Fiction

What does it mean to have a past you are estranged from? In Australian-Croatian author Marija Peričić’s third novel, Foreign Country, the title recalls the familiar L.P. Hartley line, ‘the past is a foreign country’, and stretches its metaphorical coverage to include the terrain of grief, childhood, the dislocation of immigrating, and even the afterlife.

An irony of this age, when everyone is connected to everyone else, is that loneliness proliferates. Martin Luther’s claim that a lonely man ‘always deduces one thing from the other and thinks everything to the worst’ is exemplified by the miserable spiralling of fervidly online isolates. This is the world of Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection.

For earlier generations, joining a cult typically signified a rejection of mainstream values – careerism, property ownership, the nuclear family – in favour of spirituality and communal living. Ata time when a mortgage and stable employment are no longer assumed to be within reach of an average thirtysomething in Australia, the workplace arguably becomes a cult, with its own perplexing lingo, rigorous standards for membership, and redefinitions of family.

In an instance of delicious wit, a new South Australian publisher is called Pink Shorts Press. That Pink Shorts Press has chosen a satirical collection as one of its first titles represents an almost perfect alliance. The only potential fly in this unctuous ointment is the question resounding across the world at the moment: how, as an author, does one challenge reality, distort the facts, and subvert the narrative, when currently one person dominates most of the work traditionally ascribed to satirical creatives?

Will There Ever Be Another You is a fever dream of a novel. That is, for much of the novel, the narrator is feverish with Covid-19. Our protagonist, never named, catches it in the first months of the virus’s epic global travels. It seems to have nabbed her on a family trip in early 2020, a journey undertaken after the death of her infant niece. Lockwood’s previous novel, No One Is Talking About This (2021), told the story of how the child’s life and death had propelled the protagonist out of her life in the ‘portal’ into the fleshed world of birth, illness, and love. Lockwood’s ‘portal’ is her designation for the internet, and the first half of No One Is Talking About This conveyed the rich shallowness of online life.

We Do Not Part, the most recent novel by Nobel laureate Han Kang, is an intriguing synthesis of topics, themes, and structures which have threaded through her writing since the publication of The Vegetarian (2007). As in her earlier work, We Do Not Part blends lyricism and violence to depict the psychological suffering of a female protagonist who strives to comprehend the trauma buried deep in the psyche of Korean society. Kyungha, the primary narrator, is the author of books with a socio-historical foundation and has been afflicted with mental distress – nightmares, migraines, and insomnia – since completing a book about a massacre of Korean civilians by the military government. Readers will identify similarities between Kyungha and Han Kang herself, and with her book Human Acts (2014), the highly acclaimed novel about the 1980 massacre in Gwangju.

‘Sixteen, a sick bed.’ This lyrical refrain loops through Katherine Brabon’s fourth novel, Cure, capturing the cyclical, never-ending essence of living with chronic illness. You can be anything, anyone, anywhere, but it always comes back to these facts, this bed, this body.

The War Within Me is the second book in Tracy Ryan’s trilogy on the Queens of Navarre, a kingdom precariously sandwiched between the powerful monarchies of France and Spain. In 1512 Navarre had lost much of its territory to Spain; its continued survival thereafter depended upon a complicated diplomatic dance with the French court. The first book in Ryan’s series followed the life of Marguerite of Angoulême, sister of François I of France, who married Henri II of Navarre in 1526. Now Ryan turns attention to their only daughter, Jeanne d’Albret, who succeeded to the throne after her father’s death in 1555.

It would diminish this novel to describe it as ‘timely’. ‘Timeless’ is nearer the truth. The risk of a catastrophic breaking out involving Iran is a symptom of decades of tragedy, which novelist Shida Bazyar has conveyed here with a rare balance of vivid social realism and intimate introspection. The results are masterful.

Billing itself as a ‘gay Bildungsroman’, Thomas Vowles’s Our New Gods follows Ash, a young man with a dark past, in his move from rural Western Australia to the ultra-hip enclaves of Melbourne’s Inner North. Ash immerses himself in the city’s queer scene and soon finds himself in a viper’s nest of sexual and emotional entanglements. First up is his new friend James, a rich blond Adonis; James is in an open relationship with the volatile Raf; Raf has a connection with a troubled soul called Booth.