REVIEWS: Ben Hunter’s summer of good reading

Summer will be over within a matter of days, but our fiction expert Ben Hunter would love to tell you about all of the incredible books he’s read over the last three months. Settle in and prepare for your TBR pile to get seriously huge …

Born Into This

by Adam Thompson

This collection of short fiction is full of expertly drawn humour, raw insight and deep sense of care for the characters who occupy these stories. A deeply involved member of the Tasmanian Aboriginal community, Thompson’s work is all about cultural practice and life on the margins of Black and White Australia. I loved being discomforted and surprised by these stories with their themes of racism, unspoken pretensions, and the ongoing destruction of our natural world.

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The Performance

by Claire Thomas

In this small and meditative novel, Claire Thompson has created one of the most intelligent things you’ll read this year. Three women witness a performance of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days in an airconditioned inner city theatre at the height of summer, as the suburbs around them are threatened by catastrophic bushfires. As the action on stage unfolds, we delve deeper and deeper into the inner pains and anxieties of each of these women who vary in age and status. The novel is also adept at capturing the suspended magic of hundreds of bodies attempting to sit still and contemplate art for two hours. This book will set your mind ablaze.

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The Ripping Tree

by Nikki Gemmell

It’s been yonks since we’ve seen new fiction from Nikki Gemmell. This new historical novel has welcome notes of Kate Grenville’s fiction – a shipwrecked teenage girl escapes a fate of arranged marriage in early 1800s Sydney and finds herself in the care of a wealthy family, and with that comes the chance to live a life that she’d never had in England. But there’s more to colonial New South Wales than what meets the eye. In The Ripping Tree you’ll enjoy a thrilling and unsettling story of survival and the loss of innocence.

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Klara and the Sun

by Kazuo Ishiguro

I can’t talk about this novel until it is released and media embargoes are lifted, but it is likely the biggest literary event of 2021 and for a limited time we have signed copies from Ishiguro himself. These will sell out so go have a look right now!

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On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

by Ocean Vuong

I’ve had this novel on the shelf for many moons and have finally found the time and the courage to read it. People I knew and trusted had vouched for the quality of the writing and the devastating power of the story. It takes the form of a letter written by a young man known as Little Dog to his mother. In full knowledge that his mother will never be able to read in English, Little Dog opens the floodgates on a family history forged in the destruction of Vietnam and his youth in America which is laden with neglect, poverty, abuse, lonerism, passion and grief. This book is everything. I wept.

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Lean Fall Stand

by Jon McGregor

A brilliantly crafted new release from the Costa Award winning author of Reservoir 13, this small novel is broken into three distinct acts and every beat, every sentence is perfectly done. When an Antarctic research mission goes wrong the consequences are far-reaching and McGregor takes measure of the impact on ordinary lives. Lean Fall Stand carefully unpacks the notion of heroism, the blurred lines between sacrifice and selfishness, obsession and delusion. Very impressive.

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Light Perpetual

by Francis Spufford

Another wildly clever new book from an award winning British author. Light Perpetual begins in the microsecond that a V2 rocket crashes through the ceiling of a Woolworths in the South London suburb of Bexford and into a display of saucepans, killing 168 innocent people — among them five children. The novel that follows is an elaborate “What If?” of those five separate lives spanning decades and contemplating many changes and issues of our modern history. Full of warmth and gratitude for the magic of life itself and gracefully considering the absurd tragedy of death, this novel is mighty and massive in its scope.

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Still

by Matt Nable

Fans of Scrublands and The Dry, get ready! Still takes the reader to Darwin 1963, a frontier town built on liquor, racism, violence and the tropical heat of summer. Ned Potter is the first cop on the scene when a violently murdered man is pulled from the swamp water. When his commanding officer warns Potter off from looking for answers, the whole Territory starts to stink of conspiracy and dirty money (and beer and ciggies and sweat and blood). This is grouse!

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The Family Doctor

by Debra Oswald

(CW for domestic abuse, murder, suicide.)

The delightful Debra Oswald is Aussie TV royalty, a creator and long time screenwriter of the hit show Offspring, among many others. She also writes for stage and on occasion knocks out a cracking good novel. The Family Doctor begins with an atrocity – an abusive ex husband hunts down his wife and makes her watch as he kills her children, then kills her, and himself. The woman who had been helping to harbour this mother and children is a GP in Sydney’s inner west (I loved seeing my local haunts portrayed in Oswald’s addictive prose!). The unlikely literary thriller that follows concerns how we process and grieve these unspeakable acts. It also examines what lengths we might go to to protect innocent women and children who have been failed by a legal system and a culture that permits abuse. If I say any more I’ll spoil it, but suffice to say wow!

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The Truth About Her

by Jacqueline Maley

Walkley Award winning investigative journalist Jacqueline Maley will astound you with this novel. Single mother and newspaper journalist Suzy Hamilton’s exposé of a 25-year-old wellness influencer who faked a life-threatening illness sets off a wave of trolling that precipitates her death. Soon after an office sex scandal sees Suzy ridiculed and without an income. Over an oppressively hot summer in her uncle’s crumbling Glebe terrace house, Suzy develops a strange friendship with the grieving mother of the young woman she exposed. There’s so much to discover in this incredibly readable story about motherhood, the ownership writers take for their stories, the complex ways in which we grieve, and how women are marginalised in modern Australia. I think this will be the next big thing in Australian fiction.

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The Prophets

by Robert Jones Jr

This is the most exciting new voice in fiction I’ve read this summer and maybe this year. The Prophets is a searing debut about a forbidden love on a cotton plantation in America’s deep south that threatens to rip apart an insular world of slavery and repression. You’ll revel in every laboriously honed sentence in this novel, which at times breaks from realism and goes into the chorus voice of ancestral spirits. I’m sure this book is destined for American literary prizes in the year to come, it’s a must-read for anyone who loves Colson Whitehead or Toni Morrison.

Buy it here

What did you read and love over the summer? Tell us below!

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About the Contributor

Ben Hunter

Ben is Booktopia's dedicated fiction and children's book specialist. He spends his days painstakingly piecing together beautiful catalogue pages and gift guides for the website. At any opportunity, he loves to write warmly of the books that inspire him. If you want to talk books, find him tweeting at @itsbenhunter