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Ronnie Scott’s second novel explores themes of abandonment, attachment and the idea of home. Characterised from the beginning by a sense of uncertainty, Shirley is a novel where anything can happen, and probably will. Names are ambiguous, sexuality is fluid, relationships are impermanent; the world is in flux.
This exquisite novel charts many different intimacies, both physical and metaphorical – intimacies of confidences and private rituals, of eating and touching, and of the public gaze and its counterpoint, the personal realm. Among its most vivid are the intimacies imparted through the work of an interpreter, the nuances of language conveying meaning beyond mere words.
Set in Baltimore in the near future, medical science is outrunning regulation and a black market of robotic limbs and implants has developed for HPM – human performance modification – servicing a willing population. So willing, people are ready to chance their luck with shady doctors moonlighting in back-alley operations.Â
Though I knew the gist of the issues raised by The Mother before I began – I’d read the devastating stories of victims of domestic violence, watched the news, and thought I understood the issues – this novel still shocks.
https://newtownreviewofbooks.com.au/mandy-beaumont-the-furies-and-amy-remeikis-on-reckoning-reviewed-by-jessica-stewart/ Two books released in this nascent year recount women’s trauma and silencing by men, and their rage. In On Reckoning, an essay in Hachette’s ‘On’ series, Guardian journalist Amy Remeikis documents the rising tide of women’s anger that led to thousands marching in last year’s March4Justice. In The Furies,novelist Mandy Beaumont carries that anger in a compelling story …
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After the success of her debut, Kokomo, in 2020, Victoria Hannan’s second novel is another study of friendship. Its five characters have been friends since university. They are now in their thirties and each is grappling with a pre mid-life but post first-flush weariness. But this weariness is not ennui; through their shifting points of view, Hannan brings us their shared sorrow.
Oh William! is another extraordinary insight into being human.
Torrey Peters has written a complex and deeply moving novel about the ties that bind us – ties that govern our choices about who we love, how we love, and the costs. Detransition, Babyfollows a trio: Reece, a trans woman; her ex, detransitioned Ames (formerly Amy); and Ames’s new partner, a cis heterosexual woman, Katrina, as they each struggle with the idea of parenthood.
Someone recently tweeted that if we gave male violence the same attention as Covid, men would have been under curfew for ever. Published in 2021, this prescient novel deals with both themes, taking the sickness inhabiting the world as an extended metaphor. Though the book’s few time-markers place it in separate periods in the millenium’s teens, the before times, both the virus and the impact of male predation are woven throughout as real and malevolent presences.
On an ordinary summer’s day in 1969, in a small Australian town, a new mother finds her baby missing from her cot. In this gothic novel, Cassandra Austin draws out the isolation and claustrophobia of new motherhood — and the judgement heaped upon ‘bad mothers’. My review of Cassandra Austin's novel, Like Mother, is up …
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