June: Rock star wannabees 🎸drama school, gentle revenge and mending broken hearts 💔
This month features prize winners and stories to warm your heart and make you laugh out loud
Well hello!
Welcome to the June edition of New Voices Down Under. With it being so cold and wet, it’s been perfect reading weather, hasn’t it? Which is probably why we’re celebrating a bumper selection of new titles in this month’s Books to Love. There seems to be a strong theme of feel-good stories — no complaints here. Sometimes, we all need a place to escape. We also meet author Jordan Prosser as he talks about his wickedly funny novel, Big Time. It’s being described as Almost Famous meets Slaughterhouse-Five. High praise indeed! I’m delighted that we have three of these titles to giveaway in June, so scroll down to Freebies for your chance to be in the running.
Happy Publication Month!
Congratulations to all these hard-working debut authors of fiction and non-fiction. May your books fly off the shelves.
Books to Love
First Year by Kristina Ross
(Published 18 June 2024)
Maeve defies her parents’ desire that she go to university and study something practical to follow her heart and audition for one of the most prestigious drama schools in the country. At seventeen, she is the youngest member, green in life and skill. The third years are untouchable, the second years pitying towards the first years who have no idea what lies ahead. Maeve has a quiet confidence in her ability that is quickly shaken by the talent that surrounds her and teaching staff who seem determined to break them to remake them. To survive, she must dive deep into herself and step out of herself all at the same time. Friendships with her peers are tenuous and competitive until they each start to understand what it is within each of them that sets them apart. None is more important to her than Saxon, the son of an actor, and diametrically opposed to him, Vivien who is more rival than friend. Vivien’s father, the famous actor William Yates, casts a long shadow over his daughter who must prove herself more than most. And Yates’ attention to Maeve is less paternal than predatory. There is Sylvie, the luminous and incredibly talented third year student about whom rumours are plentiful, no less so because of her Svengali-like relationship with the head of school, Quinn Medina. Drama school takes them all to dark and unsettling places and makes them face the essence of who they are. Not all will make it through that first year.
First Year is a novel that strips back the idea of what goes on behind the closed doors of an institution that promises magic and excitement but also exposes what is required to make great art. At times, it is breathtaking and excruciating in its portrayal of the personal and public humiliations and failures the characters endure. Yet this is set against those brilliant moments of breakthrough and understanding that makes the character euphoric and the reader breath a sigh of relief. There is a persistent tension between the physical and mental demands imposed upon the students, and almost masochistically accepted by them, and the inner resilience it takes to constantly seek almost divine understanding. Maeve is being moulded by instruction, lovers and friendship and, because she is so young, each revelation feels so much more monumental. The inner workings of the drama school are a trial by fire. The outside world a place filled with those whom the students deem lesser, as if the city commuters have forsaken their passions and are poorer for it. They are a warning as to the fate that awaits should the students fail.
Kristina Ross’ First Year is the 2024 winner of The Australian/ Vogel’s Award for Young Writers, and sadly, it’s last ever winner as the award has now been discontinued. Ross says that she wrote the book, in part, because no such instruction existed when she was a 17-year-old drama student. It was also a response to how, so often, women actors are portrayed as vapid or their dedication, sacrifice and hard-work dismissed. But First Year also pays homage to all those who have pursued excellence in the creative arts. It highlights the significance of the arts to our culture and social fabric. And, it is a reminder that what we see as the outcome of the creative process—the albums, books, performances and films—comes from a deep need for expression and reflection. First Year is riveting.
To win a copy of First Year, scroll down to Freebies!
A little bit about the author …
Kristina Ross is a writer and producer for the stage and screen. A graduate of the Victorian College of the Arts and a recipient of the Queensland Theatre's Young Playwrights Award, she has had the pleasure of working as an actor for the Melbourne Theatre Company, Red Stitch Actors' Theatre, the Artisan Collective and the ABC. Kristina currently lives on the Gold Coast with her husband and two children.
Kristina Ross’ First Year is the 2024 winner of The Australian / Vogel’s Award for Young Writers that has launched the careers of over a hundred Australian writers, including Tim Winton, Andrew McGahan and Emily O’Grady. Read an interview with Kristina about winning the 2024 Vogels over here
Connect with Kristina Ross
Instagram and Facebook @kketty
Australia: By a copy of the book here
The Little Clothes by Deborah Callaghan
(Published 11 June 2024, ANZ)
38-year-old Audrey Mendes is a brilliant lawyer, in fact, the firm would be lost without her. She lives alone, her personal life a blend of catching up with family, shopping and Tuesday Trivia night at the pub up the road. Her love life is non-existent, although she does fancy one of the guys in her trivia team. One day, on the way home from work, she tries to buy a bottle of wine from the pub only to be completely ignored. Exasperated, she walks out with two bottles of wine. It’s a slippery slope and it’s not long before Audrey finds herself embracing her invisibility and the way everyone finds her hilarious but fails to realise how much Audrey has propped up her family and colleagues. Will they ever?
Deborah Callaghan has written a delightful, funny and sad novel in The Little Clothes. Audrey works so well as the character who carries the narrative because there is a little bit of Audrey in all of us. Overlooked and underappreciated at work, perennially cast in the role of a child by her parents, prickly with neighbours, lusting after the wrong people and carrying a nugget of trauma hidden away where she hopes no one will ever see it. In part hoping to be seen but also wishing everyone would just go away and leave her alone. Her family and her co-workers are often callously disregarding of her feelings and caught up in their own dramas. Audrey sees all this as clearly as she fails to see it in herself, which sounds pretty much like all of us. Callaghan artfully captures Audrey’s sense of rebellion in a world where she is passed over professionally and personally. But the fun of it is watching Audrey weaponise her invisibility through small acts of defiance and telling her colleagues a few home truths about their behaviour. And, it is in this way, she finds a way to reckon with her traumatic past and forgive those she loves, including herself. The Little Clothes is a charming novel that rewards the time spent with it.
A little bit about the author …
Deborah Callaghan worked as an interstate train stewardess, a librarian, and freelance journalist before starting a thirty-five-year publishing career. She was a book publicist, a publisher, and a literary agent. She lives in Sydney with her husband, two daughters and three lovely dogs.
Connect with Deborah Callaghan
Instagram @deborahcallaghanwriting
Find out more about Deborah on her website www.deborahcallaghanwriting.com.au
Australia: Read an extract or buy the book here here
The Borrowed Life of Frederick Fife by Anna Johnston
(Published 2 July 2024 ANZ, 10 September USA/Canada)
Frederick Fife has been lonely since his beloved Dawn died. Life has lost all meaning, money is tight and he is about to be evicted. As he takes a walk by the river one day, he becomes involved in a tragic accident that results in a bizarre case of mistaken identity. Fred finds himself bundled off to the Wattle River Nursing Home where everyone assumes he is the cranky Bernard Greer. Despite trying several times to tell them he is not Bernard, Fred succumbs to the joys of a warm bed, three square meals and good company. He knows it cannot last but he is homeless and its hard to ignore how good it feels to be cared for again. The more he walks in Bernard’s shoes (literally) the more Fred realises that he is not the only one who is lonely. Bernard was estranged from his only daughter and his last letter to her was returned to sender. Maybe Fred can do some good while he’s masquerading as Bernard and mend a family as well as his own broken heart.
Inspiration for this delightful and heartwarming novel came when author Anna Johnston’s own beloved grandfather’s descent into dementia saw him moved into a nursing home. She quit her medical degree to become the social support coordinator just so she could stay close to the real-life Fred. This experience and her own deep love for her grandfather is apparent on every page as Johnston explores the possibilities for a dignified life inside a nursing home. By impersonating Bernard, Fred might have committed an immoral act but his innate kindness, humour and his desire to see others live their best lives makes him a character the reader wants to spend time with. Johnston draws you into this world and neatly balances the ensemble of characters with the tension of when Fred will be found out and if he can resurrect Bernard’s reputation enough to mend a family. For all the lightness of Johnston’s touch this is a serious exploration of homelessness and loneliness in old age and how important it is for social interaction between the generations. The Borrowed Life of Frederick Fife is a lovely and thought-provoking novel.
To win a copy of The Borrowed Life of Frederick Fife, scroll down to Freebies!
A little bit about the author …
Anna Johnston is a former baby, aspiring octogenarian and emerging Australian author with a love for the heartfelt and hilarious. She grew up in country Victoria before moving to Melbourne where she lives joyously with her husband and daughters by the beach. Anna left an imminent career in medicine to follow her heart into her grandfather’s nursing home where she became the social support coordinator, taking great delight in shaking up the usual program. When injury left her unable to continue working in aged care, she began to write about it, channelling her love for older people onto the page. Anna has enjoyed a life-long passion for screenplay, theatre and creative ageing.
Connect with Anna Johnston
Instagram and Facebook @annajohnstonauthor
Find out more about Anna on her website www.annajohnstonauthor
Australia: Read an extract or preorder a copy of the book here
USA and Canada: Preorder a copy of the book here
Jordan Prosser is a writer, filmmaker and performer from Victoria. He is a graduate of the Victorian College of the Arts, and his short films and screenplays have won multiple international accolades. His short story ‘Eleuterio Cabrera’s Beautiful Game’ won the Peter Carey Short Story Award in 2022 and was published in Meanjin.
A little bit about the book …
In a not-too-distant future Australia, the eastern states have become the world’s newest autocracy – a place where pop music is propaganda, science is the enemy and moral indecency is punishable by indefinite detention.
Julian Ferryman, bass player for the Acceptables, returns to Melbourne after a year overseas and reconnects with his bandmates to record their highly anticipated second album. On their whirlwind tour of the east coast, he gets hooked on a new designer drug, F, a powerful synthetic hallucinogen that gives users a glimpse of their own future. Rumour says, the more you take, the further you see … maybe even to the end of time.
Big Time is an anti-fascist ode to the power of pop music, wrapped up in an unforgettable, psychedelic road trip.
Big Time is a pretty wild ride of a story. What were the original strands of inspiration that you ended up weaving together to bring the story to life?
The book is a distillation of countless things I read and watched, many places I visited and many people I met throughout my 20s and early 30s. It’s almost impossible to sift through and pinpoint them all, but some do stand out: Jennifer Egan, Kurt Vonnegut, Donna Tartt, David Mitchell, Chuck Palahniuk; Almost Famous, Station Eleven, Atlanta, Network, Black Mirror. In 2014 I travelled around South and Central America, the UK, Europe and Japan, and my time in those places jump-started a lot of the characters and locations in the book.
So I think it’s a blending together of my deep love for speculative fiction, my fascination with rock bands and their tight-knit, pressure-cooker working relationships, as well as road trip movies and big, sprawling, multi-character, multi-timeline epic novels. It was all then crystallised by simply living through the back half of the 2010s – Brexit, Trump, Tony Abbott, seeing arts budgets slashed year on year, watching populism take hold, and feeling the world grow smaller and colder. That’s what sets up the central conflict in the book: you’ve got a world that’s regressing, essentially going backwards in time; a drug that lets you see into the far future; and then this group of semi-clueless, wannabe-revolutionary musos stuck in the middle.
At the centre of the story is Julian Ferryman, bass player for the Acceptables, who are about to step into the studio to record their much-anticipated second album. There is a lot to say about the members of the band but I’m interested in the intersection between the arts as expression of culture and commentary on that culture. Are you saying that artists have an important role to play in times of social upheaval? Or was it just fun writing a bunch of quite deplorable characters? Both?
That question around whether artists have a responsibility to be thought leaders, and to drive social change, is really at the heart of my book – though it’s not a question I have a definitive answer to, I’m afraid. With the Acceptables, I’m riffing on famous rock bands from the 1960s and 70s, a time when it felt like that type of music was monocultural, and people believed that art could quite literally change the world. That golden period has cast a very, very long shadow which I daresay many artists, even today, can’t help but romanticise, even envy a little. But I think that the modern commodification and capitalisation of art has had a defanging effect – especially in the mainstream, where we’ve seen the very concept of art replaced by ‘content’.
Of course, it all depends where you are in the world, and who you’re talking to. In Australia, we’re particularly dismissive of – if not outright hostile towards – our artists. Because we’re told that art is a trifle, for entertainment purposes only, existing primarily to please and pacify. A hobby. A novelty. A nice-to-have. I think that ultimately the power of artists to stimulate meaningful change is entirely contingent on the respect and significance their public bestows upon them – which, in Australia, can be pretty close to zero.
I know I’m speaking in fairly harsh binaries. I know that there are spectacularly influential artists, and arts movements, all around the world, and in Australia, too. And I personally do believe wholeheartedly that artists can and should be the moral compass of a society. Having said that, artists are still individuals, and can be deeply flawed; they can be prone to malign influence, and bouts of greed and megalomania, just like any politician or star athlete (or cult leader). There’s an upper limit to the amount of influence we should place in the hands of any individual, artists included. And that’s what was fun about writing the characters in my book: while many of their hearts are in the right place, they’re decidedly not the people you want to be running the country or making any decisions about its future. It really is true that you shouldn’t meet your heroes – and the more powerful and influential your heroes become, the more suspicious you ought to be of them.
In the novel, eastern Australia has ceded from the rest of the country to become the FREA, the Federal Republic of East Australia. It has closed its borders to the rest of the world and become an autocratic state. It’s a frightening yet eerily familiar set of circumstances. What were you thinking about as you were writing Big Time?
For me, this is one of those instances you often hear speculative fiction writers talk about, where they begin to see one of their fictional ideas play out in real life. I started writing Big Time in 2014, around the time that Brexit was first being floated. I was in Berlin, a once-divided city, and had been reading tons about North Korea. So my version of all that was to separate east and west Australia (an idea that has plenty of historical precedent to begin with). Fast-forward six years and we saw Australia getting carved up by Covid, with WA, the “hermit kingdom”, off doing its own thing, seemingly untouched by the brutal lockdowns we were experiencing in Victoria and elsewhere in the east.
To be clear, I’m not equating those Covid lockdowns to the fascist state in my book – I’m not one of those ‘Dictator Dan’ idiots. But the feeling of living through it – the feeling of having one’s world shrink down in that way, movement restricted and families separated – the day-to-day experience and isolation and unease of it all definitely informed the world of my book and the lives of my characters.
In the Federal Republic of East Australia, there’s a hallucinogenic drug with a street name of F, which allows users to glimpse their future. This is the well-spring that allows you to explore the nature of time, self-determinism and the difficulties we have as humans in resting in uncertainty. But it’s a very tricky topic to cover as an author. Is it a curiosity of yours, a means to structure the novel in a way that plays on our sense of time or something else altogether?
It’s both of those things! Time travel is an obsession of mine. I love the way it sits at the intersection of storytelling and science; physics and faith. Time travel is such a new narrative conceit (only really 150 years old), and it feels like a complete evolution in human storytelling tradition, a device we’ll be using for the next million years.
For millennia we’ve told stories about fate, about characters doomed to live and die in certain ways; puppets to predeterminist gods. Time travel narratives upend that, not only structurally, but by putting the power and knowledge back in the characters’ hands. Rather than letting them simply march blindly towards their fate, these stories can pull a character aside and show them that fate before it happens – and what then? Well, then I think it gets even more interesting. Because then you have characters who fight against that fate, armed with new knowledge, and you have the characters who still give into it. Either way, it’s a more active psychological choice. And that’s just good drama, plain and simple. If your story ultimately ends the same way it always would have – with a character understanding their fate and submitting to it regardless – I reckon that only doubles down on the tragedy of it all. The Greeks would have bloody loved it.
You are a writer, filmmaker and performer. How does writing a novel differ from your other practices. And in what ways is it similar?
I resumed writing this book in 2021, specifically because the film industry had taken so many hits during Covid and the future of collaborative art forms felt shaky at best. I was just desperate for an outlet; I wanted to make something, and I was sick of ‘performing’ over Zoom. And in hindsight, it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. Not only because it led to the amazing opportunity of having it published, but because of the creative closure and satisfaction it gave me. Screenplays are art, I know they are – but at the end of the day, they’re still a blueprint for another work of art which may or may not ever get made. Whereas the other day, I picked up a copy of my finished, printed book for the first time, and I’ve never felt anything quite like it; knowing that that was the final version, the version that would be out in the world.
Creative constraints are, I think, what make movies and stage plays so great – but it’s the extraordinary freedom of writing novels, or any sort of prose, which was such an amazing breath of fresh air after ten years of writing scripts. You’re allowed to simply describe a character’s internal thought process without needing to convey it in some clever, economical, visual way (‘tell’ instead of ‘show’ – what a novelty!). You can spend an entire page describing five seconds of action or you can skip a full century in a single sentence. It’s elastic to the point of being truly limitless. The other thing about writing films, of course, is money. Every single word in a script comes with a dollar amount attached to it. I’ve personally always been drawn to long and complex stories, sagas full of intricate set pieces, which is a terrible affliction for a screenwriter in 2024. Writing a novel is like giving yourself a blank cheque and complete impunity to spend it. I shudder to think how much Big Time: The Movie would cost to make. (Screen adaptation rights currently available.)
Finally, while I love working with other people (genuinely!), there’s something to be said for complete creative control. Collaborating on a film, or a show, naturally the story’s going to get pulled in lots of different directions, and it’s never going to end up quite the same as what you imagined when you started (which is generally a good thing). But Big Time feels like the purest, most intact personal creative expression I’ve ever had the chance to make – warts and all.
To WIN a copy of Big Time, scroll down to Freebies
Connect with Jordan Prosser
Instagram and Facebook @jordanprosser
Find out more about Jordan on his website www.jordanprosser.com
Australia: Read an extract or preorder a copy of the book here
Freebies!!
If you enjoyed the interview with Jordan Prosser, then this is your chance to win a copy of Big Time. Thanks to the University of Queensland Press for providing us with **two** copies to giveaway. All you have to do is send a reply email with the answer to this very tricky question.
What is the name of the band Julian Ferryman plays bass for?
Thanks to Penguin Random House Australia for providing us with one copy of The Borrowed Life of Frederick Fife. To be the lucky winner, you send a reply email with the answer to this question.
Who is Fred mistaken for in the Wattle River Nursing Home?
Thanks to Allen and Unwin Australia for providing us with **three** copies of First Year. To win a copy, send a reply email with the answer to this question.
How old was Maeve when she was accepted into drama school?
The fine print: Giveaways are currently only open to subscribers and you must reside within Australia to be eligible to win (postage!) The winners will be picked at random and will be emailed on Tuesday 16 July 2024. Good luck!
Remember: You can send one reply email with the answer to one, two, or all three of the questions. No need to send separate emails.
Newbie News
The winner of the 2024 Penguin Literary Prize is Melbourne-based Chloe Adams with her manuscript The Occupation, a historical novel inspired by her grandmother’s time in Japan in the late 1940s as part of the Allied occupation force. The Occupation tells the story of a young woman who travels to Japan in 1948 as part of the Allied occupation force. While there, she is confronted with moral ambiguity and the consequences of her own transgressions.
Now in its seventh year, the Penguin Literary Prize is the richest prize for an unpublished manuscript in Australia. The novel was chosen from a shortlist of six. Chloe will be awarded $20,000 and the chance to publish with Penguin Random House Australia. Last year’s winner was Michelle See-Tho for her novel, Jade and Emerald, which is being published in July.
The End
And here we are at the end of another edition of the newsletter. I hope some of the books discussed have tickled your fancy. Please leave a comment, follow us on socials and come back again next month where there will be more bookish news, reviews, interviews and freebies. See you soon!
Don’t forget, you can always catch up with us on Instagram @newvoicesdownunder
And, if you’d like to subscribe to Meredith’s author newsletter, you can subscribe to A Cuppa With Meredith here The next edition is out Monday 5 August!