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 ...

Blue sky and power lines, Geilston Bay. August 2021. The Lost Man   by Jane Harper A slow-burn mystery set in the hot and dry southwest of Queensland (the bit that is closer to Adelaide than Brisbane), I enjoyed  The Lost Man  a lot. While it is something of a murder mystery, the story isn't driven by a police investigation. It progresses through the examination of the intergenerational trauma of one dysfunctional farming family. More exploration of how brutalised Australian men deal with such trauma than boilerplate mystery, Harper adroitly captures the harsh landscape that centres the whole work. It is a strong addition to her previous books and continues the shift towards a more nuanced understanding of masculinity and loneliness in Australian settings. Well worth your time. ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

Self-portrait, Hobart. August 2021.   Song of Solomon   by Toni Morrison A strange mix of genres that touches on the metaphysical without fully entering the world of magical realism. I suspect that I may have missed some of the nuances of the narrative because of my lack of familiarity with African folklore or the oral biblical tradition, so any confusion as to what was going on at times is entirely on me. Still, it is a deeply moving and affecting work, with a feeling of real sorrow at its heart and a range of fascinating and frustrating characters that will remain vivid long in my mind. ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

  Power in the lines, Geilston Bay. August 2021. Wanderers   by Chuck Wendig This is a long and intricate book with a huge cast of characters, every one of them annoying and flawed in their own special way. Just like real life! With this, a mysterious illness arises and stalks across the fractured United States in the midst of an election that pits a career politician (who happens to be a capable but cold and aloof woman) against a reckless and obnoxious billionaire with some decidedly nefarious allies. Yes, the parallels are stark and Wendig is not shy of sharing his thoughts on the matter. The centrepiece of the novel is the emergence of a sleepwalking illness that causes a (seemingly) random group of people to zone out and hit the road, walking with some kind of predetermined destination unknown to all. If you try and stop them, they explode (generally killing anyone nearby). Very messy. The beginning of the book introduces the sullen and irritable teenager Shana, who wakes...

  Broken bottles, Geilston Bay. August 2021. Under the Cold Bright Lights   by Garry Disher This is the first book that I've read by the prolific Australian crime write Garry Disher, and I am confident that it won't be the last. It's an interesting take on the modern police procedural, introducing Detective Alan Auhl, an old-timer back in the job after a few years away. Auhl has been roped into the cold case unit, finding himself surrounded by a younger group who aren't that excited to be sharing an office with an old-timer. He's a likeable chap with a tendency to drift through life, as exhibited by a rather bohemian home life and dissatisfaction with the system failures that lead to too many bad men getting away with crimes against women. We have several puzzling murders to solve against this backdrop, each progressing on multiple fronts and Auhl getting involved in a decidedly irregular fashion. These deviations from the usual tropes keep this one engaging all way...