This is it! The first issue of New Voices Down Under
What's new in the world of Australian debut authors? So glad you asked! This month, five fabulous new books, a fascinating Meet the Author with Carolyn Swindell, lots of giveaways and news.
Well hello!
Welcome to the very first edition of New Voices Down Under. If you’re here you probably already know what this is all about, but in case you’ve randomly stumbled across this newsletter, let me give you the low down.
New Voices Down Under is a newsletter dedicated to showcasing the best of Australia’s new release fiction from debut novelists. Each month, it will feature reviews of a selection of upcoming titles, a quick chat with a new author in our Meet the Author segment and any news relating to debut fiction released in the past twelve months. It also features giveaways, which is your chance to win a copy of a brand-spanking new release. How good is that?
If you’re wondering who I am, then allow me to introduce myself.
Meredith Jaffé is the author of four novels for adults — The Tricky Art of Forgiveness, The Dressmakers of Yarrandarrah Prison, The Making of Christina and The Fence. Her bestselling novel, The Dressmakers of Yarrandarrah Prison, was voted in the 2021 Booktopia Favourite Australian Book Award Top 50 and the 2022 Better Reading Top 100. It has also been optioned for film. She also writes for children.
Meredith’s the former Festival Director of StoryFest and regularly facilitates at writers’ festivals, other author events and podcasts. Previously, she wrote the weekly literary column for the online women’s magazine The Hoopla. Her feature articles, reviews, and opinion pieces have also appeared in the Guardian Australia, The Huffington Post, and Mamamia.
I hope you enjoy this first issue. I’m so looking forward to being in your inbox on the 28th of each month and hearing your thoughts on great new Australian fiction.
Warmest wishes,
Books to Love
Duck á l’Orange for Breakfast by Karina May
Published 28 March 2023 (Australia)
Maxine Mayberry writes copy for an ad agency and dreams of one day becoming a ‘proper’ writer. Except, life isn’t going to plan. She’s dumped her boyfriend of ten years, Scott, after finding out he had a fling with one of her work colleagues. To add insult to injury, he’s been stealing her bon mots for his stand-up comedy routines whilst simultaneously denigrating her writerly ambitions. Hence why she’s now temporarily living with her best friend Alice.
After way too much time feeling sorry for herself, Alice insists Max set up a Tinder account and get off the sofa and out into the real world. Though her instincts scream ‘No!’ Max is soon intrigued by a guy called Johnny who has no interest in meeting her IRL, he just wants to be pen pals. The pair soon embark on a project called Fork Him, where they will cook their way through a copy of The Laurent Family Cookbook, a Christmas gift from Scott’s mother. And, you guessed it, the crowning glory will be Duck á l’Orange. What Johnny doesn’t know, is that the Fork Him project is also the perfect distraction from Max’s more pressing worries, her upcoming brain operation to remove a tumour.
This is such a fun snappy novel. Karina May perfectly blends the serious with the crazy as Max tries to navigate an uncertain world to find her true place in it and, of course, unravelling the mystery that is Johnny. You know how it’s going to end, it’s the journey that counts. May adds so much sparkle, between the recipes Max and Johnny cook, a rogue trip to Paris and girls behaving badly. Like any good romance, there are deceits, misunderstandings and bad timing galore but May never falls into the trap of making this a cliché. All the characters are beautifully written, Max and Johnny are impossible not to love, and the plot ticks along at a pace. It’s the perfect read to while away a few hours and lift the spirits.
A little bit about the author …
Sydney-based Karina May is a former magazine journalist turned digital marketer and avid reader. Duck á l’Orange for Breakfast draws on her slivers of her own life, including undergoing brain surgery in 2019 and 2020. This is her debut print novel. You can also find her preparing author talks for The Listening Station Book Club
Find Karina May
Instagram @karinamaywrite Facebook @karinamaywriter
Website https://www.karinamay.me/
Buy the book here
The Albatross by Nina Wan
Publication date: 26 April 2023 (Australia)
Suffering an existential crisis, Primrose Li skids her car into the bushes of the Whistles Public Golf Course. It’s not much of a golf course, redevelopment has claimed the back nine holes and the remaining nine holes are soon to suffer the same fate. Her life is a mess. She’s married to academic, Adrian, in remission from a rare cancer. She’s given up her job as a business journalist and now spends most of her days scrubbing the house from top to bottom to keep it germ free. Their six-year-old daughter, Bebe, is the only thing that keeps her going. But that day at the golf course, she does something she’s never done, she buys a $5 bag of golf clubs and decides she’s going to teach herself to play.
Every day, she teams up with septuagenarian, Harriet, and plays golf, terribly but determinedly. Primrose keeps her newly acquired hobby secret from everyone, except her therapist, who’s please she’s getting out in all that fresh air and sunshine. Her first ever boyfriend, Peter, a wealthy fifth-generation Asian Australian, used to play golf. Now, he lives across the road with his stylish wife, Louisa, who has insisted in claiming Primrose as her best friend for reasons Primrose cannot quite fathom. Golf, with its elusive promise of birdies, eagles and albatrosses, becomes her meditation and her cure.
The Albatross was shortlisted for the 2022 Victorian Premier’s Unpublished Manuscript Award, which has launched the careers of the likes of Jane Harper, Graeme Simsion and Christian White. It’s easy to see why. Nina Wan has written a novel that is quirky and clever. The narrative unfolds in unexpected ways, slowly revealing what has to be one of the most delightful and original characters who beguiles as much as she gives away. At each turn, Wan balances the tragedies of Primrose’s life and the resilience of the woman herself. Surprise awaits on every page and Wan injects warmth and humour into a story that is as much about being the outsider as it is about trying to figure out your place in the world. Put simply, The Albatross is an absolute joy and Primrose Li is impossible not to love.
A little bit about the author …
Nina Wan is a former journalist and editor for The Australian Financial Review. She holds degrees in Law and Commerce from the University of Melbourne. She was born in Shanghai and moved to Australia as a child. The inspiration for The Albatross came from an inner-city golf course in Melbourne, where she once found unexpected joys at a time of formidable challenges.
Find Nina Wan on Instagram @ninawan
Preorder the book here
Girl in a Pink Dress by Kylie Needham
Publication date: 12 April 2023 (Australia)
Art student, Frances, first meets acclaimed artist, Clem Hughes, at an exhibition of his work. The second time they meet, is in the classroom where he is her tutor for the year. She catches his eye, not just for her obvious talent but for her quiet beauty. When Frances agrees to sit for Clem, he paints a portrait of her that will irrevocably change both their lives, Girl in a Pink Dress. Now lovers, they move to an old miner’s cottage in the hills miles from the city. Ostensibly they will both create but Frances finds herself stretching canvases, painting in the backgrounds and mixing paint for Clem. Her own work is done in the margins of his overwhelming importance and self-absorption. Her painting is almost an act of defiance.
Kylie Needham’s novel explores the imbalance of power and privilege. It moves between the life of contemporary Frances and the former student who was as quiet and muted as her landscapes. Contemporary Frances is determined, resilient and possesses sharp insight. Annoyed that to some she will always be cast as Clem Hughes muse and lover rather than a successful landscape artist in her own right. Needham pushes further into this territory, examining how motherhood shapes female artists. How differently women perceive the iconic Australian landscape to their male counterparts and how often the work of exceptional women artists is lost, forgotten or their talent down-played. Needham also shines a light on that burning question about male artists painting young female nudes and where the line is between celebration and exploitation.
Needham’s writing is crisp and spare. Spanning decades, she neatly folds time in on itself by using short scenes to link the past and present. Needham’s sense of place, critical in the creation of Frances as a character, is lyrical and sparse, like the Australian landscape itself. But the true joy of Needham’s writing is the characters themselves. Creating quiet characters carries the risk of a certain dullness but not so in this case. Frances is delightfully complex and compelling. Clem, with his overblown ego and deep insecurity, his callousness in the affairs of the heart and his inability to ever shake his famous father’s shadow is equally alive on the page. There’s a humdinger of a climax that made me gasp with an equal mix of joy and surprise. Girl in a Pink Dress is a beautifully crafted novel with a driving narrative that is both rich and evocative.
A little bit about Kylie …
Kylie Needham is an award-winning screenwriter. She has won two AWGIE (Australian Writers’ Guild) Awards for television scriptwriting. Her work has been published in the Better Read Than Dead Writing Anthology 2019, The Quarry Journal and the exhibition catalogue 2014 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Dark Heart. She lives in the Southern Highlands of NSW. This is her first novel.
Find Kylie Needham on Instagram @kylieneedhamwriter
Preorder the book here
Thirst for Salt by Madelaine Lucas
Publication Date: 4 April 2023 (Australia)
Adrift after finishing university, our narrator, who the reader only ever knows as Sharkbait or love, is on holidays with her mother at Sailors Bay. Floating in the sea behind the break, she recognises the man who swims out. He’s the local guy who runs the antique shop in town, twice her age, a man comfortable in his own skin the way the boys at University never were. The attraction is mutual, the laidback coastal lifestyle magnetic. It makes it so easy to fall in love with Jude and give in to the pull of desire.
The easy days and months lull her into a false sense of security. Love, desire, passion peels back her layers. According to Madelaine Lucas, the title, Thirst for Salt, comes from a line in a poem by Robert Hass and it is an apt metaphor for how one can feel desire so strong it is impossible to slake. For Jude love is a choice not a need and the presence of Maeve, who so obviously once enjoyed an intimate relationship with Jude, begins the slow unspooling of the narrator’s understanding of their relationship.
Lucas herself grew up with a mother who was an artist and her father a musician. Perhaps that’s why she captures the sense of drifting so eloquently on the page. Lucas’ choice of first-person narration means the reader is embedded in the narrator’s perspective. In our formative years, we are the centre of our own narrative and in the case of Thirst for Salt, this is literal. But this narrative device also reinforces the exploration of intimacy that forms the heart of the novel. This is a novel that appeals for its beautiful writing, including how deftly Lucas captures the physical landscape of the story, set around the Jervis Bay area on the south coast of New South Wales. Told in hindsight, Thirst for Salt is a meditation on loss and longing and how the complexities and emotion of the past open up to interpretation when viewed through the lens of time. Thirst for Salt is a quiet, lyrical novel that also manages to be raw and heartbreaking. It stays with you long after the last page is turned.
A little bit about Madelaine …
Madelaine Lucas was born in Melbourne in 1990 and raised in Sydney as the daughter of a visual artist and a rock 'n' roll musician. In 2015, she moved to New York to complete her MFA in fiction at Columbia University, where she now teaches in the graduate and undergraduate writing programs. She is a senior editor of the literary annual NOON and lives in Brooklyn with her husband and her dog, Pancho. Thirst for Salt is her first novel.
Find Madelaine Lucas on Instagram @madelainejosephine or on her website
https://www.madelainelucas.com/
Australia preorder here
US Publisher Tin House — Publication Date 7 July 2023 Preorder here
UK Publisher: Oneworld Publications — Publication Date 9 March 2023 (ebook) 4 May 2023 (paperback) Order/ Preorder here
Meet the Author
Carolyn Swindell is a writer and stand-up comedian from Sydney who had a long career in the corporate world and can’t believe she somehow managed to go to an office 5 days a week and say things like “deliverables” for so long. Her first solo show Why DIY? was short-listed for Best Comedy at the 2019 Sydney Fringe Festival and she has since run sold-out seasons at the 2022 Sydney Comedy Festival. She is a chronic late-bloomer, having started parenting at 38, CrossFit at 47 and stand-up comedy at 49 and having her first novel published at 53.
A little bit about the book …
We Only Want What’s Best is set on a plane between Sydney and LA where a group of young dancers are flying to Disneyland to perform. Two dance mothers from very different worlds try to form a friendship. When one finds a USB containing disturbing images of the other’s child, she fights time and her own fears to try to work out whether this is evidence of a child in danger or – as the other mother claims – if she is simply too unsophisticated to understand what’s really going on and should just butt out of another mother’s parenting.
Can you tell us a little about the inspiration behind this story?
A couple of things were behind it. I visited MONA in Tasmania with a very small child (rookie error.) This made it stressful but also prevented me from really immersing myself in the experience and I felt like an outsider. I’m not a terrifically visual person and I often don’t “get” a lot of the art, but really value when someone more knowledgeable can explain it.
Not long before, there had been an exhibition of Bill Henson’s work and a huge public kerfuffle about that. I wasn’t able to be clear enough on what I thought of the art to have a view, but felt it important to me that I should know what was right because national censorship was at issue.
Some years later, there was a case at a dance studio in Sydney where a mother had been convicted of supplying images of her daughter to a paedophile dance teacher and her husband had testified in her defence that she had seemed under the control of the dance teacher. That fascinated me.
These three thoughts came together, and I wondered whether I would be brave enough to stand up for what was right if I wasn’t confident enough in my own reading of a situation to know exactly what was right.
I’d get more writing done if I…
Look, it’s not something I need to do differently so I can get more writing done, THEY just need to stop making new series of Succession please.
As a child, which book(s) did you read time and again?
The Phantom Tollbooth. I absolutely loved the word play and absurdity and worlds Norton Juster created. I also fancied myself a bit of a hero in the making, so adored the Sally Baxter: Girl Reporter series by Sylvia Edwards.
Who is your literary hero?
I don’t think being one of my literary heroes is good for people’s health, so perhaps it’s best if I don’t name anyone alive. But Sue Townsend, writer of the Adrian Mole series, Clive James and PJ O’Rourke have all influenced me enormously as a writer and a comedian.
Find Carolyn on Instagram @puffycee and on Facebook @carolynswindellcomedy or on her website https://www.carolynswindell.com/
Order the book here
Freebies!
Thanks to the good folk at Pan Macmillan Australia, we have five copies of Duck á l’Orange for Breakfast to giveaway. You could be one of the lucky ducks (see what I did there?) to get their hands on it. Here’s the drill. All you have to do is send a reply email with the answer to this oh-so-difficult question.
What is the name of Scott’s family cookbook?
And, thanks to the good folks at Allen & Unwin, we have copies of Thirst for Salt to giveaway. This is doubly exciting because the book is not out until 4 April so two lucky readers will be among the first people to get their hands on it. Same drill, if you’d like to win a copy, send a reply email with the answer to this question.
What is Jude’s nickname for the narrator?
Also thanks to Pan Macmillan Australia, we have two copies of The Albatross to giveaway. If you’d like to win a copy (and you do, you really do!) send me a reply email with the answer to the following question.
Who is Primrose’s golfing partner?
And if you enjoyed meeting Carolyn Swindell and would like to read We Only Want What’s Best then we have two copies to giveaway. Send me a reply email with the answer to the following question.
Where is the dance troupe going to perform?
The fine print: Giveways are currently only open to subscribers and you must reside within Australia to be eligible to win (postage!) You can enter to win any or all of the books. The winners will be picked at random and will be emailed on 21 April 2023. Good luck!
Newbie News
Tracey Lien’s amazing debut novel, All That’s Left Unsaid, was published in August 2022. Set in Cabramatta in south west Sydney, it centres around the brutal murder of Ky’s little brother, Denny, in a local restaurant on the night of his high school graduation. Despite the fact there were over a dozen diners at the Lucky 8, no one saw a thing.
Here’s a snippet from my review posted in A Cuppa With Meredith.
Lien balances a family saga stretching from pre-war Vietnam to 1996 Australia with a searing and insightful examination of what it means to be a refugee, an immigrant, and face daily contempt and ignorance. This is a superb and layered novel — emotionally wrenching and impossible to put down.
All That’s Left Unsaid was announced as the Indie Book Awards 2023 — Winner Debut Fiction Category in March 2023. The awards recognise and celebrate independent booksellers as the number one supporters of Australian authors. And Tracey Lien’s debut novel also won the 2023 MUD Literary Prize. Awarded annually by Adelaide philanthropic group MUD Literary Club, the MUD Literary Prize is presented for the best debut literary novel by an Australian writer.
New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards
The shortlists for the 2023 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards were announced on March 2. According to their website, they had record entries this year with over 850 original works submitted across 10 categories. A total of $350,000 in prize money will be awarded when the winners are announced on Monday 22 May, making these the richest state-funded literary awards in the country. There is one category dedicated to debut writing across genres, the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing. The shortlisted titles and authors are below.
UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing ($5000)
Blaze Del Kathryn Barton & Huna Amweero
The Eulogy Jackie Bailey
We Come With This Place Debra Dank
Women I Know Katerina Gibson
The Rat-Catcher’s Apprentice Maggie Jankuloska
The Upwelling Lystra Rose
Hush Ciella Williams
At the Altar of Touch Gavin Yuan Gao
Penguin Literary Prize 2023
The Penguin Literary Prize, launched in 2017, was established to find, nurture and develop new Australian authors of literary fiction. Previous winners include Kathryn Hind with Hitch, Imbi Neeme with The Spill, Sophie Overett with The Rabbits, James McKenzie Watson with Denizen and Annette Higgs with On A Bright Hillside in Paradise, to be published in July 2023. The shortlist for the 2023 Penguin Literary Prize is:
The Elementals by Liz Allan
The Boy Who Wept Rabbits by Benjamin Forbes
Falling and Burning by Michael Krockenberger
Jade and Emerald by Michelle See-Tho
Nothing Like The Sun by J.N. Read
The Guggenheim by Heather Taylor-Johnson
The winner will be announced by Penguin Random House Australia on Thursday, 15 June 2023.
The End
That’s your lot for March. We hope you enjoyed the first issue of New Voices Down Under and have found some fabulous new reads for your TBR.
We’d love to hear from you. 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!
Psst! Don’t forget, you can always catch up with us on Instagram
Love this,I subscribed and also made myself a profile too, good luck 🤞🏼
My goodness !! this is quite a project . Are you being inundated with more books .
I hope it is going to be a great success. Trish.