Carol Middleton

Nineteen Seventysomething is the second of the Long Story Shorts collections published by Affirm Press. It is a series of linked stories by author, journalist and music critic Barry Divola, set in the fictional Australian town of Braithwaite, in the 1970s, and told from the perspective of an adolescent boy, Charlie.

Susan Varga’s latest novel, Headlong, is set in Australia in the opening years of the twenty-first century, with the Tampa episode and detention camps as background. This setting reflects Varga’s own work with refugees and the Nazi camps of her family’s Hungarian past. Headlong relates the downward spiral that the previously indomitable Julia undergoes after the death of her husband. Her two children – the narrator, Kati, and her brother – try everything to restore their mother to physical and mental health, but Julia is adamant: life is hell. The fact that she escaped the Holocaust with her daughter and survived the horror of those years makes the story all the more poignant and distinct from similar stories of grief. Why has this loss defeated her, when she has met every other challenge in life? Has it unlocked the hidden pain of earlier years? This question, and Kati’s ensuing grief and sense of guilt, sustain the novel.

This novel is Sonia Orchard’s second book, published six years after her first, the compelling and intimate memoir Something More Wonderful (2003). For those who read the memoir – the harrowing story of her thirty-one-year-old friend’s battle with cancer – The Virtuoso may come as a surprise. Orchard has abandoned her own assured voice for that of a fictional and unreliable narrator, a young Englishman besotted with a concert pianist, slightly older than himself. The milieu is an eccentric circle of musicians and writers in 1940s London. If there is any similarity between Orchard’s memoir and her novel, it is the narrator’s stance as the observer, with a beloved and idealised friend at centre stage.

For many Australians, the Burke and Wills odyssey is a sketchy episode in our history. For Kevin Rabalais, a recent immigrant to this country from New Orleans, the fragments of the story were obviously an intriguing premise for a novel. His first novel, The Landscape of Desire, retraces this expedition and the later one led by Howitt that set out to find the missing explorers. The strange thing is that the author does not approach his work as historical fiction, but as literary fiction.

'I want to be buried on top of Connor’s Hill, the mountain at the head of the Tambo Valley in East Gippsland.’ These were the words that came into Barry Heard’s mind as he faced death in the jungle in Vietnam in August 1967, an episode recounted in his first memoir, Well Done, Those Men (2005). Later in that book, Heard recalled another near-death experience, when his mind turned again to Connor’s Hill: ‘I was in a warm, soft place that was bright, peaceful and beautiful, like the top of Connor’s Hill. It was where I wanted to be.

Alien Roots is a remarkable memoir of pre-war Germany, written in Melbourne by Anne Jacobs (born Annemarie Meyer). Jacobs wrote it in the 1960s, at a time when the Holocaust was rarely mentioned in Australia. Charles Jacobs collated his wife’s memoir for the family, and her children arranged for its publication in late 2006, twenty-four years after her death. The Melbourne-based Makor Jewish Community Library is the publisher.