Dark Mode, The Strip & Everyone On This Train Is A Suspect

Sophie Groom, CEO 

Over the summer holidays I love to read a good pageturner, and this year I’m diving into some crime novels I’ve been saving up during the year, and one that is coming out soon. First is Ashley Kalagian Blunt’s Dark Mode, which people won’t stop tsking me about not having read yet. There’s nothing like a taut psychological thriller to keep you occupied on those hot, endless days at the end of the year. According to all the tskers, this tale of a woman who has been in hiding for years when she realises she’s been identified on the dark web, is just that.

The Strip, by Iain Ryan is a January 2024 release about a police detective on the Gold Coast who gets put on a case that isn’t the simple murder it appears to be. Before long, she and her partner are dealing with a string of homicides and it’s impossible to know how deep the corruption goes. Kate Mildenhall gave it a wonderful write-up: “bingeworthy reading – a gritty crime thriller reeking of corruption, murder and sex. If you like your heroines flawed and kick-ass and your cops dirty as hell, you’ll love Ian Ryan’s gripping foray into the underworld of the Gold Coast. Hardly took a breath from first page to last.”

To round out the selection, and add a little levity, there’s Benjamin Stevenson’s Everyone on This Train is a Suspect, the follow up to his hilarious and charming Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone. I love the way Stevenson pokes fun at the conventions of the whodunnit at the same time as he’s seamlessly crafting an excellent one–it’s genius. Around the holidays we all tend to go a bit loopy, so there’s never a better time to pick up a series that will make your own family seem completely, blissfully normal.

Songs for the Dead and the Living and The Flirtation of Girls / Ghazal el-Banat by Sara M Saleh

Elliot Cameron, Membership & Operations Coordinator

This month I’m writing something of a What I’m Reading/What I’m Going to Read combo, in light of back-to-back releases from one of my favourite Australian voices, Sara M Saleh. I have been following Sara’s writing career for almost nine years now, ever since seeing her perform on the stages of Bankstown Poetry Slam and Enough Said Poetry Slam, and am thrilled to see the release of both her debut novel and debut full-length poetry collection.

While I’m only in the early stages of Songs for the Dead and the Living, I can already tell this is a book I’ll end up recommending to many people. There’s a richness to the world Sara paints here, one that would be easy to make the mistake of mythologising for how different it feels to my own upbringing in privileged white Australia, if not for the vividness and humanity of the characters and dialogue. Inspired by Sara’s maternal family’s own story of dispossession—from the occupation of Palestine through the many social and cultural challenges Lebanon has faced—this is a story whose importance should never be understated, least of all at this time. Despite all of the learning about Arab diaspora I have done over the past few years, in under 100 pages so far, Songs for the Dead and the Living has already taught me much I did not know. I look forward to learning so much more.

Over the holiday break I also look forward to reading The Flirtation of Girls / Ghazal el-Banat. I have always been taken by the way Sara’s poetry speaks to the political through the personal, something I have long considered a tough act to balance. The more I learn from voices such as Sara’s, however, the more I realise that for many writers of colour, this is not an act of balance, but an act of necessity. An exercise in truth-telling. I can’t help but think of the closing lines of Sara’s 2020 Judith Wright Poetry Prize winning piece ‘Border control: mediations’:

And when will you stop writing about borders
and bloodshed and war and death and home? And
home? And home?

Between these two books, and whatever Sara writes next, I want to keep reading more about all the places and the people she has called ‘home’.

Songs for the Dead and the Living (2023, Affirm Press)
The Flirtation of Girls / Ghazal el-Banat (2023, UQP Books)

YA Novels: Borderland, The Upwelling & Emergency Contact

Rochelle Pickles, Professional Development Officer

This year I’ve been really enamoured with the YA books I’ve picked up along the way—having worked with young people in previous roles, I love to see books that are super entertaining while sneaking in messages about developing identity, self-acceptance, navigating relationships and just generally being good humans!

Borderland by Fulbright scholar Graham Akhurst was a great example of this—thrilling and dark while showcasing characters of real emotional depth. When Jono takes up an exciting opportunity as the face of a new documentary aimed at promoting a government mining project in western Queensland to the local community, strange and frightening things begin to occur. Jono is forced to dig deep and find answers before it’s too late—and to complicate matters, he’s starting to develop feelings for his best friend Jenny.

The Upwelling by multi-award-winning debut author Lystra Rose was another fun ride and such a unique concept for YA fantasy. When Kirra time-slips into an alternative world where colonisation in so-called Australia never occurred, she is reconnected with her ancestors and culture like never before. There she meets Narn and Tarni, each with their own unique gifts of dolphin-calling and language unweaving. But something dark threatens the existence of both this world and Kirra’s, and the three must work together to save their future.

Finally, I love everything New York author Mary H. K. Choi writes but earlier this year I got around to reading her first novel from 2019, Emergency Contact, and it didn’t disappoint. Choi’s characters are always vulnerable, flawed and hilarious. Penny is a freshman who has just moved to Austin, Texas, and Sam is a wanna-be documentary-maker working at the local café. The slow-burn and often very awkward development of their relationship over text and the occasional run-in is unconventional and endearing, as each must navigate uncertain times in their lives and their own insecurities in hopes to finally be together.

Borderland (2023, UWA Publishing)
The Upwelling (2022, Hachette)
Emergency Contact (2018, Hachette)

Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens by Shankari Chandran

Nevenya Cameron, Administration Officer

I am currently reading the beautiful Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens. What I like most is how Chandran shifts point of view each chapter, giving the reader close insight into each characters’ world. The dialogue between the characters is funny and relatable as it deftly explores the unspoken tensions in relationships between friends, family and colleagues in multicultural Australia. A novel full of complexities, issues such as the migrant experience in Australia, grieving families and cultural dissonance in the diaspora, are explored through rich backstories and intimate character points of view. My favourite character so far is Maya, the strong and bold Tamil caretaker of the novel’s titular nursing home, who disguises herself as a white woman for her novels to find fame and success in the Australian literary landscape of the 1980s. The characters of the novel paint a complex portrait of modern Sydney which reflects the broader experience of Australian life, and I am excited to read more of this Miles Franklin-winner.

Over the holiday break, I am continuing to explore stories of migration, identity and cultural diaspora. The Days Toppled Over by Vidya Madabushi is at the top of my list, a novel which highlights the international student experience, and the struggles young people face with harsh visa conditions. I also plan to read the Miles Franklin-shortlisted Hopeless Kingdom by Kgshak Akec, a story following a family’s movement from South Sudan to Sydney, and the implications of intergenerational trauma on a young woman of colour. Fiction is one of the most powerful ways we can understand and empathise with other people, and I’m looking forward to reading these stories.

Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens (2022, Ultimo Press)
The Days Toppled Over (2023, Penguin)
Hopeless Kingdom (2022, UWA Publishing)

This All Come Back Now and Dreaming Again

Adara Enthaler, Project & Communications Officer

Short version: I read a lot of American and British authored fantasy this year, and these holidays I’ll be diving into anthologies of Australian and First Nations speculative fiction. Read on for the long version!

As an avid fantasy reader, I’ve been sinking my teeth into fantasy of a variety of styles throughout the year. In January I read Oathbringer, the third book in Brandon Sanderson’s epic series The Stormlight Archive, after which I took a break from dense high fantasy by reading the Blood and Ash vampire fantasy series by Jennifer L. Armentrout. It’s decidedly not as well written as some other fantasy I’ve read, but was a refreshingly easy read, and in the tradition of female vs male fantasy authors, it has a lot more ‘spice’.

Afterwards, I jumped back in time to read Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, whose epic and talented writing style I enjoyed but found to be unemotional, causing me to struggle to connect with the main character Ged. Moving from the 60s to the 80s, I read Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones, the novel that Studio Ghibli adapted into the popular animated movie, and which I hadn’t known was the original until recently. I used to read Jones’ books when I was growing up, and she crafts delightfully eccentric narratives and worlds, this one being no exception, though I will say I still prefer the movie (forgive me).

Halfway through the year I remembered to keep working through the enormous stack of Terry Pratchett novels I bought secondhand years ago – having only discovered Pratchett as an adult, I have a lot to catch up on. I read an illustrated edition of The Last Hero in less than a day – a romp of elderly barbarian heroes on a final quest – and as his writing always does, it sucked me back into the joy of reading after a dry spell of a couple of months. Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros is the latest craze in fantasy, boosted to popularity by BookTok and its entertaining tale of dragon riders and an enemies-to-lovers romance, and despite the storyline tending towards YA cliches, I’m not ashamed to say the craze caught me too – this book was fun as hell, and the sequel is next on my list.

For a laugh I picked up Bloodlines, the first book in a spin-off series of Richelle Mead’s Vampire Academy series, which I loved as a teenager, but doesn’t have quite the same magic for me now. I also re-read the urban fantasy series Downside Ghosts by Stacia Kane, which I hadn’t read in almost a decade, and was pleased to find out that there was a fifth book I hadn’t previously known about, and which I’m currently reading. The series has strong themes of horror and addiction in a world under constant threat by ghosts, and the main character Chess and her love interest Terrible both have my heart. Between so much adult and YA fantasy, I also slipped in The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, a delightfully gloomy coming of age story about a young boy living in a cemetery.

Now that I’ve gushed about my 2023 fantasy reads, I can admit my terrible shame – all of these authors are American or British. My reading list is frighteningly devoid of Australian adult fantasy authors, and that’s something I aim to remedy over the holidays, beginning with two anthologies.

Dreaming Again is an anthology of short stories by Australian speculative fiction authors from 2008, which I bought five years ago and stopped halfway through. The book of 35 stories is massive with a huge range in tone between them, and a few are still stuck in my head – some for horrific reasons, like the outback cannibal family with twisted ideas of honour and tradition, and others for amusing reasons, like the zombie camel herd that destroyed Alice Springs (sorry Alice Springs). I’m determined to unearth Dreaming Again from wherever it’s buried in my TBR pile and finally defeat that monster.

At the South Coast Writers Festival this year I saw our 2023 Speculative Fiction Festival director Alan Baxter on a panel with Mykaela Saunders, who edited the award-winning This All Come Back Now: An anthology of First Nations speculative fiction, after which I just had to buy myself a copy. I haven’t cracked it open yet, but I’m so thrilled to read a collection of First Nations writing that celebrates and remembers their cultural histories and imagines their futures.

This All Come Back Now (2022, UQP Books)
Dreaming Again (2008, Voyager)

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