This will hurt me...

Starlings, Lindisfarne. August 2021. All the Birds, Singing   by Evie Wyld As an oddly structured novel, the book features alternating chapters from the perspective of our narrator's present (told in the past tense) and her past (told in the present tense). Those chapters set in the present progress in an even and linear fashion. Those chapters set in the past hop and leap backwards in a disconnected and disjointed way. While this is an innovative way to capture our protagonist's haphazard and traumatic past, the fragmented nature of the telling is confusing at times. There is some evocative writing here, with those sections set on the remote sheep station and in the present particularly resonant. Other sections failed to convince, with the strange relationship with the withered Otto and the period of sex work in a port town in the Pilbara striking a bit of a dull note to my ear. We know very little about our central character, as Wyld lets the past emerge in fragments and half

Pipes, Geilston Bay. August 2021. The Tie That Binds by Kent Haruf Despite the arduous and grim lives of the characters within, The Tie That Binds is an extremely gentle novel. There is an ease with which Haruf's prose emerges on the page, a plain-speaking directness that carries significant emotional heft. Covering 80 years, the novel is a slow burner that starts at the ending, whips back around to the beginning and meanders across a lifetime of (largely) sadness, missed opportunity and resignation to a life suffocated by a hateful and bitter man. Told in snippets of memories and assumed events, the book bears an elegant sense of time and place rarely seen. The town of Holt, Colorado, is a small but exquisitely realised world. It saddens me to think that Haruf's oeuvre only stretched to six novels, but I am looking forward to reading the four that I haven't read. ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 1/2

  Droplets on a leaf, Geilston Bay. August 2021. Exploded View   by Carrie Tiffany Hmmm. Perhaps the fact that cars are quite possibly the least interesting things that I can imagine explains my coolness to this one. It's a bleak and sombre book, but I never quite believed it. The novel progresses through what is essentially one unbroken stream of consciousness from the mind of a young girl. Our narrator - dealing with significant neglect and abuse - struck me as too uneven to fully accept as authentic. This may well be due to her use of a Holden car manual to process her trauma. Still, there is an incongruity to her singular prescience, acumen and utter lack of agency that struck me as unconvincing. There is an implausibility to the car journey that serves as the centre point of the story, which is not helped by the feeling that the author gave up on it a third of the way through. I found the entire thing uneven and frustrating, which is disappointing as there are moments of great