September brings us **Books with Buzz**
Love, myth, magic and art. Gorgeous books that enlighten and entertain. Plus, your chance to win copies!
Well hello!
All I can say is, wow! What a month of reading pleasure awaits you. It almost feels like Australian publishers have been saving some of their best books for the last. Treats to take into the summer months when long lazy days of reading beckon.
The question is, where to start? Kell Woods’ gorgeous novel, After the Forest, imagines Hansel and Gretel’s lives fifteen years after they escaped the gingerbread house. Rich in historical detail, this enchanting tale brings a twenty-first century lens and plenty of magical detail as Woods crafts a story that is simply bewitching.
If you love stories involving famous artists, their even more famous artworks, royal courts and corruption, then Andrea Hotere’s The Vanishing Point is the book for you. Alex John’s mother died trying to discover the secrets hidden in Velázquez’s masterpiece Las Meninas perhaps confirming the rumours the painting is cursed.
Salt River Road is a coming-of-age story set against the dramatic Western Australian country. It explores the complexity of grief and family and the dynamics of small communities. It’s a small book that talks to big themes.
The smart funny Madeleine Gray joins us in Meet the Author to talk about her equally smart and funny novel, Green Dot. This interview is a terrific read.
Plus, this month, you can win copies of After the Forest or Green Dot. Read on for further details. Last, but by no means least, the winner of the 2023 Banjo Prize has been announced and we’re getting a sneak peek at the book that won and the woman who wrote it.
Happy Publication Day!
The Opposite of Success by Eleanor Elliott Thomas (3 October 2023)
All Lorrie wants is to get promoted, accept her body and end global warming. By Friday. Is that really too much to ask?
Council employee Lorrie Hope has a great partner, two adorable kids and absolutely no idea what to do with her life. This Friday, she’s hoping for change: it’s launch day for her big work project, and she’s applied for a promotion she’s not entirely sure she wants. Meanwhile, her best friend, Alex, is stuck in a mess involving Lorrie’s rakish ex, Ruben—or, more accurately, his wife. Oh, and Ruben’s boss happens to be the mining magnate Sebastian Glup, who is sponsoring Lorrie’s project…
As the day spirals from bad to worse to frankly unhinged, Lorrie and Alex must reconsider what they can expect from life, love and middle management. The Opposite of Success is a riotously funny debut novel about work, motherhood, friendship—and the meaning of failure itself.
Preorder/ buy a copy or read an extract here
Books to Love
After the Forest by Kell Woods
Published 4 October 2023 (ANZ)
1650: The Black Forest, Wurttemberg. Fifteen years after Hans and Greta escaped from the witch in the gingerbread house, life for the siblings is one of hardship. Since their parents died, they survive on very little. Hans runs up huge gambling debts while Greta’s baking is barely enough to make ends meet.
Their village is still recovering from the aftermath of the Thirty Year War and the witches trials in the nearby town has tongues wagging. Greta is also the subject of constant gossip. It’s not just her red hair or that it’s rumoured she shoved the old witch in the oven to save her and Hans’ life. She bakes gingerbread using a recipe she found in the grimoire, a witch’s handbook, she stole from the gingerbread house. Everyone who eats it agrees, no one makes gingerbread like Greta. But there’s also the time a villager’s entire crop died after Greta walked past the field and now the forest has seen the return of an enormous black bear and a pack of wolves. Trouble has come and someone must be to blame. Greta must use her wits, and maybe a little magic, to save herself, her brother and the people she loves.
After the Forest is a truly enchanting historical fantasy that takes a cautionary tale we all know so well and imagines a future for Hans and Greta. Kell Woods’ witting is lush, blending myths and fairtytale respun for a modern audience.
Woods does not shy away from viewing this story through a twenty-first century lens. Hans carries the guilt and trauma from their childhood brush with death far more heavily than his sister. Greta, meanwhile, is straining against societal expectations of her. She is repeatedly told no one will marry her, not only because she has no dowry but because she is a misfit, suspected to be a witch. Headstrong and prone to strange behaviour, she is the true centre of the story. It is Greta seeking justice, struggling to be an active agent of change for good and she offers the gorgeously brooding romantic lead the chance to reveal his true nature without judgment. (No spoilers here!) Each chapter begins with a small narrative recounting the Snow White and Red Rose story which Woods cleverly intertwines into her narrative. Her characters have moral complexity and happily-ever-after is not without its price. Beautifully researched, Woods spins threads of gold in this delicious and vivid exploration of love, myth and magic.
To WIN a copy of After the Forest, scroll down to Freebies
A little bit about the author …
Kell Woods is an Australian historical fantasy author. She lives near the sea with her husband, two sons, and the most beautiful black cat in the realm.
Kell studied English Literature, creative writing and librarianship, so she could always be surrounded by stories. She has worked in libraries for the past twelve years, all the while writing about made-up (and not so made-up) places, people and things you might remember from the fairy tales you read as a child.
Find Kell Woods
Instagram @kellinthewoods
Website www.kellwoods.com.au
Australia: Preorder the book or read an extract here
US: Preorder the book or read an extract here (Available 3 October 2023)
UK: Preorder the book or read an extract here (Available 3 October 2023)
The Vanishing Point by Andrea Hotere
Published 4 October 2023 (ANZ)
Madrid 1656. The artist, Diego Velázquez, is painting the royal family portrait for King Philip IV, Las Meninas. The Spanish court is a hot bed of political turmoil and rumour has it the royal family is cursed. No legitimate son has survived to succeed his father. The Infanta Margarita is the only viable heir but she is promised to her mother’s brother as a bride in a match intended to cement power. Overseeing the Spanish Inquisition is a priest whose own sins, by rights, should see him put to the death. And Velázquez’s cousin, De Nieto, conspires to secure a higher position within the royal family’s entourage. The Infanta Margarita sees it all.
London 1991. Alex Johns is a trainee art historian at the famous Courtauld Institute of Art. Her mother died in a tragic accident while investigating the secrets Picasso swore are hidden within Las Meninas. The painting has haunted Alex since she was a young girl and her father took her to see it. It was as if the Infanta Margarita was talking to her. Determined to finish her mother’s work, Alex soon realises she is not the only one in search of proof of Picasso’s claims. A strange Spanish man seems to always be in the same place at the same time, there ahead of her, or not far behind. She can’t fight the feeling that powerful people with deep pockets will stop at nothing to stop the truth about Las Meninas coming to light.
The Vanishing Point is the perfect blend of escapism and a high-stakes adventure. An evocative period of history, a famous painting, magic (maybe?) and curses. Andrea Hotere, herself a researcher and journalist, has written a lushly realised book filled with sharply drawn characters, devious doings and plenty of beautiful art works. Comparisons to Dan Brown’s global blockbuster, The Da Vinci Code, are obvious but this falls short of recognising that Hotere has serious literary intentions. There’s nothing wrong with having fun with the subject of a novel while also placing the narrative firmly within the framework of actual events, people and objects. The Vanishing Point will be a must-read for fans of Maggie O’Farrell or Geraldine Brooks.
A little bit about the author …
Andrea Hotere grew up in Ōtepoti, Dunedin, and lives in Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland, with her family. She studied history at the University of Otago, journalism at the University of Canterbury and has worked as a historical researcher, journalist, TV producer and author.
Find Andrea Hotere
Instagram @andrea_hotere
Australia & NZ: Preorder the book here
US: Preorder the book here
Salt River Road by Molly Schmidt
Published 3 October 2023 (ANZ)
In the late 1970s, the Tetley family, five children and their father Eddie, manage a sheep grazing property on the Salt River Road, inland from the port city of Albany in Western Australia. When their mother dies after a long battle with cancer, the Tetley’s fall apart. Grief renders Eddie almost unfunctional. Rose’s brother, Frank, has moved into one of the sheds, slowly, inexorably, harming himself in a myriad of ways. Little brother Alby is too young to understand the extent of their loss. Joe and Steve try and hold it together but the sheep suffer under the weight of their unshorn wool and the family struggles to find any traction.
Help comes from an unexpected source in the form of Noongar elders, Patsy and Herb. Their son, Bert, used to be best friends with Eddie, they’ve known him a long time. When they find Rose trying to escape the mess of her family, they take her home. With their care, Rose might find a way to heal and to understand the wounds that shaped her family.
There are so many beautiful things to love about Salt River Road. It is a coming-of-age novel about the powerful unravelling of grief, growing up in a small town and the complex family dynamics that are exposed when the lynch pin of the family is removed. But it is also an exploration of the traditional owner’s, the Noongar people, relationship with the land on which the story is set and with the broader community who live on those lands. Schmidt’s writing is lyrical and sparse, it’s almost meditative. She doesn’t shy away from the pain inherent in her story but at the same time, she enriches it with so many small details that shine a light on each and everyone of the characters. It manages to be both expansive in scope, matched by the landscape that surrounds it, and intimate in the emotional world it portrays. Salt River Road is a novel to sit with.
A little bit about the author …
Molly Schmidt is a writer and journalist from the coastal town of Albany, Western Australia. An only child, she grew up roaming paddocks and climbing paperbark trees on Menang Noongar country. When she was ten years old, her father lost his battle with terminal cancer. Molly began writing to process this loss, and through written word has found healing, growth and her life path. Molly is passionate about producing stories that are inclusive of all members of her community. While writing Salt River Road, she collaborated with Noongar Elders from Albany, with the goal of producing a novel that actively pursues reconciliation between non-Aboriginal and Aboriginal peoples. Salt River Road was the recipient of the 2022 City of Fremantle Hungerford Award.
Find Molly Schmidt
Instagram: @molly.elizabeth.schmidt
Website: www.mollyschmidt.com
Preorder a copy of the book or read an extract here
Meet the Author
Madeleine Gray is a writer and critic from Sydney. She has written arts criticism for SRB, Overland, Meanjin, The Lifted Brow, The Saturday Paper, The Monthly, etc. In 2019 she was a CA-SRB Emerging Critic, and in 2021 she was a finalist for the Walkley Pascall Prize for Arts Criticism, a finalist for the Woollahra Digital Literary Non-fiction award, and a recipient of a Neilma Sidney Literary Travel grant. She has an MSt in English from the University of Oxford and is a current doctoral candidate at the University of Manchester, researching contemporary women's autobiographical literary theory. Green Dot is her first novel.
A little bit about the book …
Hera Stephen is clawing through her mid-twenties, working as an underpaid comment moderator in an overly air-conditioned newsroom by day and kicking around Sydney with her two best friends by night. Instead of money or stability, she has so far accrued one ex-girlfriend, several hundred hangovers and a dog-eared novel collection.
While everyone around her seems to have slipped effortlessly into adulthood, Hera has spent the years since school caught between feeling that she is purposefully rejecting traditional markers of success to forge a life of her own and wondering if she's actually just being left behind. Then she meets Arthur, an older, married colleague. Intoxicated by the promise of ordinary happiness he represents, Hera falls headlong into a workplace romance that everyone, including her, knows is doomed to fail. A witty, profound and painfully relatable debut novel exploring solitude, desire, and the allure of chasing something that promises nothing.
Can you tell us about the inspiration behind this story?
Before I am a writer, I am a reader. For years I had been reading a lot of intergenerational affair novels – novels like Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry, Raven Leilani’s Luster, and Niamh Campbell’s This Happy. I think the power dynamics in romantic relationships between younger women and older men are fascinating – they say so much about how gender inflects our wants and desires and what we think we deserve. In Green Dot, I wanted to look at this proposition from a different angle. I wanted to consider why a young, queer woman in particular might become enamoured with an older, married man. What is it about the promise of stability and socio-economic privilege that can turn us all into fools? Further, I wanted to write a novel about a young woman experiencing economic precarity and heartache etc. that was also really funny. I think that in life, depressing, traumatic things that happen to us never happen in a vacuum: even as they are happening I think we can see that terrible things are also often hilarious. A lot of people get through the trauma that is being in the world by mentally distancing themselves from their situations, by seeing life as a series of amusing bits. I wanted to square that tendency – to turn everything into a joke – with the very real feelings that happen alongside this. It’s a joke and it’s not a joke: that’s how I see this book.
On a more practical level, I wrote this book because I was bored. I am from Sydney, but I was living in Manchester doing my PhD. When the pandemic hit I came back to Sydney, and I was doing my PhD remotely, living by myself in lockdown, and working part-time in a bookshop that was unionizing: there wasn’t much laughter in any of this. I started writing Green Dot to take care of myself during the pandemic – to do something that was just for me, to make myself think and laugh. I gave myself a year to write it, and then between shifts and PhD work, I just... did. I’d never really written fiction before apart from like, two short stories, so I was very much just winging it, lol.
I found the use of the first-person narrative really made me feel I was in Hera’s shoes — for better and worse! Did that feel like the natural way to tell the story or did that decision produce its own challenges?
Haha, yes, it is very much like – you can’t escape this person’s head! More fool you! But yeah, I think this story had to be told in first-person, because the premise of the narrative is as old as time. It’s someone embarking on a doomed romantic journey. So there needed to be a way to make it fresh, to make readers care and invest in it. And the best way I could think to do that was to make Hera the most engaging, dry, funny, mischievous character. She speaks directly to the reader, inviting them in to all her internal machinations, all her ambivalent emotions, all her cynical observations. The aim was that the reader would come to care for Hera so much that despite maybe not even wanting to “side” with her, they do.
In terms of whether it brought more challenges… I truly found it really helpful in terms of plot and tension to only write from Hera’s perspective, because that means we never know whether how she is interpreting things is how they are “actually” happening. We have to take her hand and accept that her version of events is the real one, or the real one for her. And this means the reader can be in the position of feeling like they know more about what’s going on than the protagonist does, which I think invests readers with a kind of friendly or even parental protectiveness over her… Or maybe they just find her insufferable. Hopefully that’s not the case, but at least one lady on Goodreads definitely thinks so.
There was a lot of buzz around the acquisition of Green Dot both here in Australia and overseas, with it set to be published in Australia, the UK, North America and Germany. Congratulations! That’s amazing. Most authors can only dream of selling their novel into multiple territories. What does it feel like?
Thank you! I mean, it feels truly bizarre in the most wonderful way. As I said, when I was writing Green Dot I was working as a bookseller, and my colleagues and I were unionising to try and get job security and a dollar more an hour than minimum wage. Then one day, having shared the manuscript with no one while I was writing it, I sent the book off to an agent… and then within a few days I had two pretty wild publishing deals in Australia and the UK, and then the US, Germany and France not long after. I’ve been working as a freelance book critic for years, I’ve studied literature at university for a decade (I’m literally just about to hand in my PhD so please keep your fingers crossed for me!), and I’ve worked as a bookseller: I am well aware that Green Dot’s publication trajectory is not at all the norm, so I feel extremely lucky and basically just in a constant state of disbelief.
And now Green Dot is about to be launched into the world, what are your hopes for how the novel will be received?
I want people to love it, obviously! No but for real, I get very mushy when I talk about novels and what they can do. I feel that everything in life is a story – literally every experience we have we narrativize in some way, and that story forms who we are and who we think we are, and then what we do and how we connect to other people and the world. The magic of novels is that they have the potential to shift us into someone else’s story, and then take from it what we need. Novels work like emotional conduits or vectors. So I hope that readers of Green Dot find company. I hope that it connects them to a feeling they once had, or a relationship they’ve experienced, and it reinvigorates their connection to whatever that is, maybe makes them think about it in a new way. More specifically, I hope it gets people thinking about “morality” in relationships, and what we owe to each other. Finally, I hope it makes people laugh! Laughing is my favourite thing! I think that humour is the affect that can cut through everything – pathos and artifice and pretence and more – and it can return us to ourselves more honestly. If you can laugh, you can go on.
To WIN a copy of Green Dot, scroll down to Freebies
Find Madeleine Gray
Instagram @madeleine_gray_
Website www.madeleine-gray.com
Australia: Preorder a copy of the book here
US (Published 27 February 2024): Preorder a copy of the book here
UK (Published 1 February 2024): Preorder a copy of the book here
Freebies!
It is such a great pleasure to be able to offer you two amazing books to give away this month.
Many thanks to the folks at HarperCollins Publishers for providing **five** copies of After the Forest for you to win. All you have to do is send a reply email with the answer to this question.
Which fairytale inspired After the Forest?
Thanks to the terrific team at Allen and Unwin, we also have **two** copies of Green Dot to give away. All you have to do is send a reply email with the answer to this oh-so-tricky question.
What is the name of the protagonist in the novel?
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 September 2023. Good luck!
Newbie News
Stefanie Koens has won the 2023 HarperCollins Banjo Prize for Fiction for her unpublished manuscript Islands of Secrets.
In Island of Secrets, ‘a woman searching for answers in her own life finds them—and much more—in the wreckage and haunting stories of the Batavia shipwreck’. As well as this story of Tess McCarthy (a schoolteacher travelling to Western Australia’s remote Abrolhos Islands in 2018), the novel also tells of Saskia, a young Dutch woman who boards the Batavia with her family in 1628, ‘only for her world to first collide with Aris Jansz, the ship’s reluctant under surgeon’. Spanning these centuries are themes of past losses and future uncertainties, as well as ‘faith, acceptance, and love’.
HarperCollins fiction publisher, Anna Valdinger, said: ‘Stefanie’s novel impressed us all with its skillful blend of contemporary and historical storylines, strong writing and a powerful evocation of this fascinating slice of Australia’s past.’
Four runners up will also receive a manuscript assessment from HarperCollins. These runners-up include:
Anna Fursland for ‘Lou and I’
A’Mhara McKey for ‘The Shores Between’
Natasha Neary for ‘The Sister Tree’
Christina Pontos for ‘Katherine Papadakis Is Figuring Things Out’.
Congratulations to you all!
The End
And here we are at the end of another 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
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