Books have been a known comfort for most of us during the lockdowns and the isolations. The love of reading was brought back in a big way and authors really stepped up to the plates. Below are some reviews from people who have found their love for reading!
Hannah Kent
My year of reading has been filled with fever-dream books that have left me in odd states of rapture and disquietude. In this ongoing time of uncertainty, perhaps I have been seeking out the off-kilter. I enjoyed the profanity of Melissa Broder’s sex and food-drenched Milk Fed (Bloomsbury), and the discomfiting ambiguities explored in Diana Reid’s debut, Love & Virtue (Ultimo). But my two standout books of 2021 were Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi (Bloomsbury), an ecstatic literary hallucination, and Permafrost by S.J. Norman (UQP), ghost stories that queer and disrupt the Western gothic tradition. Both of these continue to haunt me in the best way imaginable.
Kazuo Ishiguro
My big discovery this year was the brilliant, disturbing, supernatural-infused fiction of Mariana Enriquez. Her story collection, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed (Granta), is filled with damaged adolescents craving love and shelter in an Argentina whose nominally comfortable surface can’t suppress a frightening underbelly of savage inequality and the legacy of the junta years. Jonathan Coe’s Mr Wilder and Me (Penguin) is a beautifully elegiac novel told by a young woman in 1970s Greece hired as an interpreter for the great Billy Wilder as he struggles to make what he suspects will be his final film, still haunted by the horrors of 20th-century Europe that he fled decades earlier.
Helen Garner
In The Premonition (Allen Lane) Michael Lewis, the American journalist I love best, pays raging tribute to the US epidemiologists no one would listen to as COVID-19 came surging in. Out of the wreckage of biographer Blake Bailey’s reputation staggers his subject, the mighty Philip Roth (Jonathan Cape), bloodied but unbowed. Novelist Emily Bitto kicks over the traces and breaks hearts in Wild Abandon (Allen & Unwin). Diana Reid, in her first novel Love and Virtue (Ultimo), restores what’s gone missing from contemporary sexual politics: the distinction between “being hurt and being wronged”. Meanwhile, in his novel In Moonland (Scribe), Miles Allinson lays out his territory with authority and a quiet, complex beauty.
Sofie Laguna
The Silence of the Girls and its sequel, The Women of Troy (Hamish Hamilton), by Pat Barker are a re-telling of The Iliad through the eyes of women. Female characters that have traditionally been rendered invisible and mute – objects of rape or slavery – are given life. I felt Barker, this mature, clever, articulate author, teaching me about writing. Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters (Profile), about three women – transgender and cisgender – managing an unexpected pregnancy, was illuminating and provocative. Bewilderment by Richard Powers, (Hutchinson/Heinemann) about a recently widowed father and his young son, is a book about grief set against a backdrop of astrobiology, animal extinction, climate change and US politics. What a trip.
Alexis Wright
During lockdown, I worked steadily on my next novel, but also found time to enter the dazzling world of British poet Alice Oswald. Her work sweeps across time and often evokes the world of Homer. One of her works is Memorial (Faber), which is an elegy for 200 soldiers killed in the Trojan War. More than just a historical fable, it tells a timeless story of the unrecognised victims of war. In Falling Awake (Vintage), I admired Oswald’s acute sense of the natural world in her poem 40 Minutes in the Life of the Dawn. In another work, Nobody (Vintage), sea voices surround an ancient poet who has been abandoned on a stony island. Dart (Faber), features Oswald’s magnificent corpus of voices heard along the River Dart in Devon, and where we find dreamers, swimmers, fishermen, poachers, ferrymen, and a character she calls the rememberer. Oswald has also edited a unique anthology titled The Thunder Mutters: 101 poems for the Planet (Faber). This book should be on every bookshelf. It includes a marvellous verse version of an ancient Aboriginal story of this country from East Arnhem Land titled Song-Cycle of the Moon Bone.
Craig Silvey
I can think of no more prestigious literary honour than the Silvey Nod of Approval for Books I Enjoyed This Year. For fiction, it’s hard to go past Emily Bitto’s brilliant and inventive Wild Abandon (A&U). For non-fiction, the strange and extraordinary Larrimah (A&U) by Caroline Graham and Kylie Stevenson held me captivated. For memoir, look no further than Nina Simone’s Gum (Faber) by Warren Ellis – it’s a wise and inspiring and fascinating journey. Paige Clark’s deft and original She Is Haunted (A&U) resoundingly takes the prize for short stories. And for younger readers, I absolutely adored the beautiful and bittersweet Ghostbear (Scholastic) by national treasure Paul McDermott.
