Milly Main
Milly Main is a New York City-based writer and editor, originally hailing from Perth, WA. She was the 2012 ABR Ian Potter Foundation Editorial Intern.
Shadows, shallows, tides, secrets, aching hearts, and tragedy. ‘The love and the grief and the joy and the pain and all the emotion’ – oh the emotion – in Hannah Richell’s new novel, centred around a secluded lake, can leave one feeling thoroughly water-logged. Richell’s close follow-up to Secrets of the Tides (2012) uses similar techniques to depict another troubled family that must c ... (read more)
Our instinctual reaction to parents who leave their children is one of suspicion. ‘Child abandonment’ elicits such images as a swaddled foundling in the woods, a parent in a train station losing hold of her child’s hand and disappearing into the crowd, or an anonymous baby hatch in a hospital. The presumption is that a mother (fathers are usually spared this judgement) abandons her child bec ... (read more)
Friendship between women is ideal. It is affectionate and nurturing, founded on generosity and mutual love. It is intimate and loyal, because you can tell your best friend anything and she won’t betray you. It lasts a lifetime.
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A drunken woman stumbles into a party where people are gathered around a bonfire, determined to give the baby girl under her jacket to its father. When he refuses, she seizes the baby by the foot and throws it into the air above the fire. The child is Amanda and this is her start to a life that will be informed by criminals, harmed people – the crushed, flawed, abused. The image of Amanda as a b ... (read more)
In this collection of short stories from Pierz Newton-John, the author calls upon the suburban familiarity of a garden weed: couch grass, the fast-spreading pest whose rhizomes grow rapidly in a suffocating network, until the area it covers is ‘strangled’ and the custodian must ‘pull up the entire intractable tangle and start again’. This network of affliction that spreads throughout Newto ... (read more)
This volume from musician, writer, and satirist Justin Heazlewood (‘The Bedroom Philosopher’) collects seven years of touring diaries from a performer well known for maintaining an ironic distance in singles such as ‘I’m So Post Modern’ and ‘Northcote (So Hungover)’. These diaries aren’t so derisive, and greater meaningfulness counterpoints his characteristic satire. When he isn’ ... (read more)
Deborah Burrows’s well-researched historical novel, A Stranger in My Street, begins with the protagonist, Meg Eaton, declaring that Sunday, 3 January 1943 was the day her life changed forever. We quickly learn why – the Stranger of the title has arrived in the eponymous Street.
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While the magazine (due tomorrow) is being printed, the May issue is now available to Australian Book Review Online Edition subscribers. After spending the past few days uploading this month’s ABR (with highlights including David Marr on Patrick White in Adelaide, and a review of Susan Swingler’s sensational family memoir on the Jolleys), I will be grateful to swap the pixels for ink and get b ... (read more)