PICK OF THE WEEK
Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray (River of Dreams)
Anita Heiss,Simon&Schuster,$32.99
Since Kate Grenville’sThe Secret River,which left its Aboriginal characters mute,Indigenous authors have stepped into the literary limelight. Anita Heiss’Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray is historical fiction set by a different river,the Murrumbidgee. Beginning with the 1852 flood that devastated Gundagai,it follows the fortunes of Wagadhaany,a Wiradyuri girl whose father rescues her and many others from raging waters,ferrying them to safety in his canoe. His heroism affords him brief celebrity,but no rights,of course. Nor does it stop his daughter being separated from her people and forced to wait upon a white family far from home. Heiss brings Wagadhaany’s mind to life and elucidates her complicated relationship to a settler woman whose good intentions have cruel consequences. A moving,empathetic historical novel that reimagines colonial Australia from an Aboriginal perspective,weaving Wiradyuri language throughout.
Gunk Baby
Jamie Marina Lau,Hachette,$32.99
Jamie Marina Lau follows upPink Mountain on Locust Island with a disorienting and sinister consumerist dystopia.Gunk Baby is the blackest sort of satire on post-industrial anomie,though it has a sharp sense of intellectual playfulness too. In the suburbs of Par Mars lies a gigantic mall called Topic Heights,where our protagonist Leen opens a healing centre specialising in Chinese ear-cleaning. The mall has everything you could want,except,you know,meaning. Naturally,perversions abound,including a sadistic cult that co-opts existential philosophy into a resistance movement,whose practical jokes soon escalate into surveillance techniques and torture. Fans of Bret Easton Ellis,J.G. Ballard or Chuck Palahniuk’sFight Club will lap up the affectless nihilism of Lau’s vision:it reopens a peculiar vein of postmodern darkness that seemed to have all but collapsed in Australian fiction.
The Paris Collaborator
AW Hammond,Echo,$29.99
The third crime novel from AW Hammond takes readers into Paris under Nazi occupation. Auguste Duchene is a schoolteacher turned sleuth,surviving by tracking down missing persons. We meet him on the case,retrieving a kidnapped baby from a desperate and grieving couple whose own child was killed,and he is about to step into an even uglier and more dangerous situation. On his return to Paris,Auguste soon finds himself serving two masters:both the French Resistance and the Nazis coerce him into using his talents. For the Resistance,Auguste must find a priest who vanished along with a weapons cache,while a high-ranking Nazi demands he hunt for a soldier accused of desertion. If he fails,his daughter dies,and if either side discovers he is working for the other,he does. Hammond artfully constructs this historical thriller within a paranoid and desperate city,creating plenty of twist and tension.