Run and Hide Pankaj Mishra, Hutchinson Heinemann, $32.99Ĭlass tensions and the rising tide of illiberalism in contemporary India are laid bare in Pankaj Mishra’s Run and Hide. Roff writes with precision, and this volume possesses an imaginative scope that consistently defies category, upends expectation and rebels against any sort of formula or received idea for what Australian fiction should look like. Other stories offer the keys to love through puzzle-like narrative structure or computer code.
An archaeologist paid by a mining company to work against Indigenous cultural interests is visited by a strange disorder that makes her faint and commit extraordinary acts of kindness. Clandestine operatives of a KFC-like fast-food company plot vengeance on any who would dare steal the corporation’s secret recipe. It’s a rangy collection featuring everything from capitalist satire to more intimate experimental stuff. South Australian writer Andrew Roff debuts with a suite of speculative short stories that blends formal invention and dark humour, often using bizarre gambits to capture the absurdity and melancholy of the way we live now. The Teeth of a Slow Machine Andrew Roff, Wakefield, $29.95
Sex blogger Imogen has always had to hustle to survive as a writer among the precariat, and when Harri offers her a secure gig, it seems like a lifeline.īut dream jobs don’t exist, and the novel’s savage, black comic critique of contemporary workplace culture would make anyone look twice at the anti-work movement. Harri has slaved away at Panache magazine, sacrificing her happiness in pursuit of ambition, only to be sidelined when the top editing job comes up. Two women, Harri and Imogen, are exploited by the industry they love. Careering is about spiralling out of control, but also partakes of the millennial trend for performative verbification: it covers “careering” in the same sense as “adulting”.īuchanan has written a sharp-eyed satire on toxic work culture in journalism and publishing. The double meaning in the title of Daisy Buchanan’s second book encapsulates it in a word. The Colony is a luminous neo-colonial parable, though its light is blanched and wan and draws bleak relief from the weight of Irish literary tradition. James, one of the island’s few teenagers, becomes a go-between when the two men take an instant dislike to one another, and as his artistic talent becomes clear, the terrorist violence of the Troubles rears its head. Jean-Pierre Masson is a French linguist, a defender of endangered languages, who has devoted successive summers to recording spoken Irish there. Mr Lloyd is a London artist whose marriage and career are in a rut he has rented a cottage to paint the rugged coastal landscape. Fiction pick of the weekĪudrey Magee’s latest novel is set on a tiny island off Ireland’s west coast where the dwindling local population still speaks Irish as their first language. Normal text size Larger text size Very large text sizeīook critics Cameron Woodhead and Fiona Capp cast their eyes over recent fiction and non-fiction releases.