Cassandra Atherton

I was hooked by Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale For the Time Being (Text) from the moment the Hello Kitty lunchbox washes ashore in British Columbia. It contains a Japanese girl’s diary and it’s the beginning of a relationship between two ‘time beings’ – reader and writer. Similarly, Michelle de Kretser’s Questions of Travel (Allen and Unwin, 10/12) uses the double narrative to explore identity via two fascinating characters from different parts of the globe.

I have loved Anne Carson since Glass, Irony and God. Red Doc> (Knopf) is brilliant. Written in two-inch columns of text, this verse-novel explores time passing in devastating ways. It is an unforgettable sequel to Autobiography of Red; the strange title references the default file name her computer gave her document.

As Chris Wallace-Crabbe prepares to turn eighty, his New and Selected Poems (Carcanet, 4/13) contains his best poems from 1959 to the present day. ‘The Amorous Cannibal’ remains my favourite.

 

Tony Birch

Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites (Picador, 5/13), set in Iceland in 1829, involves the impending execution of a young woman, Agnes, sentenced to death for her involvement in a brutal murder. Through Agnes we come to question the moral complexity circling the crime she has been involved in. Burial Rites produces an atmosphere of visceral emotion and subtle tenderness. This is wonderful storytelling from a young writer.

Jess Walter’s We Live In Water (HarperPerennial) is not only my favourite book of short stories of 2013; it is one of the best collections of recent years. The stories are set around Walter’s hometown of Spokane, Washington, among the ‘down-and-outs’. The story ‘Wheelbarrow Kings’ is a gem.

With Bitter Wash Road (Text, 12/13), Garry Disher once again demonstrates that he is the best crime writer in the land.

 

Matthew Condon

John Safran’s Murder in Mississippi: The True Story of How I Met a White Supremacist, Befriended His Black Killer and Wrote this Book (Hamish Hamilton) is an astonishing example of the true crime genre. Safran both subverts the non-fiction discipline and retains enough of its traditional tics to produce a compelling account of the murder of Richard Barrett in the American South. The prose is fresh, the attention to detail extraordinary. That this is the documentary-maker’s first book is similarly remarkable. Heaven forbid if he turned his considerable literary talents to a true crime case on home soil.

David Marr’s The Prince (Quarterly Essay 51, Black Inc., 11/13), an investigation into George Pell and the Catholic Church in Australia, underlines yet again why Marr is probably our finest long-form journalist. Marr’s fascination with power and its mechanics – evidenced also in his portraits of Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott – finds its natural fit with Pell and a scandalised church. A timely and at times chilling character portrait.

 

Miriam Cosic

Kevin Powers, a former US soldier who served in Iraq and is now an MFA, published The Yellow Birds (Sceptre), a harrowing, insistent, illuminating novel narrated with the emotional urgency of personal experience.

Notable war novels written by Australians included Denise Leith’s What Remains (Allen & Unwin) and Ashley Hay’s The Railwayman’s Wife (Allen & Unwin, 5/13). Janet Butler’s Kitty’s War: The Remarkable Wartime Experiences of Kit McNaughton (UQP, 11/13) is a slightly over-academic but still fascinating history of Australian women who, as nurses, performed essential military service during World War I.

Andrew Solomon’s Far from the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity (Scribner) is eye-opening and thought-provoking: it should be required reading for parents and for people on the right of the bioethics wars.

The revelation of the year was the republication of Kenneth Mackenzie’s 1937 novel, The Young Desire It (Text Classics, 9/13), an erotic Australian coming-of-age story masterfully told, with compelling lyricism in an idiosyncratic voice. How could it have faded from literary view in the intervening years?

 

Sheila Fitzpatrick

My fiction nomination is Glenda Adams’s Dancing on Coral (Text Classics, 11/87), first published in 1987. With wry humour and a light hand, Adams tells the story of a young woman who, like the author in the 1960s, makes the journey by cargo boat from Sydney to an expatriate life in New York. The eponymous dancing on coral occurs in mid-ocean and is closely followed by a betrayal whose shadow hangs over the rest of the novel.

For non-fiction, I pick Kay Dreyfus’s Silences and Secrets: The Australian Experience of the Weintraubs Syncopators (Monash University Publishing, 9/13). Dreyfus’s well-researched real-life story gives us jazz, Jewish refugees, spies, denunciation, World War II internment, and even a bit of skulduggery in the Soviet Union, along with a judicious analysis of the difficult moral questions surrounding Australia’s past treatment of refugees.

 

Morag Fraser

Reading Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (Giramondo, 9/13) is like sky or sea diving: suddenly the world becomes magical, yet credible. Fantastic creatures swirl past, become your familiars, yet remain creatures. Wright, so intuitive, so adept with metaphor, always gives the natural world its due, and its dignity. Her novel – about a future Australian dystopia where the land is degraded in lockstep with blind-sighted politics – is a feat of imaginative prophecy and wild linguistic invention.

In Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools (Knopf), Diane Ravitch, research professor of education at New York University, hammers out the brief history of another potential dystopia – the American school system as ‘reformed’ under George W. Bush and Barack Obama. As uncompromising as her title and subtitle, Ravitch argues that the implementation of programs like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top has led to test mania, shrunken curricula, the corporatisation of American education – and radical inequity. Confronting, irritating, opinionated – but essential reading. For Australians too.

 

Andrew Fuhrmann

Few books on theatre are as interesting, original, and meticulous as Gay McAuley’s Not Magic but Work: An Ethnographic Account of a Rehearsal Process (Manchester University Press). Sydney academic Gay McAuley goes behind the scenes to observe a play’s progress from first draft to opening night, making a careful and invaluable surveillance of daily life at Sydney’s Belvoir St theatre.

László Krasznahorkai’s Seiobo There Below (New Directions) is quite simply the most rewarding reading experience I’ve had in years. Hungarian writer Krasznahorkai’s prose is huge, often opaque, but utterly alive – as though the night itself were animate, awakened by strange dreams and beautiful obsessions.

A quiet, meditative journey through the empty ruins of the world, Nicolas Rothwell’s Belomor (Text, 3/13) is by turns ravishing and dismaying, a novel which is also an essay on art and a chantepleure on meaning and impermanence.

 

Michael Fullilove

Having spent the last few years writing history, I have retreated into fiction when it comes to reading for pleasure. Richard Flanagan’s new novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Vintage, 10/13) is magnificent. It can be grim, but it contains profound insights on war, the Australian character – and, most importantly, love.

Colum McCann’s TransAtlantic (Bloomsbury) describes the journeys of a series of real-life visitors from North America to Ireland, and the female characters who link these men across the centuries. The book has drawn some flak from critics, but I found it moving in its portrayal of the remarkable courage and imagination of these transatlantic voyagers.

In An Officer and a Spy (Hutchinson), Robert Harris tackles the Dreyfus affair with his usual intelligence and style. Cicero’s speeches, the Hitler diaries, Tony Blair – is there no subject which Harris cannot make sing?

 

Kerryn Goldsworthy

‘Robert Galbraith’ is the crime-writing pseudonym of J.K. Rowling, but the novel The Cuckoo’s Calling (Sphere) received excellent reviews before the secret came out, and it won’t surprise readers who appreciate the finer points of the Harry Potter series to discover that she has a finely tuned ear for the definitive characteristics of other literary genres. This novel is a perfect balance of crime fiction’s traditional qualities with Rowling’s characteristic wit, inventiveness, and deft plotting.

Based on ‘Little Gidding’ from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, Steven Carroll’s A World of Other People (Fourth Estate, 4/13) explores the nature of literary inspiration in its tale of lovers whose lives intersect with that of the real-life Eliot. The story turns on a moment when an Allied bomber in flames flies low over London during the Blitz in 1941 while Eliot is acting as an ARP warden on the roof of Faber & Faber, as he did in real life. Carroll’s is an original and intriguing approach that explores ideas about creativity, war, and damage.

 

Jacqueline Kent

Peter Fitzpatrick’s engrossing double biography, The Two Frank Thrings (Monash University Press, 10/12) is at once a valuable contribution to the history of film-making and the performing arts in Australia and a psychological study of two compulsively secretive men: a father who kept his secrets carefully concealed; and a son who hid in plain sight.

In his social, cultural, and environmental history of the Great Barrier Reef, The Reef: A Passionate History (Viking), Iain McCalman effortlessly synthesises scientific information, scholarship, fascinating and perceptive accounts of the great environmental and creationist debates over the last two hundred years, and a witty and perceptive appreciation of human foibles.

Written with fluid elegance, grace and humour, Michelle de Kretser’s Questions of Travel is an absorbing study of two very different lives and journeys as well as exploring ideas about home and displacement with imagination and high intelligence.

 

John Kinsella

Pam Brown’s witty, smart Home by Dark (Shearsman, 7/13), reconfigures public and private, pulling down aesthetics to level all playing fields, fusing pinpoint observations with deflations of artistic and social niceties. Brown’s verbal play disobeys and undoes literary propriety. Her ‘quotidian’ can be disturbing and plangent. Her pithy, strung-out poem ‘half life’ recalls the title of Michael Hulse’s Half-Life (Arc). Brown’s and Hulse’s aesthetics are immensely different (Hulse is ‘formal’ in prosody if not in sensibility), but both take risks. Hulse’s collection of poems is brilliant but devastatingly disturbing and worrying. Technically ‘perfect’ in formal constraint, Hulse is willing to delve the (im)moral depths to reach firm ethical conclusions.

I also recommend an impressive Festschrift that constitutes a superb scholarly volume on Dante, Legato con amore in un volume: Essays in Honour of John A. Scott, edited by John J. Kinder and Diana Glenn (Leo S. Olschki Editore).

 

Bronwyn Lea

Many books of poems deserve to be read, but at least three recent collections deserve to be ravished. Sharon Olds’s Stag’s Leap (Knopf) is an unflinching look at a marriage in collapse. Named for the couple’s favourite red wine, the eponymous poem reads: ‘When anyone escapes, my heart / leaps up. Even when it is I who am escaped from, / I am half on the side of the leaver.’

The late Dorothy Porter was always on the side of the lover, to which The Best 100 Poems of Dorothy Porter (Black Inc.), selected by Andrea Goldsmith, stands in testament.

Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson’s Envelope Poems (New Directions), edited by Jen Bervin and Marta Werner, is a full-colour facsimile edition of the belle’s late work. ‘Excuse / Emily and / her Atoms,’ one poem reads, ‘the North / Star is / of small / fabric but it / implies / much / presides / yet.’

 

Patrick McCaughey

We have to thank Text Publishing for giving us Elizabeth Harrower’s The Watch Tower (Text Classics,10/12) after it was out of print for many years. It’s harrowing stuff all right, with its claustrophobic world of the entrapment of the feminine and the recklessness of the masculine in Australian society.

Andrea Goldsmith’s The Memory Trap (Fourth Estate, 5/13), one of her subtlest, most intricately constructed novels, is woven around the double narrative of two sisters. Goldsmith’s compassion and sympathy always match her keen awareness of weakness and inadequacy in the mistakes of love.

David Cannadine’s The Undivided Past: History beyond Our Differences (Penguin, 10/13) is immensely stimulating, with a dazzling intellectual reach in its sources. The clarity and forcefulness of its argument remind the reader what a brilliant lecturer Cannadine is. You feel the voice of this historian urging a divisive present to be mindful of the past.

 

Stuart Macintyre

Geoffrey Parker’s Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century  (Yale University Press) sets out the evidence for a shift in weather patterns in the seventeenth century that brought famines, wars and misery around the world. Part of the fascination of the book is reading the familiar histories of civil wars in Britain and Western Europe against the Indian and Chinese calamities.

Two books on the idea and practice of internationalism caught my attention. Mark Mazower’s accomplished Governing the World: The History of an Idea (Penguin) traced the shifting forms and purposes of international institutions, while Glenda Sluga’s Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (University of Pennsylvania Press) is a distinguished Australian contribution that reveals how these institutions have served both as an antidote to nationalism and its accomplice.

Finally, I was entranced by Ciaran Brady’s reconsideration James Anthony Froude: An Intellectual Biography of a Victorian Prophet (OUP), about the Victorian historian, religious bigot, and author of a scandalously frank biography of his mentor Thomas Carlyle. This is intellectual biography at its best.

 

Brian Matthews

In Canada (Bloomsbury, 7/12), Richard Ford unravels, in prose that seems unpretentious but is often magnificently orotund, the darkening sequence of episodes that shapes the destiny of the Parsons family, and that ends with a shrug of desperation: ‘We try. All of us. We try.’

The evocation of an atmosphere of impending doom is also Alex Miller’s splendid achievement in Coal Creek (Allen & Unwin, 10/13). Bobby Blue, the barely literate hero, intuitively understanding the human heart and the natural world, foresees his fate with guileless, deadly accuracy.

On Warne (Hamish Hamilton, 12/12) may be Gideon Haigh’s best yet. Shaped, as the title suggests, in the manner of the classical essayists – Montaigne, Hazlitt – this is cricket writing as art.

In HHhH (Harvill Secker, 9/12) Laurent Binet agonises brilliantly about how best to tell his story while brilliantly telling it – the self-regarding author, pretending to diffidence, relentlessly pursues and nails ‘the butcher of Prague’.

 

Brenda Niall

Hearing about Clive James’s new translation of The Divine Comedy (Picador) set me thinking: had I ever read this cultural treasure? The Dorothy Sayers version on my shelves looked suspiciously pristine. Rather than go back to Sayers, I turned to James. If his vernacular style is sometimes flat, it has sublime moments too; and the pace is wonderfully sustained.

The art of the poet–translator led me to Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf (Faber). On Heaney’s death in August 2013, his superb reading of the poem was broadcast and re-issued. I’d read Beowulf in the original as a student, but I remembered only the task of recognising words and getting some kind of grip on the grammar. Heaney’s version is magical; and so is his account of finding a familiar local voice for the poem in his Northern Irish farming background, starting audaciously with the word ‘So.’

 

Thuy On

Mo Willems’s That is Not a Good Idea! (HarperCollins) is a fractured fairytale that will delight young children with its twist on traditional characters and its pantomime-style illustrations. There is a wily fox with nefarious motives who courts a seemingly innocent goose, but the ending will subvert expectations.

Another picture book, Amazing Babes (Scribe) – with words by Eliza Sarlos, drawings by Grace Lee – is a sophisticated affair, with inspirational text beside full-page portraits of twenty influential women of the world. It’s a beautifully crafted book of potential role models for impressionable minds.

In Don’t Look Now (Allen & Unwin), two comic masters – Paul Jennings and cartoonist Andrew Weldon – have teamed up to produce a four-part series involving a little boy who can fly (but only when no one is looking). A likeable, funny series for young readers.

For an older demographic, Allyse Near’s Fairytales for Wilde Girls (Random House, 7/13) is an assured début with crossover appeal. Its heady mix of Angela Carter-inspired Gothic romance and fantasy elements ushers in a new talent in total control of her storytelling.

 

Stephanie Owen Reeder

Picture books can be perfect vehicles for exploring the vicissitudes of life. With its lyrical text and decorative illustrations, Alison Lester’s Kissed by the Moon (Viking, 12/13) takes children on an evocative journey through the natural world. It is an enchanting celebration of a baby’s first year of life.

Hauntingly illustrated by Freya Blackwood, Margaret Wild’s thought-provoking The Treasure Box (Viking, 4/13) is a dark and moving tale about war, displacement, and refugees. However, at its heart is the intrinsic value of knowledge, memory, and tradition.

Using opulent, almost surrealistic illustrations and a sensitive and engaging text, Tine Mortier and Kaatje Vermeire pull no punches in Maia and What Matters (Book Island). The book deals with how a feisty young girl comes to terms with the effect of a stroke on her once active grandmother, followed by the death of her grandfather.

 

Nicolas Rothwell

In a year of fitful and unfocused reading, in a time when the mere act of giving oneself to a book feels like a stand against convention, one book stood out, a slim, frail one: Simone Weil’s On the Abolition of All Political Parties, (Black Inc.). ‘Nearly everywhere, instead of thinking, one merely takes sides. Such a choice replaces the activity of the mind.’ It is the work of a Frenchwoman, translated by Simon Leys, that Canberra scholar of Belgian birth, and buttressed with an essay by the Lithuanian-born Polish poet Czesław Miłosz.

Alas, where do our borders lie? To chase down this thin, crystal-textured work, a fat one: The Leichhardt Diaries: Early Travels in Australia 1842–1844 (Queensland Museum, edited by Roderick Fensham and Thomas Darragh): the record of the Prussian-born explorer Ludwig Leichhardt’s first steps towards the inland: he looks, he studies, enchantment takes hold: words flow onto the page, and await us, buried deep in time.

 

Michael Shmith

The late and fabled travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor is the subject of my two choice books of the year: his biography; and (with some posthumous assistance) the last volume of his trilogy covering his legendary walk in the 1930s from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos (John Murray) – well edited, from substantial fragments, by Artemis Cooper and Colin Thubron – completes this epic journey almost seventy years on. Cooper has also done a sterling job sorting out the rococo complexities and embellishments of travel literature’s most noble foot soldier’s long and colourful life in Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure (John Murray, 4/13).

I’ve also been dipping, with considerable delight, into Amazing Aussie Bastards: Remarkable True Tales from Magnates, Moguls and Other Australian Mavericks (Allen & Unwin) by my Age colleague Lawrence Money. This is clear and perceptive journalism of the finest quality.

 

Mike Shuttleworth

Andy Griffiths and Terry Denton’s Treehouse series is doing more for children’s reading than all the hand-wringing Op-Eds ever will. Part high-wire comedy, part comic book, Griffiths and Denton’s unique balance of words and pictures reach new heights with each book. The latest is 39-Storey Treehouse (Pan Macmillan).

Beginning with a brilliant set-piece at Notre Dame, Timothée de Fombelle’s Vango Book 1: Between Sky and Earth (Walker) is a between-the-wars novel stretching from Loch Ness to the Aeolian Islands. A novice monk accused of murder is pursued by mysterious men. Nazis, heroes, hidden treasure, and journeys by Zeppelin, boat, car, and a hunt through frozen forests are here in a book that is hard to pigeonhole and harder to put down.

In Simmone Howell’s Girl Defective (Pan Macmillan), fifteen-year-old Sky Martin sets out to explain the death of a young woman whose body is found in the Elwood canal. Howell mythologises but also pokes fun at the St Kilda demi-monde and would-be bohemian crowd.

 

Ruth Starke

Young Adult novels often deal with developing identities, but few tackle this as directly, honestly, or insightfully as Alex as Well (Text, 3/13) by Alyssa Brugman. Alex’s parents raised him as a boy and want to keep him that way but she has other ideas.

In her second book Friday Brown (Text, 9/12), Vikki Wakefield gives us another battler heroine. The beautifully written and observed first-person narration tells a gritty yet tender, multi-layered story about family and home, peopled by richly drawn characters.

For sheer originality and black humour, Creepy and Maud (Fremantle Press, 10/12) was a standout. Dianne Touchell’s first novel has the nerdish narrator obsessed with the self-harming girl he calls Maud pulling her hair out in her bedroom across the way. Jane Campion should lose no time in optioning the film rights.

For younger readers, Catherine Jinks’s A Very Unusual Pursuit (Allen & Unwin, 6/13) is scary fun. In this historical Gothic adventure set in 1870s London, horrible bogles, or monsters, are gobbling up and eating little children.

 

Jane Sullivan

In an impressive year for Australian fiction, I still have much to look forward to, for some of the most promising titles are only just out; but at present, my favourites are Alex Miller’s Coal Creek, for the extraordinary lyrical simplicity and deceptively artless power of the narrator’s voice; and Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book, for the audacious sweep and impassioned urgency of Wright’s imagination. I also loved the meditative pace and sly wit of Michelle de Kretser’s Questions of Travel.

My outstanding non-fiction choice is Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights (Vintage), Marina Warner’s latest foray into the land of legend, in this case the Arabian Nights. It always amazes me how she can combine thorough scholarship with addictive readability. She pursues a strong and elegant argument about how the Arab tradition of storytelling speaks to Western culture, and makes me realise both how little and how much I have absorbed of tales that have haunted and delighted me since childhood.

 

Martin Thomas

A lifetime of scholarship informed the novel Memoirs of Hadrian: And Reflections on the Composition of Hadrian (Penguin), Marguerite Yourcenar’s exquisite evocation of the dying emperor grappling with the past. My partner gave me the new reprint and it set the stage for more recent visions of empire in this year’s reading.

Dane Kennedy’s The Last Blank Spaces: Exploring Africa and Australia (Harvard University Press, 6/13) is the academic history that most captivated me. A transnational comparison of African and Australian expeditions, it traces the rise and fall of exploration as an intellectual project.

Trevor Shearston’s Game (Allen & Unwin) set in colonial New South Wales, recounts the demise of bushranger Ben Hall. Lean, wiry prose and an almost anthropological view of relations between the outlaw and his tribe of kinsmen liberate this bushranger from the clutches of cliché.

More crime and Victoriana, on a New Zealand goldfield, came with Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries (Granta). Booker Prize winners don’t always speak to me, but the dark interiority of this strange mystery was immediately seductive.

 

Jacki Weaver

My favourite books this year were Dave Eggers’s A Hologram for the King (Hamish Hamilton), Philip Roth’s The Humbling (Vintage), and Luke Davies’ Interferon Psalms (Allen & Unwin). I found them all brilliant and soul-stirring.

 

Jen Webb

Among all the fine poetry published this year, three (more or less) local collections captivated me. New Zealand poet laureate Ian Wedde brings myth and memory up to date in The Lifeguard: New Poems 2008–2013 (Auckland University Press). From the opening lines ‘You have to start somewhere / in these morose times’, to the last ‘shadow / standing up, the motorway’s / restless traffic going west’, the poems are supple reflections on place and memory.

Again from New Zealand, Elizabeth Smither’s The Blue Coat (Auckland University Press), in resonant images, shifts from humour to meditative melancholy, always evoking ‘solicitude / tenderness, no matter who portrays it’.

Six Different Windows (UWA Publishing, 9/13), by my colleague Paul Hetherington, translates the dépaysement that so often disturbs the everyday. But though it may be true that ‘everywhere, even home, was a travelling away’, still it offers ‘an improbable joy in being / at one with a world’.

 

Kim Williams

I had a diverse reading year. One standout was William Dalrymple’s Return of the King: The Battle for Afghanistan (Bloomsbury), a riveting definitive account of the First Afghan War, which I could not put down. It heightened my personal sense of despair over the most recent futile eleven-year foray.

Roger Crowley’s City of Fortune: How Venice Ruled the Seas (Random House) is another piece of splendid, coherent, authoritative page-turning history – a worthy successor to Empires of the Sea.

Tim Winton’s Eyrie (Hamish Hamilton, 11/13) presents a challenging character for the present in Tom Keely. It is haunting, confronting, and exquis itely written.

My final choice is a reflection of contemporary creative business thinking published to mark the fiftieth anniversary of BCG. Evidencing the quality of original lateral analytical thinking, Own the Future: 50 Ways to Win from The Boston Consulting Group, edited by Michael Deiomler et al. (Wiley) is recommended.

 

Robyn Williams

My most enthralling science book of the year was Peter Pringle’s Experiment Eleven: Dark Secrets behind the Discovery of a Wonder Drug (Walker & Company) Pringle, a journalist based in New York, writes about the astonishing story of Albert Schatz, who found a cure for TB but was cheated out of the kudos, royalties, and even a Nobel prize by his devious professor.

My most disturbing novel was Ben Elton’s Two Brothers (Bantam), a rough read in parts but hugely satisfying in the end. Not a comedy for once, but a Nazi saga.

My biggest surprise of 2013 was a book published four years ago: Claire Thomas’s Fugitive Blue (Allen & Unwin), my novel of the year for its sweep, evocative detail, and exquisite writing. The theme, as in Geraldine Brooks’s People of the Book, is the adventures of an object through history. This time it’s a painting. Claire Thomas is a Melburnian and enormously talented.

I also enjoyed James Robertson’s The Professor of Truth (Hamish Hamilton), a thriller about Lockerbie with explosive Australian associations.