Eva Sallis

The Marsh Birds, by Eva Sallis, is a bleak but poignant account of one boy’s consuming loss and bewilderment as war and internal political tension separate him from his family, his home and his country. It is the story of parallel journeys in the life of Dhurgham Mohammad As-Samarra’i as he grows to manhood in an unforgiving world and searches for love and acceptance. Throughout this pilgrimage, Sallis examines concepts of anguish and hopelessness, social hostility and exclusion, fear of difference and the collision of cultures. In the tradition of Sallis’s City of Sea Lions (2002) and Mahjar (2003), themes of self-discovery, escape, constraint, and the obstacles to freedom and solace in other societies are revisited.

The word ‘mahjar’, Eva Sallis informs us, ‘refers collectively to all the lands of Arab, most often Lebanese, migration’. Her third book of fiction is a slight volume composed of fifteen stories, divided into three sections. In deceptively simple prose and syntax, Sallis surveys the gamut of experiences affecting the displaced migrant. As in her previous novels, Hiam and The City of Sealions, a beguiling mixture of fantasy, fact, and fable make up the fabric of the book. With a PhD in comparative literature (Arabic and English), Sallis is well placed to oscillate between two cultures, and Mahjar is a perfect vehicle to showcase cross-cultural interactions.

Nikki Gemmell’s third novel, Love Song, set in both Australia and England, is a striking and memorable work. The style is sharp, jagged even, but so energetic that it sucked me in. I had to read it twice to know more than the fact that I had thoroughly enjoyed it.

This is a story written to an unborn child by a mother who seems, at first, both old and young, something which proves to be the case. She is Lillie, a girl who has survived the eccentric, cult-like community that incarcerated her, and who has survived the loss of her lover, the child’s father. She has survived a short life dogged by false accusation. She is also a young woman who, at the point of writing that old person’s document, her memoirs, is scarcely into her adulthood and is still inexperienced in the ways of the world. Her voice is fresh, young and oddly wise.