In Smoke in the Room, three characters end up in a share house in Sydney. Katie works on instinct and is weighted by an overwhelming empathy. Adam, an American, is grieving and needs to save money to get home. Graeme, an aid worker, has rid himself of possessions and simplified his existence. In this novel, [...]
Tag Archives: Australian fiction
This cumulative kind of effect when you stop: an interview with Emily Maguire on Smoke in the Room, part one
November 3, 2009 – 12:23 pm
Peter Goldsworthy’s Everything I Knew
July 14, 2009 – 8:06 am
Penguin Aus
ISBN 9780143009634 (paperback – out August 2009)
It’s 1964 in small-town South Australia and Robert Burns (like the poet) is on the cusp of adolescence. ‘Happiness is a default state’, he narrates, looking back. Reading it, no matter when or where you grew up, one can relate to that simplicity, the time before ‘adult’ aspects of [...]
Sexy romance + serious issues: Toni Jordan on Addition
May 20, 2009 – 7:49 am
Addition (Text Publishing, Australia) is a sexy, smart, funny and totally refreshing read. It’s the story of numerical-obsessive Grace, and her unique navigation of life. When Grace meets Seamus, her lifestyle comes into question – the counting, the obsession with dead mathematician Nicola Tesla, the careful structures of her daily life. Can she fall messily [...]
Eva Hornung on Dog Boy, Writing and Activism
March 9, 2009 – 1:38 pm
In October 2006, I was sitting at the airport in Bali after the Ubud Writers’ and Readers’ Festival, and Eva Hornung (then Sallis) and her gorgeous little boy came and sat next to me. I had seen her speak during the festival, and read her book Fire, Fire, which I found quite confronting. We talked [...]
Things We Didn’t See Coming – Steven Amsterdam
March 4, 2009 – 7:49 am
Sleepers Publishing, 9781740667012, 2009
Things We Didn’t See Coming is a series of vignettes, from different stages of the unnamed protagonist’s life in a dystopian alterno-present/future. It is a post-apocalyptic story, but told in a hard-boiled, yet highly resonant literary style. The sentences are sharp, the character is hard and the environment is one of rapid [...]
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