Dennis Altman

As usual, I was attracted to speculative political fiction and began the year with Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood (Bloomsbury) and William Boyd’s Ordinary Thunderstorms (Bloomsbury), both of which capture the chaos and uncertainty of the present world.

As a political scientist, I read academic and journalistic attempts to make sense of the world, and here two titles stood out for me: Peter Beinart’s The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris (Melbourne University Press) and Anna Krien’s Into the Woods: The Battle for Tasmania’s Forests (Black Inc., 11/10). Krien’s book is particularly resonant at a time when the anti-logging forces appear to have succeeded in Tasmania; and Beinart should be compulsory reading for all those politicians who defend our presence in Afghanistan with an insouciant disregard for history and culture. Moreover, both Krien and Beinart write carefully, and, in Krien’s case, with the eye of a novelist.

Don Anderson

John Tranter’s Starlight: 150 Poems(University of Queensland Press, 10/10).Here is the Snap, Crackle and Pop of contemporary Australian poetry. It is Tranter’s twentieth collection (approximately), and his radical imagination shows no sign of flagging. A visceral and intellectual delight.

Frederick Seidel’s Poems: 1959–2009 (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux). How could I have missed ‘the best American poet writing today’, having read his Paris Review interview with Robert Lowell some forty years ago? Seidel is not only the best-dressed American poet, he is also the most psychically violent, making Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, John Berryman, even Lowell, look like pussycats.

Ashley Hay’s The Body in the Clouds (Allen & Unwin, 9/10) is a scintillating and accomplished début novel, whose central emblem is the concept of ‘bridges’, particularly the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Hay’s structures and her characters are illuminated by an incandescent intelligence and a rare sensibility.

As for Peter Porter’s The Rest on the Flight: Selected Poems (Allen & Unwin), ‘urbane’ is the word that springs to mind regarding the late Peter Porter, for both the man and the poetry, though the ‘urbs’ might be Martial’s ancient Rome or twentieth-century London. The poetry of Porter, a true Athenian, was always civil, civic, civilised. He spoke in a public voice on ‘élite’ topics, being extraordinarily and gracefully erudite. He was the heir of his admired Auden, whom he at times surpassed, as of other public poets such as Pope and Byron. A consummate prosodist, he loved to climb in rhyme.

 

Carmel Bird

Chris Womersley’s novel Bereft (Scribe, 9/10), set in rural Australia in 1919, has lodged in my heart like a great poem or a sad, sad song – expressing the futility and grotesquerie of war, and the doggedness of the human spirit. It glides between the forms of the historical novel, the ghost story, and the whodunit.

With Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom (Fourth Estate, 12/10), I found the prose seductive, so cool and confident. Population control and the environmental movement, as they are understood by Walter, the protagonist, are at the centre of this realist novel. The characters are so flawed as to be repulsive. Walter, in his quest to save the cerulean mountain warbler from extinction, makes a pact with the devil. The others are just awesomely selfish and mean. The novel suggests that nobody and nothing will prevail. Without the laid-back writing, all this would be dire. I think Franzen has made a pact with the reader.

 

Nicholas Birns

Kirsten Tranter’s The Legacy (Fourth Estate, 2/10) is, on the surface, a pastiche of Henry James’s The Portrait of A Lady, but on a deeper level it is a searing portrait of Sydney and New York before and after 9/11, a world morally unprepared for the calamity that overtakes it.

Delia Falconer’s Sydney (New South, 11/10), vitally attuned to contemporary history, celebrates the city’s stylish embrace of the global and its expanded possibilities, but with an elegiac sense of the moral costs of this embrace. Falconer also offers a fitting celebration of Kenneth Slessor as a Sydney poet.

Peter Rose’s Roddy Parr (Fourth Estate) is a dryly funny tale of writers and biographers that is also, en passant, an incisive political novel.

Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story (Random House) is a novel of a dystopian future abounding in compassion and clear-eyed optimism.

 

Alison Broinowski

Because the bestseller lists tend to overlook Asia-Australia fiction these days, I’ve noted some of the best of it. These writers, with origins in Singapore, China, and the Philippines, widen our world view, while knowingly taking an insider’s satirical poke at their own and other societies, Australia included. ‘We’re so under-represented, and there’s so much to say,’ according to Miguel Syjuco; and he says it in his prize-winning, postmodern narrative of Philippines history and politics, Ilustrado (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux).

Idiosyncratic English distinguishes the way Asia-Australia novelists write, especially Ouyang Yu, who puns in two languages. English is the antagonist in his novel The English Class (Transit Lounge), against which a Chinese worker is in lifelong contention, but his victory costs him too dearly.

Asia-Australia fiction is often about individuals tested by life-changing hardship, as in Simone Lazaroo’s new novel, Sustenance (UWAP, 9/10), which foodies will love, when everyone in the Elsewhere hotel in Bali is taken hostage and the cook, Perpetua, has to nourish them all, body and soul.

 

Jo Case

This has been a year of outstanding short story collections. Maile Meloy’s Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It (Text Publishing), several years in the making, is both a triumph of craftsmanship and a pleasure to read. It combines a sharp sense of place (from America’s Midwest to Argentina), silkily apt imagery, thrillingly precarious scenarios, and engrossing characters.

Sherman Alexie’s War Dances (Scribe), shortlisted for the US National Book Award, similarly combines storytelling with deceptively simple technical excellence and a hefty emotional punch. Deeply affecting, crackling with stimulating ideas about race, class, and identity in America, these stories (and poems), many featuring Native American narrators (like Alexie himself), are brilliant.

Two starkly different Australian novels dazzled me this year: Patrick Holland’s poetic, darkly beautiful small-town tragedy The Mary Smokes Boys (Transit Lounge) and Fiona McGregor’s Indelible Ink (Scribe, 6/10), an engrossing family drama that brilliantly dissects contemporary Sydney.

 

Glyn Davis

Two books this year shed light on the political process. The first, Malcolm Fraser: The Political Memoirs (Miegunyah Press, 5/10), co-written with Margaret Simons,offers an immediate resonance: it suggests that reversing Whitlam’s unforgiving policy on Vietnamese boat people was among Fraser’s proudest achievements.

The second, Learning to Be a Minister: Heroic Expectations, Practical Realities (Melbourne University Press), by Patrick Weller and Anne Tiernan, is a thoughtful examination of the experience of new ministers, based on extensive interviews with the incoming Labor government in 2007.

A fresh biography of John Henry Newman, John Cornwell’s Newman’s Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (Continuum), provides an accessible account of the prolific writer and theologian, with an illuminating chapter on the cardinal’s ideal academic institution, expressed in The Idea of a University.

For insight into a scholar, it is hard to go past Sheila Fitzpatrick’s My Father’s Daughter (Melbourne University Press, 10/10).Fitzpatrick dissects her father, and her own motivation, with an objectivity remarkable even in an historian committed to evidence. It is hard to recall a memoir so committed to unflinching truth, so determined to find patterns and meaning across the decades.

 

Gillian Dooley

It is particularly difficult to choose this year, even if I confine myself to Australian fiction. Kirsten Tranter’s The Legacy had me enthralled from the start. It is not a book to read quickly, but one to savour.

Stephen Orr’s Time’s Long Ruin (Wakefield, 4/10) is a fine and quirky novel about an historical mystery, the disappearance of Adelaide’s Beaumont children in the 1960s. It too has a haunting quality, as one might expect from such a subject, but it is also surprisingly droll.

Michael Meehan’s Below the Styx (Allen & Unwin, 3/10) is the funniest thing I have read for years – devastating wit with a straight face.

Kathleen Stewart’s Men of Bad Character (University of Queensland Press, 6/10) is a triumph of unreliable narrative, much more clever and illuminating than the feminist complaint about the male sex that it could so easily have been.

 

Andrea Goldsmith

Love has guided my reading this year, and very satisfying has it been. A Happy Marriage (Scribner), by Rafael Yglesias, is an edgy, honest, intimate novel about a marriage from its earliest exuberance, through years weighted with routine and a long extramarital affair, to the final embrace of enduring love.

Simon Mawer was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2009 for The Glass Room (Little, Brown), an excellent novel with a shockingly lazy ending. But his earlier, non-shortlisted novel, The Fall (Little, Brown), is the best novel I have read this year. Set in the 1940s, 1960s, and 1980s, it is a novel of triangular relationships and mountain-climbing, of human failings, of long-held secrets, of love missed and wrong choices suffered. Not once does Mawer let anything slip through his well-inked fingers.

Michael Cunningham’s quiet new novel, By Nightfall (Fourth Estate), is a beauty, with a depth of characterisation entirely lacking in Franzen’s new doorstopper. Marriage fails to live up to its promise, the heart sags, and, for the husband, temptation arrives in the form of someone close to home.

It is a red-letter year when Judith Beveridge publishes a new volume of poetry. Storm and Honey (Giramondo, 12/09) includes a vivid sequence set in the rough and bloody maul of a fishing trawler. As well, there are delicate and surprising poems of jellyfish, cuttlefish, bees, cockatoos, and the lovely thrum of rain. A volume for the years.

 

Lisa Gorton

In Denmark in 1950, peat diggers found a two-thousand-year-old body, preserved in bog: the Tollund Man. Prompted by schoolgirls, the Danish archaeologist Peter Glob wrote his beautiful book, The Bog People: Iron-Age Man Preserved (1969). Now, in Bodies in the Bog and the Archaeological Imagination (Chicago University Press), Karin Sanders describes the modern afterlife of bog bodies – in art, literature, philosophy, science, and museums. This would make a strange and disconcerting read among tanned bodies on a summer beach.

I also liked Robin Black’s first collection of stories, If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This (Scribe). These stories, in their restraint and ambition, work in the tradition of Alice Munro. Darkly funny and various studies of family, they might well help with those end-of-year get-togethers.

Another highlight was Prosper Merimée’s brilliant study of his friend Henri Beyle (Stendhal), which Simon Leys translates and introduces in his lively small collection, With Stendhal (Black Inc., 6/10).

 

Rodney Hall

David Foster’s fecund, witty torrent of energy, Sons of the Rumour (Picador, 11/09) – enlivened by his unique, eclectic brand of cheeky fatalism – has marked a highpoint in the year. Also Kim Scott’s gentle celebration of first contact between the Noongar people, British colonists and American whalers, That Deadman Dance, a novel of welcome compassion from a writer bewitched by the Australian past. Each book, in its way, establishes its own world.

 

Kate Holden

The wonderful Richard Holmes’s The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (HarperCollins, 12/08) is infused with his characteristic acuity, humanity, and focus.

A fictional portrait of painter Clarice Beckett made Kristel Thornell’s début, Night Street (Allen & Unwin), a quiet, exquisite paean to female independence and artistic vision.

Sharyn Killens’s The Inconvenient Child (Miracle Publishing, 9/10), which I reviewed for these pages, still haunts me with its true tale of childhood abuse and triumphant self-determination.

As inspiring, but using a broader canvas, Tim Flannery’s ambitious and enthralling new book Here on Earth: An Argument for Hope (Text Publishing) suggests that disaster is not necessarily our fate if we can seize our evolutionary destiny and realise that cooperation is more productive than competition.

 

Jacqueline Kent

In lesser hands, Lorrie Moore’s novel The Gate at the Stairs (Knopf) – young student becomes nanny to adopted black American daughter of trendy couple – could have slid into Oprah-like sentimentality. But Moore, a brilliant manipulator of tone, moves easily from jokey student-speak to poignancy without going near the quirky button.

Iain McCalman’s Darwin’s Armada: How Four Voyagers to Australasia Won the Battle for Evolution and Changed the World (Viking, 3/09) has been called a scientific adventure story as racy as any historical novel, and so it is: the joint biography of four adventurous young naturalists, Charles Darwin, Joseph Hooker, Thomas Huxley, and Alfred Wallace, who, separately, set out on long and dangerous sea voyages to collect evidence that would support the theory of evolution. This is an admirable multiple biography that succeeds in doing what the best of such books do: illuminating a whole world through life stories.

Finally, Shirley Walker’s The Ghost at the Wedding (Viking, 7/09). This one sneaks up on you. Part memoir, part war history, and written with the intensity and vividness of a novel, it is a searing account of war’s catastrophic effect on one family from the Clarence River district of New South Wales. Walker carries her research very lightly. Once the story has got you in, it doesn’t let go: its horror is all the greater for its calm honesty and complete lack of sentimentality.

 

James Ley

The two standout books for me this year were both works of critical biography. The first was Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time (Princeton University Press), a superb distillation of his definitive five-volume biographical study, which is as brilliant at drawing out the complexities of Dostoevsky’s character as it is in placing his fiction in its appropriate political and philosophical context.

The second was Michael Kimmage’s The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers, and the Lessons of Anti-Communism (Harvard University Press), which explores the evolution of postwar American politics through a parallel biography of the liberal Lionel Trilling and the conservative Whittaker Chambers. Both men were 1930s radicals who later defined themselves as anti-communists, and both were deeply engaged in the ideological arguments of their time. In tracing their intellectual development, Kimmage unearths some of the tangled roots of the aggressive brand of conservatism that dominates the political scene in the United States today.

I was also pleased to have an excuse to reread Christina Stead’s masterpiece The Man Who Loved Children (Miegunyah Press), which turns seventy this year and has just been republished in honour of the occasion. And about time, too!

 

Patrick McCaughey

Janine Burke’s Source: Nature’s Healing Role in Art and Writing(Allen & Unwin, 2/10) showed an extraordinary ‘range of mind’, from Ernest Hemingway at Key West to Emily Kame Kngwarreye at Utopia. Dr Burke chooses the biographical essay as her modus vivendi, and is readable and perceptive.

The Donald Friend Diaries(Text Publishing, 11/10) have been skilfully distilled by Ian Britain from four long volumes into a welcome single volume, which preserves Friend’s wit, insight, and vanity.

Keith Hancock has been unfairly forgotten by all but professional historians. Jim Davidson’s A Three-Cornered Life: The Historian W.K. Hancock(University of New South Wales Press, 7/10) resuscitates a distinguished career and mind. He goes beyond that to trace the outlines of an eminent Anglo-Australian, a servant of the British Empire, and a pioneer historian of the Australian environment who thought that Australian National University might become ‘an All Soul’s in the bush’.

 

Brian McFarlane

Peter Goldsworthy’s Gravel (Hamish Hamilton, 3/10), a collection of highly individual but not merely quirky short stories, was going to be my Australian book of the year until, six years late, I came across Michael Blakemore’s Arguments with England: A Memoir (2004). Having left Australia in 1950 to pursue an acting career in England, he stayed on to become a notable stage director. This memoir catches the social and emotional conflicts of someone living, imaginatively at least, in two places at once, balancing adroitly the personal and professional aspects of his life over several decades.

David Kynaston achieves another kind of balance in Austerity Britain: A World to Build (Bloomsbury), a magisterial history of postwar Britain: the sweep of social and political change in austerity-ridden Britain offset by Kynaston’s sympathy for the intensely personal.

Even more out of date is my first contact with Maria Edgeworth, whose novel Helen (1834, reprinted by Sort of Books) reveals an author combining Jane Austen’s astuteness with Elizabeth Gaskell’s range.

 

Brenda Niall

I envy those who have yet to discover Britain’s Kate Atkinson, whose career began in 1995 with a haunting novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum. In recent years, Atkinson has taken to the crime genre with an accident-prone sleuth, Jackson Brodie. Set in and around Leeds, the latest Brodie has an Emily Dickinson title, Started Early, Took My Dog (Doubleday). It’s superbly written, with characters to remember, and a zany plot which defies summary.

Hilary Spurling, biographer of Matisse and Ivy Compton-Burnett, made an unexpected choice of subject in Pearl Buck, missionary’s daughter, prolific best-selling writer about China, and winner of a much-disputed Nobel Prize in 1938. In Burying the Bones: Pearl Buck in China (Profile Books), Spurling skilfully excavates layers of fact and fantasy in Buck’s extraordinary life.

From last year, a first novel by Melbourne writer Vivienne Kelly, Cooee (Scribe, 4/09), is a deft psychological thriller with an unreliable narrator who delivers some nasty surprises.

 

Peter Pierce

Three overseas thriller writers came back to top form: James Lee Burke with The Glass Rainbow (Orion), Alan Furst, Spies of the Balkans (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), and Carl Hiaasen, Star Island (Sphere).

My fictional find of the year was Willa Cather. Leaving her reluctantly aside (that was in another century), Les Murray was in top form in his latest book of verse, Taller When Prone (Black Inc., 4/10) – experimental, by turns melancholy and playful, imbued with that equanimity that his finest poetry has always achieved.

The best Australian first novel was Ashley Hay’s The Body in the Clouds, which daringly moved across different generations while keeping the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and lives affected by it, central. Among practised hands, Roger McDonald’s When Colts Ran (Vintage, 11/10) stood out in a strong year.

 

Angus Trumble

This year I was fascinated by The Axe and the Oath: Ordinary Life in the Middle Ages, by Robert Fossier, in Lydia G. Cochrane’s fine translation from the French (Princeton University Press), with its amazingly granular excursion into the medieval smell-scape, to say nothing of recent developments in palynology, carpology, and anthracology – in other words, valuable evidence for a history of the weather.

I thought the most beautiful book – apart from Geoffrey de Bellaigue’s magisterial French Porcelain in the Collection of Her Majesty The Queen (Royal Collection Trust) – was Rare & Curious: The Secret History of Governor Macquarie’s Chest (Miegunyah Press), by Elizabeth Ellis, an object of quite extraordinary historical importance whose exquisite state of preservation is something of a riddle.

The lavish two-volume Digging and Dealing in Eighteenth-Century Rome (Yale University Press), written by Ilaria Bignamini and Clare Hornsby, meanwhile, puts in order the entire calendar of archaeological excavations conducted by greedy British artist–dealers, and documents most if not all of the thousands of Roman antiquities duly exported under papal licence on a scarifying one-for-His-Holiness-and-two-for-me basis.

 

Geordie Williamson

No doubt there were more worthy novels published during 2010 than Skippy Dies (Penguin), but this was the title which crawled its way into my ventricles and squeezed them hard. Don’t mistake Irishman Paul Murray’s Dublin boarding-school tale for snappily dictated puerility. Yes, it’s a funny book, but also fiendishly clever; and, finally, very sad. The marvel of Skippy Dies is that its many dimensions manage to coexist within the same narrative structure. It is a work at once haunted and full of laughter.

I was slow to pick up Chris Andrew’s translations of Argentine author César Aira. His rendering of Aira’s novella An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter (New Directions)is thrillingly strange. Still, a light aperitif when compared with the South American’s harder, more experimental stuff.

While I have no idea whether Durs Grünbein is, as Helen Vendler suggests, the greatest living German poet, I do know that The Bars of Atlantis (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), a recent selection of his non-fiction in English, provides ample evidence for his being the smartest.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Jessica Anderson’s death was unforgivably overlooked this year (ABR apart, of course). Of her backlist, it is The Commandant (1975, reprinted by Sydney University Press), a perfectly proportioned historical novel, whose vision of convict Australia retains the power to shock, which most deserves resurrection.

 

Thuy On

Sonya Hartnett’s The Midnight Zoo (Viking, 9/10) once again shows off her prodigious storytelling skills combined with her trademark poetic lyricism. Ostensibly a Young Adult novel (though there are those who will frown at such a dark, violent novel being directed at impressionable younger children), the book can easily be seen as a crossover into the adult market. Sure, there are talking animals and a juxtaposition between real and imaginary landscapes, but this is not a cutesy fable. The story involves two young boys and their baby sister making their way across war-scarred terrain during World War II.

For pre-schoolers, The Terrible Plop (Penguin) by Ursula Dubosarsky and Andrew Joyner is a fantastic read with its rhythmic, toe-tapping, Dr Seuss-inspired words and bright cartoon illustrations.

 

Stephanie Owen Reeder

Stephen Michael King’s You (Scholastic), a whimsical and life-affirming tale about friendship, engages the senses and touches the heart, and it is perfect for the very young.

Jan Ormerod and Freya Blackwood’s Maudie and Bear (Little Hare, 11/10), a delightfully old-fashioned domestic tale about the enduring power of love, will appeal to beginning readers.

Jeannie Baker’s stunning Mirror (Walker Books, 11/10) is a more challenging work for older readers. This thought-provoking book celebrates the diversity of our shared existence.

The boxed set of Shaun Tan’s The Arrival and Sketches from a Nameless Land: The Art of the Arrival (Lothian) is indispensable for book collectors. It provides fascinating insights into the creation of Tan’s iconic exploration of the refugee experience.

 

Mike Shuttleworth

The Piper’s Son (Viking, 5/10) confirms Melina Marchetta as the queen of Australian Young Adult fiction. A sequel of sorts to Saving Francesca (Viking, 8/03), this novel is packed with big emotions and realistic, complex, contemporary characters.

My revelations for 2010 were two novels by Cassandra Golds, a writer deeply in tune with a child’s emotional world. The Museum of Mary Child (Puffin) is part fable, part Gothic adventure, as Mary Child learns the truth about her past and herself. The sequel, The Three Loves of Persimmon (Puffin), weaves a similar spell, though with more sweetness and humour. Powerful, lyrical, compassionate, these are books to cherish.

From abroad, No and Me (Bloomsbury), by Delphine de Vigan, shows a side of Paris you won’t see on Getaway. Teenage girl Lou’s school project about homelessness uncovers a world of alienation and loneliness, some of it in her own family. Film adaptation on the way.

 

Ruth Starke

You can’t beat a good murder tale and this year there were two beauties, both set in the past. Nette Hilton’s The Innocents (Woolshed Press) is told largely through the eyes of a child and combines small-town prejudices, fear of the Other, and a tragic miscarriage of justice. Penny Matthews’s début Young Adult novel A Girl Like Me (Penguin) is based on the real-life murder of a young woman in an isolated rural German community north of Adelaide in 1901; the period details are almost as fascinating as the story.

Brilliantly written and emotionally wrenching, Sonya Hartnett’s The Midnight Zoo manages to be both heartbreaking and hopeful.

The Return of the Word Spy (Viking), written by Ursula Dubosarsky and illustrated by Tohby Riddle, is wise, witty and a heap of fun, and just as beautiful to look at and handle as was its predecessor.

My overseas pick is The Undrowned Child, by Michelle Lovric (Orion), a period fantasy set in Venice, full of murderous villains, merry mermaids, mournful ghosts, and vampire eels. Over the top and gloriously rococo!