Stella
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In My Mother’s Hands is a moving and disquieting memoir of life in a family where silence ruled and nobody felt safe, but where everyone remained as loyal, and even as loving, as they could. Ward’s story of her family, and especially of her mother, is full of insight and frank intelligence, and shows what terrible stress and struggle sometimes went on behind closed doors in an era that stigmatised mental illness and idealised traditional family life.
Ellen van Neerven moves with ease between realism and fantasy, using elements of myth and mysticism in her storytelling. From one story to the next, the content is always rich and suggestive and the writing is always beautiful and clever. Each of these stories is told with passion and conviction; van Neerven writes with the confidence, maturity, and subtlety of someone twice her age, and with startling originality.
Now middle-aged, Jen lives alone in the rainforest landscape of her childhood, where the dark stories from that time still haunt her. Once a teacher, she’s now an artist who gives private lessons to a talented schoolboy who functions as a conduit, giving her news of the local community. So when he arrives one day disturbed by the disappearance of a fellow student, it’s the beginning of a long story that winds back into the past.
Set in the 1990s, before social media and mobile phones dominated adolescent social life, Alice Pung’s novel tells the story of Lucy Lam, a working-class child from a Chinese family who wins a scholarship to attend the ‘exclusive’ private girls’ school Laurinda.This novel is much more than just a story of high school; it explores the workings of class conflict and racial difference in a hothouse atmosphere and it’s an incisive critique of the limitations of a privileged upbringing.
The Golden Age is a story of exile, transition, and resilience; it shows the power of vocation and the fragility of love. And in its account of how it feels to belong to a displaced, marginalised and vulnerable race recently threatened with genocide. It has some delicate reverberations for the oldest Australians as well as for the newest.
Jimmy Flick isn’t an ordinary child, and as his story progresses we quickly realise that he has some unspecified condition, probably somewhere on the autism spectrum. He can’t slow down, he can’t calm down, and he can’t respond appropriately in difficult or even dangerous situations, but his world view is unique and full of unexpected insights.
The sciences and the humanities are traditionally thought of as separate, or even as opposite, fields of study and endeavour, but Christine Kenneally moves on from this kind of thinking in her fascinating exploration of DNA and what it tells us about our individual, social, and anthropological pasts, bringing genetics and history together via the concepts of ancestry and inheritance.
Children have their own rules and laws, separate and often secret from the adult world. This vividly imagined and quietly disturbing novel, focused on two neighbouring families, is about a group of boys on the cusp of adolescence, over a few weeks of summer.
It’s been ten years since Robert Farquharson’s car veered off a road in country Victoria after dark and careered into a dam, where his three sons, trapped inside, were drowned. With her trademark stylistic precision and lucidity, Helen Garner shows how her own and everyone else’s immediate human reactions to such a story – horror, sympathy, empathy, instinct – are balanced against the relentlessly formal logic and causality that shape the due process of the law.
In this collection of stories, closely linked by subject and theme, the souls of ten animals speak to the reader. All ten have died in some kind of human conflict: a fastidious cat in the Great War trenches, an oversexed mussel in Pearl Harbor, a philosophical parrot abandoned in war-torn Beirut.
Maxine Beneba Clarke is a performance poet, acutely aware of the accents, idioms and cadences of the spoken word, and her gift with voices – their origins, their meanings, their struggles and triumphs with alien English – is at the heart of this collection of stories. Although these are stories about inequalities of power in the intersections of class and race, Beneba Clarke also uses narrative voices and the effects of dialogue to show characters attempting to create and assert a coherent self through the power of speech.
“Emily Bitto’s debut novel The Strays is about families, art, isolation, class, childhood, friendship, and the power of the past. It’s both moving and sophisticated; both well-researched and original; both intellectually engaging and emotionally gripping.” – 2015 Stella Prize Judges
