It’s the End of the Fictional Year! I’ve read so many books I haven’t blogged about my ‘accountant’ is demanding an EOFY summary. Here’s Part 1.

Between a Wolf and a Dog by Georgia Blain

Set on a rainy day in Sydney, four characters are pondering the pains and joys of where they’re at in life and what they’ll do next. There’s the estranged sisters Ester (a therapist) and April (a muso), their mother Hilary (a filmmaker) and Ester’s ex-husband Lawrence (a political researcher). The story shifts back and forth in time and between their perspectives. This means we see Ester and April when they were younger and what triggered their split. We also learn what prompted Ester and Lawrence’s marital collapse. We discover Hilary has a brain tumour and has made her last film. We also visit the riverside house where so many of her family’s fondest memories were made.

Blain writes about relationships, illness, morality, family and death with elegance, melancholy and an unwavering hand. She was diagnosed with brain cancer in November 2015 and, while this is not an autobiographical novel, the urgency and poignancy that propels Between a Wolf and a Dog seems fed by this fact.

Here’s a quote …

She meets his gaze. ‘It’s how most of us live, paying so little attention to the good fortune we enjoy. Perhaps we can only carry our good fortune with us if we don’t know that we are doing it—otherwise we would be overwhelmed by anxiety at the possibility of its loss.’ … Ester would like to reach for him, but she can’t, and so her own hands are clasped, her wedding ring long discarded, and she listens, aware of the truth and beauty in his words, and that here, in this room, she too is blessed—an awareness she doesn’t have enough, she realises, as the rain continues to fall, sweet against the soft grey of the sky.

The Cat with the Coloured Tail by Gillian Mears

I was drawn to this gorgeous hardback for children with its porcelain-green cover and wonderful drawings (by Dinalie Dabarera) the moment I saw it in Gleebooks. The tale features Mr Hooper and the Cat with the Coloured Tail who love finding heart shapes in the world. They also like making people happy with their moon-creams—which are the most delicious of all of the ice creams they dispatch from their van. When they discover that all is not well in the forest, they are deeply concerned. Can they do something courageous to save the day?

Acclaimed Australian author Gillian Mears died in May after a long and painful battle with multiple sclerosis. Her death is a great loss to our nation but it is a real treat to have her first children’s book as a final memento of her contribution to Australian literature.

Here’s a quote …

For a while, the moon-cream truck trundled along from town to town. Because this was the last day before their holiday started, the moon-creams were extra fantastic. If anyone was totally happy and therefore bought a normal moon-cream, eating it was just like licking sweet silver.

What a day they were having. Had there ever been a Sunday afternoon so full of variety?

Heart Creams. Double Scoop Stars. Hot Butterscotch Button Biscuit Sauce.

The Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill

Offill’s novel dives into the murky waters of marital betrayal. It also reveals how marriage and motherhood can seriously interfere with a woman’s dream to be an ‘art monster’. The book’s quirky fragments have a wonderfully poetic quality I adore. It’s not hard to understand why this marvellously original book was shortlisted for the Folio Prize.

Here’s a quote …

How has she become one of those people who wears yoga pants all day? She used to make fun of those people. With their happiness maps and their gratitude journals and their bags made out of recycled tire treads. But now it seems possible that the truth about getting older is that there are fewer and fewer things to make fun of until finally there is nothing you are sure you will never be.

Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks

I’m happy to have finally read this classic novel that starts with the love story of Stephen Wraysford and Isabelle Azaire in Amiens, northern France, in 1910. We next see Stephen as an infantry officer on the Western Front in 1916 where he’s involved in an accident and makes a promise to a wounded tunneller called Jack Firebrace. The love story and the war story come together in the 1970s when a young woman called Elizabeth Benson finds a diary. To reveal more of the plot would be to spoil it for you. Suffice to say: I don’t usually like stories that feature warfare but this one had such a  gripping plot and such superbly drawn characters I was absorbed from go to whoa.

Here’s a quote …

The room had a smell of damp cardboard, or perhaps brown tobacco from an earlier decade, mixed with something sweeter, a pre-war aftershave or the attempted concealment of some half-remembered plumbing failure.

The Evening Chorus by Helen Humphreys

This novel was easy reading for me so I wasn’t perturbed (like some other reviewers) by its slightly overwrought avian theme. It’s the 1940s and James is studying a species of birds called redstarts in order to fill his long days in the German PoW camp. He writes home to his wife Rose about these birds but she has started an affair with an officer on leave and she’s not interested in them (or in him). Meanwhile James’s sister Enid, whose London home has been bombed, comes to stay with Rose and the women build a tentative friendship. It’s interesting to see how their lives turn out.

Here’s a quote …

‘Birds don’t like crowds. They’re wild creatures. They can put up with my presence, just barely, but they wouldn’t tolerate a group of us. Solo observation has always been the most effective way to study them.’ James turns to look at his sister. ‘I’m not just brooding here, Enid,’ he says. ‘I’m working.’

Almost Sincerely by Zoë Norton Lodge

There aren’t too many debut short story collections by Australians that are as funny as this one. Or—for this reviewer at least—set so close to home. In the early stories Norton Lodge plunders her childhood memories of Annandale in Sydney’s inner west and skewers the plumpest, most comedic, for public display. In the later stories she moves on to her young adulthood—hanging her hijinks out to dry and banging the piñata. It’s refreshing to watch this gal play!

Norton Lodge sets a jumble of pets, bosses, possums, chardonnay chuggers, Greek grandparents, Bell’s Palsy and bullies circling in the cultural tumble-dryer of the 1980s and ’90s—and the energy carries the collection. Not all of the stories appealed to me (wrong demographic?). But their slick and breezy delivery should guarantee that younger readers will hoover them up with beer and relish.

Here’s a quote …

If you’re a forty-year-old woman with bright red nails and all ten fingers be-ringed and jingle-jangle bangled wrists then you’re Mamma screaming a fish-and-chips order to Dad … Little Georgia and I wave to him from the swing in the park across the street, and we swing to and fro until we get called inside which we know will be very soon for playtime is as sand through the egg-timer – about three minutes.

At Freddie’s by Penelope Fitzgerald

Set in the 1960s, in London’s West End, At Freddie’s is Penelope Fitzgerald’s most playful and humorous novel. It’s also said to be based on her time as a teacher at the Italia Conti stage school. Freddie is a formidable character, who brooks no criticism of the Temple Stage School of which she is the headmistress, and this is despite the fact that it’s a chaotic and crumbling old place. The teachers are badly paid and fall in love (though not always reciprocally); the pre-adolescents are jealous and highly-strung (and some are too poor to stay at the school); and the school is under serious threat of closure (despite Freddie’s denial about this pressing reality). What will Freddie and her band of theatrical eccentrics do?

This is not my favourite Fitzgerald novel but it is both funny and heartbreaking at the same time—and I know this tricky combination is hard to do so well.

Here’s a quote …

Although Jonathan’s serene manner remained unaltered, his entire horizon was now filled with the interpretation of his part, that is to say, with the problem of becoming princely. His vision or double vision of the torture scene during the first night at the Nonesuch had apparently been a case of ‘seeing true’. At least, at the run through on the morning after the accident he had covered his eyes with his hands to give the idea of imagining blindness and Ed Voysey had shrieked from the stalls: ‘You’re doing something rather good there, keep it, keep that rather good thing in.’ The assistant stage manager had noted it down accordingly.

Sweet Caress by William Boyd

Amory Clay learns how to be a photographer from her glamorous uncle Greville. This lays the groundwork for a life of adventure that includes being beaten by rioting blackshirts in 1936, enduring a counter-attack by retreating German forces in 1944 and being shot by a Viet Cong guerrilla in Vietnam in 1968. As a photographer, Clay enjoys more freedom than most women in the 20th century and she makes the most of this in her career, love affairs and later life.

The black-and-white photos scattered throughout the novel were mostly found by Boyd in second-hand shops or through internet searches. One photo was sent to him by UK journalist Christian House, who writes, ‘I picked her up at a bus stop in Dulwich. She was lost, dirty and lying at my feet. As a found photograph she was a catch. The tiny, frayed and faded print sat sorry-looking in the gutter. But its subject was glorious: a young woman in the 1920s poses knee-deep in a country pond—one arm aloft like a classical sculpture—for an unknown eye. And there she was, down at heel in SE22 … I emailed Boyd a scan of my discovery, an act that he now describes as “spookily serendipitous” because it chimed with an idea he was working up.’

Here’s a quote …

I know I won’t sleep now that I’ve made my decision. I hold my glass of whisky up to the glow from the peat bricks in the fire and watch the small flames shuffle and refract through the golden liquid. Yes, I’ll go down to the beach with Flam—now, in the middle of the moonless night and listen to the waves—and walk on the shore and look out at the darkness of the ocean, all senses dimmed except the auditory; stroll on my beach with the lights of my house burning yellow behind me in the enveloping blue-black sea-dark and contemplate this uncertain future that I’ve just bestowed on myself …

Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson

Nobody does disturbing quite like Shirley Jackson—and she delivers it in Hangsaman with an arctic chill. Seventeen-year-old college freshman Natalie Waite is itching to begin her education at a college for women. But there are dark currents at work to loosen her grip on reality. These include intellectual men who manipulate her, a father who presses her loyalty and a weird girl who latches onto her with a creepy ferocity.

I can’t say I understood everything that was happening in this strange bildungsroman. But it did make more sense when I learned that Jackson had based it on a real, unsolved disappearance of a college student. In case you don’t know Jackson: She was born in California in 1916 and died at age 48 in her sleep. By this time she had written ‘The Lottery’, which is widely considered to be one of the best American short stories of all time and six novels of which We Have Always Lived in the Castle is viewed as her masterpiece.

Here’s a quote …

Being so near the lake troubled her; it was a spot where, she could see, warmth and movement had once abided, where a skeletal roller coaster presided ghoulishly over the remains of a merry-go-round, a skating rink, a bath house. She shivered.

The Summer Book by Tove Jansson

Jansson’s quiet brilliance in The Summer Book crept up on me. The prose is so simple in a way … but bang on. The conversations between the fractious little girl and the weary old grandmother at the book’s heart are priceless. Every summer this quirky twosome come to the same uncultivated island with the child’s father (who is often absent). The pair talk, fight and have adventures, and their conversations are deep, funny and moving.

Seeing the old and the young up close like this made me realise afresh what a unique relationship a child can have with his or her grandparents or their other elders. I now also understand a little more about the crabbiness that can come when you’re old, tired and dizzy and an irrepressible child bounces around you like electrons in an atom.

Here’s a quote …

‘Or maybe it was a safety pin,’ Sophia went on. ‘Some days I can’t remember exactly. But who was he?’ ‘Your grandfather, of course,’ Grandmother said. ‘My husband.’ ‘Are you married?’ Sophia cried in astonishment. ‘Bloody nitwit.’

The Lake by Banana Yoshimoto

Chihiro’s mother has a business that means her family is shunned by many people in their conservative Japanese town. After her mother dies, Chihiro lives in Tokyo and works as a mural artist. She also makes friends (and has occasional, awkward sex) with a straight-talking but quiet genetics student called Nakahjima. They go to a lake to drink tea with two old friends of Nakajima’s and this is where the mystery of his painful past is finally revealed.

This revelation comes from a bedridden woman via ventriloquism with her brother and this seemed perfectly reasonable while I was reading the novel in Japan. Its almost glacial pace also seemed right in that context—as did Yoshimoto’s unusual way with words.

Here’s a quote …

One was sociable and upbeat, a woman of the world who lived in the moment and seemed like really cool person to be around; the other was extremely delicate, like a big, soft flower nodding gently on its stem, looking as if the slightest breeze would scatter its petals.