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This week's fiction spans cosy drama, speculative fiction and a satire of aimless young men, while non-fiction picks include an Indigenous military biography, tips on cognitive change and Richard Dawkins on evolution.
This week's fiction ranges across cosy drama, speculative fiction and a satire of aimless young men, while our non-fiction picks include a remarkable Indigenous military biography, tips for understanding cognitive change and evolutionary lessons from Richard Dawkins.
Nine Yard Sarees have overlapping characters and storylines, with a focus on the diasporic narratives of Indian women, from youth to old age. The book is a polyphonic wonder - a multi-generational exploration of sibling and parent-child relationships, traditional values butting against the desire for autonomy, new and long-term marriages, interracial couplings, patriarchal and caste systems, and more.
Nine Yard Sarees and Tamil Family Stories
Set mainly in Singapore, "the land of Chinese people and Western modernity", the non-chronological collection follows the winding paths of an extended Tamil Brahmin family, whether living in close quarters or separated by land and seas. It also comes with a large supporting cast of characters, and feels epic in scale despite its length.
Nine Yard Sarees won the 2024 Singapore Literature Prize for English Fiction and has all the colour and tumult you'd expect, but it's also perceptive, nuanced and empathetic, giving voice to women of different socio-economic backgrounds. A standout tale is about a domestic worker sponsored by higher-class, affluent Indians in Singapore. The Strangers is an uneasy mix that doesn't quite gel.
Following the death of her mother, the narrator sets up a camera in her parents' backyard and accidentally records what could possibly be a new species in the UK. They are the strangers of the title, badger-like creatures whose long proboscis resembles an elephant's trunk. Promptly nicknamed "mimmoths", they are soon discovered across the globe, prompting all manner of conspiracy theories on whether they are harbingers of hope or pests with malicious intent.
The book leaves open-ended what these mammals represent, so the reader can insert whatever they deem fit (immigrants? Fear of the unknown? ).
Moreover, the narrator (also called Naomi) is possibly an unreliable one, still processing not only the loss of her mother, but also her inability to carry a pregnancy to term. Was her personal interaction with the mimmoths a manifestation of grief? With its play of fact and fiction, The Strangers. After a decade hustling in London, washed-out model Xander returns to New Zealand for a holiday and reconnects with his family, exes and old friends.
The Long Cloud and Aimless Young Men
Hector MacKenzie's debut novel favours short chapters with long sentences in lower case, mostly without punctuation, so the effect is an unfiltered stream-of-consciousness narrative from a 30-year-old with an inferiority complex. Xander feels he's a failure because he's not a "doctor or a writer or a musician or an artist or a producer", just someone who trades on his fading good looks. His successful actress girlfriend, who financially supports him, also presents a challenge to his masculinity.
The Long Cloud immerses you in the mindset of an immature and anxious kidult, and a lot of the prose reads like rambling journal entries full of vaping, drinking and hangouts with small-town inhabitants. But when Xander meets someone whose radiance pierces his maudlin self-pity, there is a chance he may upend his life. The book is a study in arrested development; it both satirises and indulges in the depiction of rudderless young men.
The Treasure House and New Beginnings
With a hardscrabble background and after a string of shabby rentals, all Zoe ever wanted for herself and her 11-year-old daughter, Florence, was stable accommodation. So despite barely knowing "a nail from a screw", she decides to buy what's euphemistically called a "treasure house" in a small seaside town in the US state of Maine, which is full of holidaymakers and retirees. The property is actually a hoarder's paradise, full of a lifetime's assortment of memorabilia and junk.
Its low price reflects its decrepitude. The narrative is divided into two parts: the present, with full-scale cleaning and renovation of the "gnarled crone of a cottage" and its garden, undertaken by an enthusiastic team of helpers, and the 1950s, from the perspective of Marly, a previous occupant. Despite some traumatic content involving drug addiction and its effects, The Treasure House is a wholesome, cosy drama that prefers to focus on new beginnings, community goodwill and the balm of romance.
The mother-daughter relationship between Zoe and her precocious preteen is sweetly drawn out, with This tiny book (only 108 pages) shares its title with an Anton Chekhov short story, but where Chekhov's tale deals with an affair between two married people, this one, as Carrie Tiffany points out in her afterword, is dedicated to her late mum, who suffered from Alzheimer's disease. The unnamed woman in this novella has received a diagnosis not long before a new dog - also unnamed - arrives in the home she shares with her husband.
It is apparently the sixth canine to have graced the household, but the woman's memory is patchy and unreliable. Her past bleeds into the present, with recollections of family dogs from yesteryear mingled with the antics of the latest creature. It's a sad story of mental disintegration. Not only is she unable to recognise a photo of her younger self, but she is constantly confused about timelines and despairs that "most things are her fault now".
Reg Saunders and Indigenous Military Service
Interspersed among the spare text are coloured line drawings by Noel McKenna that add poignancy to the story. Tiffany is adept at depicting the collapse of language and identity. Fighting for Country looks at first glance to be a standard military biography. But look again.
The man is clearly Indigenous, and the title doesn't just refer to doing service for the nation. Reg Saunders was Australia's first Indigenous military officer. His remarkable feats on the battlefield are, however, only one dimension of his story. His nephew, James Saunders, sets the mood early with Reg as a boy walking the shores of Lake Condah in Victoria's Western District, in the footsteps of his forebears on Gunditjmara Country.
With a flair for evocative, immersive storytelling, the biography captures a life that extends far beyond military service.
theage
smh:This story was compiled and edited by the HeadTopics newsroom and HT AI from the reports above.
Nine Yard Sarees The Strangers The Long Cloud Fighting For Country
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