Kick start your reading year with great Australian writing
Famous writers, troubled women and sisterly love are this month's themes. Plus, your chance to win copies!
Well hello!
So, here we are, starting a new year with a bunch of great fiction coming our way in 2024. I want to say a big hello and welcome to our new subscribers. Out of curiosity, I have a look at where we all live. While most subscribers are Australian based, there’s a smattering (11%) who come from other places around the globe, including the US, Canada, Morocco, the Netherlands, Thailand, wee Norfolk Island and our dear friends across the trench in Aotearoa, New Zealand. So lovely to have you all here.
This year, I thought I’d mix it up a bit. I’m adding in debut non-fiction as well. I’ll continue featuring reviews and our Meet the Author segment. Not to mention the ever-popular giveaways.
I have some real treats in story for you this month. Two very different novels that both tackle issues around mental illness and grief. These are stories that will make you stop and think. I loved them both. And, in our Meet the Author segment, we get to talk to Amy Brown about her extraordinary debut novel, My Brilliant Sister.
Let’s go!
Happy Publication Month!
You know it’s the beginning of a new year when all these wonderful titles start landing in the mailbox. Congratulations to all these hard-working debut authors on the massive achievement of being published. May your books fly off the shelves.
Books to Love
Tidelines by Sarah Sasson
(Published 30 January 2024 ANZ)
Grub is spending an idyllic summer with her older teenage brother, Elijah. Swimming, surfing, hanging out. They meet a guy named Zed and instinct tells Grub that he’s trouble but that doesn’t stop Zed fast becoming a guy that Elijah likes to hang out with. Under Zed’s influence, playing his beloved cello gives way to smoking dope in a darkened bedroom where Grub is no longer allowed to go. The guys go surfing, reluctantly allowing Grub to tag along and make up an uncomfortable third. But Grub is also drawn to Zed. A boy who is, as the family comes to call him, a ‘survivalist,’ attracted by the wholesome happy Donohue family.
As their lives drift into adulthood, Elijah’s once clear path— to go to the Conservatorium of Music and pursue a career as a professional cellist— is abandoned in favour of a different artistic path. Grub goes into medicine, makes it all the way to her internship before realising she can’t be this person. Zed drifts along, managing bars, and dabbling in the darker side of life. Elijah sinks further and further into Zed’s world until he disappears altogether. The Donohue’s unravel. Cast adrift by grief, Grub blames Zed for her brother’s disappearance. If only they’d never met him that summer.
Sasson’s exploration of love between teenage siblings, their journey from a mostly idyllic childhood in the bosom of a loving family is tender and evocatively lifts off the page. She explores the descent into addiction and mental illness with authenticity and compassion. The aftermath of grief, the struggle to make sense of it, to struggle onwards, is explored in such a way that hope is never far away. This is a story to tug the heart strings, populated with complex and compelling characters who are both singular and inextricably linked by the ties of shared experience and love.
To WIN a copy of Tidelines, scroll down to Freebies
A little bit about the author …
Sarah Sasson is a physician-writer living on Gadigal land in Sydney. Her poetry, short-fiction and creative non-fiction have been published in various places, including Meanjin, Medium and Grieve Anthology. In 2021, Sarah edited the anthology Signs of Life — a collection themed around first- and second-hand experiences of mental and physical illness, and of caregiving. Tidelines was shortlisted for the 2020 Varuna House Publisher Introduction Program and longlisted for the 2020 Queensland Writers' Centre Publishable Program under the title Some Things Beautiful. Sarah currently works as a clinician and scientist.
Find Sarah Sasson
Instagram @sarahsassonwrites
Website www.sarahsasson.com
Australia: Buy the book here
Everything is Perfect by Maxine Fawcett
(Published 6 February 2024 ANZ)
Cassie Prince’s life is perfect. She lives in a beautiful beachside suburb with her husband and two adorable children. Cassie took a year off to help with their youngest, Danny, who was having some issues but given both the kids are school-aged, she has a lot of time on her hands. Time to scroll endlessly through social media, go crazy with on-line shopping, beauty appointments and time at the gym to try and maintain some semblance of her former youthful glory. Time also to realise that she’s bored senseless by her marriage and her life. Then there’s the whole issue of her mother. Even though she’s in a nursing home on the other side of the world, it’s not quite far enough away to stop the feelings of guilt or those pesky memories that keep trying to bubble to the surface.
Distraction arrives in the form of Chris Lancaster. He’s the new hot dad at school who also happens to be recently widowed, raising five little ones on his own. This is a man crying out to be rescued. And Cassie throws herself into the task with, unfortunately, all her heart. It’s a toxic cocktail that is not going to end well for anyone.
Maxine Fawcett perfectly blends comedy with the serious in this story about staring down the barrel at menopause and grappling with past demons when they come back to bite you. As Cassie descends deeper and deeper into the grip of her blossoming mental crisis, her behaviour becomes increasingly erratic and immoral. Fawcett, however, has a firm grip on her material. This is smart writing combined with wry wit. It’s the kind of novel that can be read in one sitting (as I did) but leaves you thoughtful as well as entertained. What’s not to love about that?
A little bit about the author …
Maxine Fawcett lives in Sydney, where she runs her own media and marketing agency with her husband. She’s written for MamaMia in Australia and Mummypages in the UK and gained a place on HARDCOPY the renowned Australian writers development program. Everything is Perfect is her debut novel.
Find Maxine Fawcett
Instagram @maxinefawcettwriter
Website www.maxinefawcett.com
Australia & NZ Preorder the book, e-book or audio book or read an extract here
Meet the Author
Amy Brown is an award-winning New Zealand-Australian writer and teacher who lives in Naarm/Melbourne. She has published three collections of poetry, four children’s novels, and completed a PhD at the University of Melbourne. In 2022 she was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Prize for an Unpublished Manuscript that became her debut adult novel, My Brilliant Sister.
A little bit about the book …
Stella Miles Franklin’s autobiographical novel My Brilliant Career launched one of the most famous names in Australian letters. Funny, bold, often biting about its characters, the novel and its young author had a lot in common. Miles went on to live a large, fiercely independent and bohemian life of travel, art and freedom. Not so her beloved sister, Linda. Quiet, contained, conventional, Linda was the complete opposite of Stella. The family peacemaker, she married the man Stella would not, bore a son and died of pneumonia at 25.
In this reflective, witty and revealing novel, Amy Brown rescues Linda, setting her in counterpoint with Stella, and with the lives of two contemporary women: Ida, a writer whose writing life is on hold as she teaches and raises her young daughter; and Stella, a singer-songwriter who has sacrificed everything for a career, now forcibly put on hold. Binding the two is the novella that Linda might have written to her sister Stella – a brilliant alternative vision of My Brilliant Career.
Can you tell us a little about the inspiration behind this story?
I first read Stella Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career when I was in my late twenties, recently married, and adrift between careers. Franklin’s somewhat autobiographical portrayal of the protagonist Sybylla and her younger sister Gertie, based on Stella’s own sister Linda, hit a nerve for me. The binary opposition between a “forward-hearted firebrand”, who shuns the narrow, dusty path of conventional femininity in favour of a career as a writer, and the “pretty peacemaker”, who pleases her parents and marries an eligible bachelor, felt like compelling caricatures of the divided parts of myself at that time. So, I dug deeper – I wanted to know about the real relationship behind these fictional sisters.
Ida is a woman struggling to balance her creative self with the practicalities of modern life. Miles, the singer-songwriter, has eschewed everything for her art. In the middle is Linda, Miles Franklin’s sister, who has been written out of her own story in so many ways. Three separate voices, in different time periods. Why did you choose to structure it this way?
What started as an historical novel solely focussed on finding Linda Franklin’s voice, became over nearly a decade of writing, thinking, and living, a way of reconciling the different parts of myself that Stella and Linda seemed to represent. The three-part form wasn’t a deliberate decision from the outset; it came gradually, organically growing to suit the questions that were bothering me. Initially, this question was: “who was Stella Miles Franklin’s sister”? Then, it morphed into, “at what stage did the sisters’ paths in life diverge?” Then, “if these women were alive in 2021, who might they have been”? I wanted to bookend the novel-within-a-novel with two alternate versions of the same woman’s life – a kind of “sliding doors” thought experiment centred around the historical starting point.
In recreating (resurrecting?) Linda’s voice, in what way, if any, did it shed new light on Miles Franklin as a person and as the writer of My Brilliant Career?
After finishing My Brilliant Career and not being able to let go of these sisters, I borrowed Jill Roe’s excellent biography of Miles Franklin from the library and read it greedily and selectively, hunting for mentions of Linda and interactions between Stella and Linda. This then led me to Franklin’s letters and diaries. I remember spending some of the summer holiday between school terms in Sydney at the Mitchell Library, squinting at Stella’s spidery script. I think the most poignant letter, for me, was one sent not long before Linda’s death, illustrated by her baby, Teddy. This is all to say that reading behind My Brilliant Career illuminated for me the tender and quotidian minutiae of Stella’s life, which of course exists in every writer’s life. This brilliant, whip-smart, hilarious, audacious, at times insufferable and others utterly charming writer was also a daughter, a friend, a sister. And these roles contribute to the role of writer.
You’re a poet, a writer of children’s books, an essayist. How did these forms of writing inform or influence your approach to writing the novel?
My previous poetry collection, Neon Daze, a verse journal of the first four months of motherhood, came unexpectedly as the manuscript for My Brilliant Sister lay dormant. While it’s a completely different form, the ideas it considers are similar; without realising it at the time I think it helped me figure out what do next with the novel. More generally, I think my background in poetry has given me a high tolerance for unconventional plot shapes or means of cohering a narrative (motifs, symbols, repetition) – another way of putting this is that I’m not a natural at neat beginnings, middles and ends. That said, writing the children’s novels was a valuable apprenticeship for me in using more traditional narrative form – with the Pony Tales series, my main interest was in writing the kind of books that I loved as a child, so there was little call for experimentation. And, while my approach to writing essays is quite different again, I think the research I’ve done as an essayist (especially for my PhD) prepared me well for writing the historical section of My Brilliant Sister.
To WIN a copy of My Brilliant Sister, scroll down to Freebies
Find Amy Brown
Australia & NZ Buy a copy of the book here
Freebies!
What better way to kick start a new year than with a couple of freshly-minted titles to add to your 2024 reading stack. If you’re new here, this is your chance to get you hands on one of the books we’ve talked about this month. And who doesn’t love a freebie? Anyway, it’s our way of sharing the love of a good story.
This month we owe our debt of gratitude to the wonderful people at Simon and Schuster Australia for offering you the chance to win one of **three** copies of My Brilliant Sister by Amy Brown. All you have to do is answer this very tricky question.
What was the name of Miles Franklin’s sister?
Another generous supporter of New Voices Down Under is the fabulous Affirm Press. This month, they are offering you the chance to win one of **two** copies of Tidelines. All you have to do is answer this question.
Who does Grub blame for Elijah’s disappearance?
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 19 February 2024. Good luck!
(Remember, you can enter twice if you’d like to win both books. You can answer both questions in a single email.)
The End
And here we are at the end of our first newsletter for 2024. 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 February!