Japan, but its focus is not the trip. Told from the daughter’s point-of-view, it tells about a relationship that is characterised by closeness and distance, by tender caring and frustration, by needs that aren’t always satisfied perhaps because they can’t always be, by a desire to connect. For me it was about the paradoxical nature and mutability of life. But everyone who reads this book – as in my reading group – seems to see something different because it speaks so closely to our individual experiences of life and close relationships. The Prime Minister’s Literary Award judges capture this well in their comment (see the Giramondo site above) that it is “intricately structured and with a flow and reach that, like all remarkable writing, is without boundaries”. “Without boundaries” is a good description …

Au’s book might have been my only novella review in the last twelve months, but all has not been quiet on the novella front. Back in July I wrote a Monday Musings about support for “short novels” from various points of view over the first half of the 20th century – that I found in Trove. And, just a few days ago I wrote about the winners of the new 20/40 novella prize being run by Finlay Lloyd publishers. I plan to read these two winners for this year’s Novellas in November.

Written for Novellas in November 2023

Winners announced for the inaugural 20/40 Prize

/ Whispering Gums / 15 Comments

Last November, I announced the creation of the new 20/40 Publishing Prize by independent, non-profit publisher, Finlay Lloyd. And then, early this month, I announced the shortlist for the inaugural prize. Today, I announce the Winners.

First though, I’ll remind you that 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 some criteria, in addition to looking for “writing of the highest quality”. Submissions must be prose, and must be between 20,000 and 40,000 words (hence the name). Outside of these criteria, works submitted can be “all genres … including hybrid forms”. The plan is to choose two winners, as they have this year, and they hope to run this prize for many years to come.

And now, the Winners

From six on the shortlist, we now have our two winners:

  • Rebecca Burton, Ravenous girls. FL says “Stories of family dysfunction often expose us to relentless failure. And while Ravenous Girls is about the tensions and growing distance between two sisters—the elder burdened by anorexia, the younger by self-doubt—it is distinguished by its lithe and tender understanding of the complexities of growing up.”. Burton is an editor, and author of two young adult novels, Leaving Jetty Road and Beyond Evie, both published by HarperCollins Australia.
  • Kim Kelly, Ladies’ Rest and Writing Room. FL says “Two young women, brought up to expect conventional lives, are thrown together in unexpected circumstances. Each has suffered a devastating loss that challenges their belief in life and themselves. It’s rare to come across a work of deep psychological insight conveyed with such verve and lightness of touch”. Kelly is known to many already, I think, as the author of historical fiction, most if not all published now by Brio Books.

Finlay Lloyd had hoped to make one award to fiction and one to non-fiction, but there were not enough strong non-fiction entries this year. They hope this changes as the prize becomes better known. I hope so too, as I enjoy creative non-fiction.

You can read Finlay Lloyd’s announcement here. Also, Lisa has read the winners, while I plan to read them for Novellas in November. Here is Lisa’s post.

It would be great to see Aussie readers, not to mention others, get behind this publishing prize. You can order the winners at Finlay Lloyd, with a special deal if you buy the two.

There is to be a launch of the books in Canberra on 18 November. If you will be in town that day, and would like to attend, comment here, and I will contact you with the details.