Love in a time of war...
finding your voice and a new collection of short stories. Fantastic advice on writing and publishing. Plus, three wonderful books to win!
Well hello!
This month’s reviews are a real mix of wonderful writing, covering such themes as a forbidden love in a time of war, exploring what it’s like to grow up, and find a way out of, a life of poverty and dysfunctional families. A short story collection that explores First Nations experience viewed through a lens of speculative fiction. A humorous and laser-focused story about race and identity and a romantic comedy about becoming a proper grown-up.
Our July Meet the Author features Jessica Seaborn as she talks about her new novel Perfect-ish. Jess’s background is in publicity for bother TV and publishing. She shares some amazing advice on getting published and getting heard. It’s a very generous Q&A. Thank you Jess!
Of course, there are copies to win of many of these books plus some more good advice for emerging writers from Agents and Books. And more award announcements.
Some wonderful reads to add to your teetering TBRs!
Happy publication day!
This title slipped though the net in the last edition of New Voices Down Under. Roseghetto is a fantastic read and deserves time in the spotlight.
Roseghetto Kirsty Jagger (4 July 2023)
Journalist, Shayla, returns to Rosemeadow, the public housing estate where she grew up, to cover a story about it being demolished to make way for a new housing estate. The locals have been evicted and taken with them their stories. But her story lives within her and the memories bubble to the surface. The good, like making friends with fellow gutter kids, Charlie and Sean, and the relationship with her loving but disapproving grandparents. The bad, her violent army dad and her mother, struggling to raise three kids on no money, who replaces one bad man with another. As a child, her only refuge from an emotionally and physically violent life was through books. Now, the only way to make sense of it, is to write about the Rosemeadow she knew and how it shaped her.
Roseghetto is a powerful novel that feels so real that it is, at times, a fraught and uncomfortable read. Jagger does not shy away from showing the violence of Shayla’s childhood on the page. Yet, the incredible sensitivity to the nature of a life living on the edge of homelessness and very much in poverty also means that Roseghetto is rich in details. Jagger shows the conflict between loving, being loved insufficiently and choosing the wrong kinds of love. While all the time your heart is breaking for Shayla, the reader is also willing her on, pushing her to make the right decisions, choices that will help her escape the poverty cycle. There is nothing gratuitous about Roseghetto, Jagger’s writing is too strong for that but it is a stark portrait of a life Jagger knows from lived experience and it makes for coming-of-age story that lingers long after the last page is turned.
Buy a copy here
Books to Love
At the Foot of the Cherry Tree by Alli Parker
Published 2 August 2023
Eighteen-year-old Gordon Parker finds himself posted to Japan at the end of World War II to the Allied base in the town of Kure. Sixteen-year-old Nobuko “Cherry” lives here after a miraculous escape from the ravages of Hiroshima. He is a trainee medic and Cherry is one of the many girls who find work on the base as cleaners. The soldiers are banned from associating with the Japanese and the Military Police enforce the rules, but Gordon and Cherry meet in secret and fall in love. While they marry under Japanese law, their marriage is not recognised by the Australian Government. Worse, the White Australia Policy means Gordon cannot bring Cherry home as his bride. Leaving Cherry, alone and pregnant, in Japan Gordon is forced to return home. In Australia, Gordon must face racism, post-war anti-Japanese sentiment and confront the misgivings of his family in an attempt to bring his wife and child home. The question is, is hope and love enough?
Alli Parker has taken the true history of her grandparents and spun it into a novel that shines a light on the post-war period of history when, across the globe, people were attempting to redefine their lives that had been irrevocably altered by the long-lasting conflict. At the Foot of the Cherry Tree is both a fascinating insight into this period as much as it is a moving love story. It celebrates the immense courage it took and the refusal to let hope die in a battle against forces bigger than them both. Unlike many soldiers who simply abandoned their Japanese wives and resumed life in Australia, Gordon refused to give up. It’s a powerful love story and while it takes centre stage (rightly so) Parker includes so much fascinating details about life in Japan in these years. At the Foot of the Cherry Tree is a sweeping narrative that made it a book that draws the reader in and keeps them turning the pages.
To WIN a copy of At the Foot of the Cherry Tree, scroll down to Freebies.
A little bit about the author …
Alli Parker is a Japanese-Australian author and screenwriter. Her writing credits include episodes of crime drama series Jack Irish, romantic thriller series Secret Bridesmaids' Business and mystery telemovie series Ms Fisher's Modern Murder Mysteries. At the Foot of the Cherry Tree is a novelisation of the true story of Australia's first Japanese war bride and Alli's grandmother.
Find Alli Parker
Instagram: @alliparkerwriter
Website: http://www.alliparker.com/
Preorder, buy the book or read an extract here
But the Girl by Jessica Zhan Mei Yu (1 August 2023)
(Also available in the UK and US)
Girl is born the day after her mother, father and grandmother, Ma, Ikanyu and Ah Ma, arrived in Australia from Malaysia. Her mother said she kept her pelvic floor muscles clenched the whole way just to make sure she was born here and could get an Australian passport. Many years later, as a PhD student, she travels to Scotland to take up a writing residence and work on her post-colonial novel. But instead of becoming immersed in the community of fellow creatives, lethargy overtakes her. The physical and emotional distance from her tight-knit family finds her dwelling on her childhood and the stories of her parents and grandmothers upbringing. Rather than write, she models for the artist, Clementine, and tries to figure out why she feels the subject of her PhD, Sylvia Plath, is both an obsession and repellent. As the relationship with Clementine becomes complicated by their need to see and be seen as who they truly are, Girl wonders where is her place in a world that is both racist and sexist. Is she living her dream or her father’s dream? And is it right that she’s fallen in love with a literature that doesn’t even recognise her?
Jessica Zhan Mei Yu’s But the Girl is a novel that plays with form and plays with its reader. First and foremost, But the Girl is funny. Self-discovery is borne out of moments of acute observation that sees Girl juxtapose her very real dilemmas with a sense of irreverence. She’s a millennial with none of the regular angst. Rather, Girl has her own unique version of navel-gazing. She’s a scholarship student, bright, beautiful and self-deprecating but she also carries within her a multitude of contradictions. As she struggles to articulate exactly what is wrong with her situation, she is also highly articulate about the place in life she finds herself. She vacillates between loving Clementine and finding her abhorrent. She has no idea how to fit in with the other artists on the residential but that’s no different to how her life was at school and University. How is a young woman of Asian heritage supposed to tackle the cannon of the English Literature that she adores when she only ever finds herself in its pages crudely or cruelly depicted? Somehow, Jessica Zhan Mei Yu pulls these disparate threads together in what is a beguiling novel filled with heart and humour yet doesn’t shy away from tackling the big questions about identity.
To WIN a copy of But the Girl, scroll down to Freebies.
A little bit about the author …
Jessica Zhan Mei Yu holds a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Melbourne, where she currently teaches. In 2020, But the Girl was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literature Award for an Unpublished Manuscript. She has won various prizes and fellowships for her work and her writing has been published in Best Australian Poems, Overland, Yen, the Sydney Morning Herald, the White Review and more.
Find Jessica Zhan Mei Yu
Website: https://www.jessicazmyu.com/
Buy the book or read an extract here
Firelight by John Morrissey (1 August 2023)
Firelight is a short story collection that uses speculative fiction to explore the First Nations experience. It opens with the story Five Minutes. It’s about an invasion of inter-galactic caterpillars that have returned to earth to retrieve their arsenal, not expecting that the human species to have built their lives on top of the dump. In Special Economic Zone, a young homeless women inherits an unlikely bequest from her mining tycoon father.
Prisoners, ghosts, the homeless and estranged families populate the pages of these short and sharp stories. Sometimes almost vignettes, John Morrissey explores dispossession and disconnection. The humour shines through as Morrissey uses it to lure the reader into the heart of the matter - investigating the impact of colonisation on identity. The diverse range of characters prove Morrissey is a brilliant and astute observer of humanity. The writing is clever and concise and is reminiscent of the work of Noongar writer, Claire Coleman.
To WIN a copy of Firelight, scroll down to Freebies.
A little but about the author...
John Morrissey is a Melbourne writer of Kalkadoon descent. His work has been published in Overland, Voiceworks, Meanjin and the anthology This All Come Back Now. He was the winner of the 2020 Boundless Mentorship and the runner-up for the 2018 Nakata Brophy Prize.
Read an extract here
Meet the Author
Born and raised in Brisbane, Jessica Seaborn lives in Sydney where she works as a television and film publicist at Stan. Prior to this, she worked at SBS, Allen & Unwin and HarperCollins. Her writing has been published in The Sydney Morning Herald, NewsCorp’s Body & Soul and Feminartsy. In 2020, she did Curtis Brown Creative where she completed the first draft of her debut novel, Perfect-ish.
A little bit about the book …
Prue is about to turn thirty and feels like everyone else is living their best life. Her friends are posting online about their amazing relationships, exciting travel plans and newborn babies. Prue, on the other hand, has been dumped by her fiancé, she's dropped out of uni, and her job counselling lonely people only makes her feel more alone.
With the help of her best friend, Delia, Prue decides to turn her life around before her milestone birthday: ditch the job, move out of her brother’s house, and find love. But when Delia’s perfect marriage begins to crack, and a secret threatens to shatter their friendship, Prue realises there’s a difference between seeming to have a perfect life and finding your own perfect-ish life. And maybe being far from picture perfect is perfectly okay.
Can you tell us about the inspiration behind this story?
The book was the amalgamation of a few ideas.
I’ve always been fascinated by society’s tendency to project the best part of our lives onto others, particularly online. I’ve certainly been guilty of hiding certain parts of my life on social media, and when COVID-19 hit, I realised just how many others were doing it as well. Friends gushing about their husbands were suddenly leaving them, believing they were never in love with them to begin with. Friends with enviable jobs were realising they were actually unhappy with the direction of their career. And friends who always insisted on living in the inner-city were suddenly moving further away, seeking a different lifestyle.
I also found it interesting how anxious people can get as they approach 30. The desire to own property or get married or have children seems to accelerate the closer we get to exiting our twenties. I certainly had a habit of continually reassessing my life as I progressed through my twenties – I’d moved to Sydney and left a relationship to work in publishing but only made it five years before I realised the career I thought I wanted, I no longer did.
The book also explores loneliness, something I experienced when I moved to Sydney at 21. It was incredibly hard to form new friends when I moved and it wasn’t until I got older that I realised just how many others are going through the same thing. You can be living what appears to be an amazing life but you can still be unhappy if you don’t feel you have many people around you.
You’ve worked in publishing and now work in TV, what did you learn being on the other side of the writing equation?
Working in-house for publishing companies and television networks shows you the bigger picture, more specifically, just how busy the staff are, and just how many projects they undertake. So, for a writer, your novel may be your entire focus, but you cannot expect the entire attention of others. It’s simply not realistic (or fair) to think that. Publishers, editors, publicists, marketing professionals, social media managers etc, they have other books they also have to prioritise and so the best thing you can do is focus on what you can control. For example, compiling a list of publicity angles that your publicist could pitch to media, and perhaps any media outlets you think could be a good fit. Or, if you’re comfortable, working to grow your social media following to attract new readers.
Another big learning was realising just how many people are trying to get their stories heard. Publishing houses, and I imagine literary agencies are the same, receive countless submissions every week. So do television networks and production companies – they pass on pitches all the time. So if you’re going to pursue a piece of writing, it needs to be something you truly believe in. It needs to be something you feel truly passionate about pursuing, and something you think is quality, because if you don’t think that, then how is it going to get through the many many hurdles to publication?
In 2020, you did the Curtis Brown Creative online novel writing course and wrote Perfect-ish. This has produced such fantastic books such as Jane Harper’s The Dry and Bonnie Garmus’ Lessons in Chemistry. What is it about this course that makes it so attractive to emerging writers?
I wouldn’t have become a published author without that course (I completed the three-month novel writing program with Cathi Unsworth, who was a fantastic mentor).
The main benefit to the course is how quickly it builds your confidence in your writing. This particular course requires an application and you have to submit a sample of your writing, and so being accepted into the course means they saw something in your writing that they felt was worth pursuing. That alone was a real boost to my confidence.
Once I started the course, it felt like a family. One big, virtual family, scattered all around the world. COVID-19 was in its infancy at the time (May 2020) so it was a bit of a scary time, but communicating with each other about our work and sharing samples with each other helped with motivation and discipline. I told myself that I’d write 1,000 words a day so that at the end of the course I’d have a completed first draft, and I did.
There is also 1:1 mentoring with your tutor, which can prove invaluable. Cathi helped me finalise the direction of my story and its plotting, and then helped me rethink some of my secondary characters who weren’t quite serving the story the way they were meant to.
I’d highly recommend Curtis Brown Creative, for anyone considering it! They also have a fantastic editing course which I undertook about six months after completing the novel writing program. Would highly recommend that as well.
Releasing a book into the world means lots of publicity and marketing and that means lots of social media! What wise words can you share for those about to embark on the same journey?
Get comfortable with being uncomfortable. Until I signed my book deal with PRH, I rarely posted on social media. I lurked a lot, but rarely posted. I felt anxious about being honest on social media, and revealing too much about myself. But I knew that people who might enjoy my book would be on social media, and I’d be doing myself a disservice if I didn’t at least try to engage online. And so I learnt to post about my writing process, and my reading recommendations. I shared my journey with my family and friends, as well as strangers who were interested in reading my work. I still find it a bit uncomfortable (I recently joined TikTok and I feel like a geriatric), but I can recognise how important it is.
Publicity can also be anxiety-inducing, because it can involve a certain level of vulnerability that a writer may not have yet experienced. If any writers are wondering how they might be able to secure some publicity, or perhaps help their publicist secure coverage, it helps to compile angles that relate to your book (particularly for fiction). To help you think of angles, here are some questions to ponder:
What made you want to write this story?
Were there any challenges to writing it?
Any areas of research you had to undertake to complete the book?
This is a key one - are there any aspects of your personal life in this story?
If there is a personal story there, can you break it down into a few different angles? More angles = more opportunity for press
Are there any cities in Australia that you have a connection to, outside of Sydney or Melbourne? Smaller cities like Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth, Hobart are often interested in a local story or a local connection, so if you were born there or grew up there or wrote your book there, it can help get a story in the local paper or local radio station
To help come up with publicity angles, think less about the book and more about you and how your life aligns with this book. Writing a book is not a PR angle (unless you’re famous, in which case, it is) because lots of people have written books, so you need to think about what is unique about you writing this book. When I worked in publishing, I used to phrase it as 'pulling the non-fiction out of the fiction'. What is the non-fiction you can pull from your book?
Find Jessica Seaborn
Instagram: @seabornj
Website: http://jessicaseaborn.com/
Preorder/ buy the book here
Freebies!
Always the popular section of the newsletter :-) Here is your chance to win copies of some of the books featured in this issue.
With thanks to the folks at HarperCollins Publishers, there are copies of At the Foot of the Cherry Tree to give away. All you have to do is send a reply email with the answer to this question.
Where is Gordon based in Japan?
Thanks to the lovely folks at Penguin Random House, we have copies of But the Girl to giveaway. To win a copy all you have to do is send a reply email with the answer to this oh-so-difficult question.
Who is Girl’s literary inspiration?
Thanks to the super people at Text Publishing, we have copies of Firelight. If you would like to win a copy, send a reply email with the answer to this question.
What is the name of the story that features inter-galactic caterpillars?
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 21 August 2023. Good luck!
Newbie News
2023 Davitt Awards
Sisters in Crime Australia has announced the shortlists for the 2023 Davitt Awards for best crime and mystery books by Australian women. Categories include adult novels, Young Adult novels, Children’s books and non-fiction. Winners will be announced on 2 September.
Judges’ coordinator, Dr Philomena Horsley, said, “The Davitt Awards are riding the crest of an enormous wave of popularity for crime writing by Australian women. Women like writing it, the publishers like printing it, and we all love reading it – and increasingly we can enjoy it being translated to the screen.”
Congratulations to the shortlisted titles in the Debut Books category!
The Cane by Maryrose Cuskelly
All That’s Left Unsaid by Tracey Lien
The Torrent by Dinuka McKenzie
The Unbelieved by Vikki Petraitis
Dirt Town by Hayley Scrivenor
No Country for Girls by Emma Styles
Agents and Books
I’ve recently discovered the
Agents & Books newsletter, which is dedicated to demystifying publishing. Authored by Kate McKean who is an adjunct professor at New York University in the School of Professional Studies, teaching about agents and publishing, Kate is also a writer herself.If you are an emerging writer looking for solid advice on what goes on behind the scenes in publishing, how to land an agent, contracts, publicity and much more, I highly recommend it. Here’s a snippet from her latest newsletter called, The Lure of the Shiny New Project.
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The End
I hope you enjoyed this jam-packed issue of New Voices Down Under. 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