AustLit

'Silvey’s first novel since Jasper Jones is a compassionate tale about overcoming trauma to find family and self-acceptance, narrated by a trans child.'

'In the hands of its acerbic narrator – dealing with a crushing mental illness – even the darkest material is handled lightly, and is all the more powerful for it.' 

'I’m not too concerned at first, not really. I make jokes, like I do in any difficult situation: about how I’m an introvert anyway and can’t think of anything better than staying away from other people, how I’ve more than a decade’s experience in working from home, how this is my time to shine. I roll my eyes when my parents cancel their overseas holiday.' (Introduction)

'The Morbids takes its title from the unofficial moniker of a therapy group that its protagonist, Caitlin, attends in a “nondescript community room in Surry Hills” on Tuesday nights, alongside a ragtag group of misfits all united by their crippling fear of death.' (Introduction)

'There’s a strange elasticity of time at play in the latest issue of Meanjin, which seems fitting, perhaps, for the particular moment in which we find ourselves, unmoored from our regular habits and lives, newly conscious of our place in history. Many of the pieces within its pages were clearly written in the early months of this year – such is the nature of lead times in publishing – and are concerned with the horrors of the past summer: the devastating fires that destroyed massive amounts of bushland and habitat and choked cities with smoke for weeks; our politicians’ failure to properly respond. And then a new crisis emerged, and in many ways eclipsed this, because of the immediacy with which it affected all of our lives, and the profundity of the change. It’s evident that a good number of the pieces have been rapidly updated to reflect this, to begin to grapple with what an event such as the coronavirus might mean, as seen from the vantage point of the early days of the pandemic. Jonathan Green’s opening editorial explicitly speaks to this “moment of such extraordinary and irreversible disruption” where “all that seemed so solidly certain [has been] made tremulous and thin”. So the issue as a whole feels almost like a time capsule, a reminder of what the world was like before we knew precisely how it would change.' (Introduction)

'The Octopus and I opens with a short chapter in the voice of an octopus, heavily pregnant, attempting to cross the isthmus at Eaglehawk Neck, near Port Arthur. “My body is brimming is pulsing is purring is ready,” the octopus narrates, “… the moonlight envelops me caressing my arms as they caress the kelpy floor the kelpy shore.” This is a gesture that sets up the book’s thematic and stylistic concerns: the novel is largely about the interconnections between the animal and human worlds, and the ethical problems that our relationships with different kinds of life forms often elide. Animals – the octopus, a mutton bird, a pair of seals – are important characters here, and while Erin Hortle’s attempts to enter their subjectivity aren’t always this successful, they provide a continual counterbalance to the dramas played out in the human characters’ lives. The book is very much a work of ecological fiction, a genre that is becoming increasingly common in Australian literature, and in which octopuses – because of their intelligence and strangeness – frequently occur.'  (Introduction)

'The Bass Rock opens with a memory, or a dream, where six-year-old Vivianne, whose adult self is one of the narrators of the novel proper, discovers a woman’s body in a suitcase, washed up on the beach near her grandmother’s house. The memory is important, not only because it is a formative experience for Vivianne and one that haunts her adult life, but also because it sets up The Bass Rock’s central concern: this is a novel about the centuries-long history of violence committed against women, and the legacies this might leave.' (Introduction)

'Josephine Rowe’s stories are about time. Time as it is lived and as it is recounted; the way it doesn’t just progress, but speeds and slows, persists and lingers. Her characters are sometimes aware of time passing, almost as if they stand outside it, sometimes aware that the moment they are in is one that they will return to, again and again, across their later lives. Or else they are narrating from a position that is simultaneously in the present and in the future, looking back: ‘I will never see anything like it again,’ narrates a boy, suddenly a man, describing wading out to an island through a sea full of bioluminescent phytoplankton in ‘Glisk’; the story ‘What Passes for Fun’ begins with the phrase ‘somewhere close to the end of things,’ an opening that’s also a foreshadowing of an ending, although of what and of which nature the reader is never privy. Memory, in Rowe’s stories, works in anterograde, as well as in reverse.'(Introduction)

'The Breeding Season is a novel that grapples with big ideas: the connections between death; grief, mortality and the bodily experience of them; how the male gaze preconditions how women (and female animals) are portrayed and described in science and art. It is an ambitious book, and the ideas that drive it are one of its main pleasures, even if they sometimes overburden the narrative.'(Introduction)