Fiction

Australia is a weird place. A backwater colonial outpost settled by racist squatters and their indentured convict servants, it is a country forever defined by its isolation, in every sense, from the rest of the world. Faster than Barron Field could say ‘kangaroo’, an Empire crashed onto the shores of the First Peoples who had been cultivating a narrative tradition since time immemorial, and set about writing a (manifest) destiny of its own.

In one of the later short stories in Michael Farrell’s The Victoria Principle, a man anonymised as ‘Bill’ is prompted by an anecdote recounted in a university swimming pool change room to reflect on possible excuses not to arm-wrestle. This does not seem to have been a topic of interest for Bill previously. Indeed, the narrator concedes that for Bill’s ‘milieus (overlapping academic and creative)’ arm-wrestling was given little thought, if any.

In one of the later short stories in Michael Farrell’s The Victoria Principle, a man anonymised as ‘Bill’ is prompted by an anecdote recounted in a university swimming pool change room to reflect on possible excuses not to arm-wrestle. This does not seem to have been a topic of interest for Bill previously. Indeed, the narrator concedes that for Bill’s ‘milieus (overlapping academic and creative)’ arm-wrestling was given little thought, if any.

Isabel Allende’s My Name is Emilia del Valle begins in the Mission District of San Francisco in the late nineteenth century and vividly evokes life among ‘that multicolored, polyglot multitude of emigrants’.

An unknown woman – traumatised, amnesiac, unable to speak – is found just north of Broken Hill in western New South Wales. Who she is and what happened to her is the question that drives Gail Jones’s twelfth novel, The Name of the Sister.

A scanning of programs on any streaming service will reveal that the phenomenon of the cult, both real and imagined, continues to fascinate the public imagination. One notorious historical example, and the subject of recent documentaries and a gripping TV series, is a group called The Family, which operated undetected from the late 1960s for over twenty years in a secluded rural property near Lake Eildon in Victoria. What makes this case so unusual is the fact that its leader was a woman: the glamorous, pathologically narcissistic Anne Hamilton-Byrne. Shockingly, as many as twenty-eight of the victims were children who were subject to brainwashing and sustained physical abuse. Discovered and released in 1987, many of those children suffered lasting trauma and some committed suicide. In a stroke of terrible irony, Hamilton-Byrne never faced justice for her heinous crimes because the law judged the testimony of the children to be unreliable.

David Szalay’s characters drift, indifferent and alone, caught in currents of seemingly trivial events that carry them further from comfortable shores. Encounters begin and end without resolution, connections form and dissolve in passing, and only in retrospect, if ever, do scars appear. ‘Are you happy that you’re alive?’ one character asks another in Turbulence (2018), Szalay’s short story collection that circumnavigates the globe via consecutive aviation encounters. The protagonist of each story meets their successor, with ubiquitous woe making Senegalese businessman indistinguishable from Canadian novelist. The twelve travellers crammed into roughly one hundred pages suffer the consequences of globalised relationships, of a single human network in which personal connections are stretched thin and tension ripples far, as their lives are thrown off-kilter by cold gusts of fate. Characters’ sense of their own existence and surroundings is tenuous. One character reflects: ‘It was strange to think that the same people would walk around the same paths tomorrow, without him being there to see them.’

When Moreno Giovannoni, in his first book, The Fireflies of Autumn (2018), produced lines like ‘The Angel of Sadness draped its wings over the village and slept’, it was clear we were dealing with a writer of some poetic sensibility. Indeed, Giovannoni writes about his subjects with such care, tenderness, and gentle humour that it is possible to forget that the life he is depicting was more often than not ‘wretched’. He wrote his first book for two main reasons: to give readers the ‘flavour’ of a place and to depict the ‘travails of migrants’. These are also the reasons for his second book, The Immigrants, in many ways a companion to his first.

From whiskey priests and crazed conquistadors to sun-maddened tourists, stories of white exile in South America are staples of Western literature and film. Such tropes are productively complicated in an outstanding début novel by Rachel Morton.

Why read a dystopian novel when the present already feels dystopian? In a round-up in The New Yorker of speculative fiction released during the first Trump administration, the historian and critic Jill Lepore criticised the ‘radical pessimism of an unremitting dystopianism … [which] cannot imagine a better future’. Her point was that the genre had become mired in despair and hopelessness; that what had once been a literature of resistance in the age of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley had descended into a ‘fiction of submission’. In her masterful new novel, Salvage (2025), Jennifer Mills offers the antidote that Lepore sought: gleaming speculative fiction with a core of humanism and hope.