This psychological novel from across the ditch won the Michael Gifkins Prize at Text Publishing, one imagines on the distinctiveness of its narrative style. We enter the mind of Olga, a woman unflagging in her devotion when her friend Lara becomes a grandmother at a difficult time. Widowed during her pregnancy, Lara’s daughter Sophie suffers post-natal depression after her son is born, leaving Lara – and Olga, who kindly steps into the breach – to care for her baby. Underneath the helpful exterior, Olga is different. She’s abrasive, resentful, seething with frustration and contempt, and as her warped perspective gathers force, it swells into dangerous obsession. I found the relentless staccato of Olga’s syntax off-putting and couldn’t consistently suspend disbelief, but it’s still an ambitious stab at voice creation, claustrophobic and domineering in tone.

NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Funkytown
Paul Kennedy, Affirm, $32.99

This is not simply a coming-of-age memoir, it’s also a highly evocative and atmospheric portrait of a place and a time: Seaford, near Frankston (Funkytown) in 1993. In admirably spare, unaffected writing, Paul Kennedy – ABC journalist and author – resurrects his 17-year-old self in his final year of school and all those with whom he shared the year. There are fights, too much binge drinking, an arrest, clumsy, inarticulate attempts at first love, and football – Kennedy’s dream to play AFL ending with the VFL. Running all through this are the serial murders of three women in the Frankston/Seaford area, a case that not only chilled the community but brought it together. Along the way, via English literature classes, he acquires a love of and facility for writing. Immediate, with a strong sense of place.

Long Players
Ed., Tom Gatti, Bloomsbury, $34.99

While being a collection of reminiscences by writers about the records that had a pivotal effect on them, this is also a homage to the LP itself – especially vinyl. Tom Gatti, from The New Statesman, where the pieces first appeared, provides a history of the form, how it survived the computer age, as well as the observation that, from The Beatles’ Rubber Soul on, the LP became a “complete statement” beyond the confines of the 45. The contributions are meditative, often atmospheric: novelist David Mitchell recalling first hearing Joni Mitchell’s Blue on his walkman strolling home in Great Malvern after finishing school, Deborah Levy connecting her teen angst with David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs or Eimear McBride listening to Tindersticks and being transported through Kentish Town by the music. Mine? Please, Please Me – the first true LP.

No, You’re Not Entitled to Your Opinion
Ed., Alexandra Hansen, Thames & Hudson, $29.99

Opinion pieces are like greyhounds, they’re everywhere. But there’s a big difference between having an opinion and knowing what you’re talking about. Enter The Conversation, formed by Andrew Jaspan in Melbourne in 2011 to tap into experts at universities and bring informed opinion to the public, as apart from rants. As Michelle Grattan’s introduction points out, it’s been a rapid decade and this collection of The Conversation’s Top 50 is a snap-shot of its major concerns. Patrick Stokes, in his eponymous essay, questions the “false equivalence between experts and non-experts”, Eva Cox discusses the limitations of #MeToo and argues for cultural change in pursuit of gender equality, and Judith Brett’s 2018 essay cites the Morrison government’s “biggest problem” as climate change, all the more resonant now given the Glasgow farce.

The One That Got Away
Ken Haley, Transit Lounge, $32.99

In February 2020 travel writer Ken Haley embarked on what he planned to be a year-long tour of the Caribbean – brave stuff, given that he is paraplegic. But Haley, as becomes clear from this record of his highly unusual journey that at times leaves you shaking your head in wonder and admiration, is undaunted by most things. There were no COVID cases when he landed in Havana, but it didn’t take long and soon he was ordered out of Cuba – fetching up in Florida. Rather than return home, remarkably he pressed on with plan A and was in hotel quarantine in Jamaica when he heard that his home town, Melbourne, had just gone into lockdown. His island-hopping journal, entertaining and witty, gives us, among other things, an insight into the demands of wheel-chair travel as well as documenting an Odyssean year’s journey in strange days.