Purple Prose - September 2026

Jacaranda Journal
8 hours ago
31 min read

Monthly Recap and Reminders

Ah shit, here we go again. Another issue of Purple Prose Newsletter. In case you’ve never read this before (which, why not? traitor) my name is Jemma Green, I am the Co-Head of Social Media and Marketing here at Jacaranda Journal, and aside from doomscrolling on Instagram for hours, I curate and write parts of this newsletter you’re reading now! I took a brief hiatus from Purple Prose because I was off living my Euro Summer life. But now I’m back, my bank account is empty, and it’s time to return to the very lucrative (unpaid volunteer) role I briefly abandoned. And boy howdy is this one hell of an issue to return to.

In our September newsletter, Dani Ringrose, one of our Salon Supervisors and Subeditors, jumps in as a guest writer in my regular column The Writer’s Rant. With her call-a-spade-a-spade attitude and brilliant vivacity, she dethrones AI’s relevance in contemporary writing and editing. Given spring is here (moment of silence for all those living in magpie nesting neighbourhoods) we’ve put together a list of spring-themed recs for you, from food, to events, to books, and music. For the Creative Spotlight, I have interviewed bestselling author of At The Foot of the Cherry Tree and Until the Red Leaves Fall, Alli Parker. We have a very special host of reviews in our Behind the Scenes Bookclub from multiple members of the team on the entire Miles Franklin longlist! Last, but definitely not least, Dr Niamh Wood returns! Our Assistant Publisher and Editor brings her uniquely striking prose to a new work of fiction (which can be read in full on our website).

Of course, you didn’t come here just to read what we have to say. Purple Prose always delivers the goods on what’s going on in the writing, arts, and creative scene for the month!

The Brisbane Festival starts this week. We’re talking Riverfire on September 5th, the ancestral Tibetan melodies of Be The Sky on September 7th, the flying wonder of the Fijian Flying Circus from September 4th, a taste of queer mayhem in the Night Moves SHANDY dance party of September 4th, and the show of family and belonging in the production Koreaboo which runs from September 2nd–12th. For more info on locations and specific times, check out the Brisbane Festival website.

The Form and Movement Exhibition opens on Sunday the 6th and runs through until the 20th of September at Flying Colours Bar. Exploring human movement, the opening event runs from 6-9pm Sunday the 6th and is free to attend. They have a ticketed Movement Life Drawing Workshop 5-6pm on Sunday the 20th and a free closing event from 6-9pm on the same day.

Fans of Labyrinth and The Muppets will love the upcoming world-first exhibition Make, Believe, Magic: The Worlds of The Jim Henson Company. This ticketed exhibit opens at GOMA on Saturday the 12th of September!⁣ SoFA is hosting A Very Big Giant Party on September 12th from 6-10pm at Vacant Assembly. This is a one night only exhibition, celebrating Meanjin’s art scene with tunes from the incredible Ra66it.

For our romance lovers, remember that the film adaptation of Ali Hazelwood’s The Love Hypothesis will be in cinemas on September 23rd. And UQP author Mirandi Riwoe discusses her latest historical fiction novel, A Short History of Longans, on the 24th of September at The Red Room. Be sure to go and support her!

Avid Reader will be at The Loft, West End at 6pm on the 25th of September where Remah Naji will be in conversation with Dr Bushra Othman and other contributors to the book The Weight of Witness. All proceeds from ticket sales for this event will be donated to support those in Gaza. Avid will also be hosting Wanyjika-warla: Finding Your Way on Gurindji Country with Leah Leaman, Briony Barr and Felicity Meakins. This will be in store on September 30th at 6pm.

Kieron Anderson’s exhibit Medicine Woven Through the Tide is open until October 2nd at NAVA and explores the deep relationship between saltwater Country, ancestral knowledge and the living systems that have sustained Quandamooka people for countless generations. (Jacaranda may or may not have a review of this one coming out soon too… shhh.)

Remember! While writing submissions are closed for our upcoming issue 13.2 Perennial, our art submissions have been extended. We need more, so submitting your art gives you a higher chance of being accepted. No matter your medium, we’re here for it. And submitting automatically enters you into our cover art competition, so if you’d like to see your art on the front page… SUBMIT!

The Writer’s Rant

F*ck AI

By Dani Ringrose

I’m a good writer.

I know when to deploy a semicolon. I can craft a unique metaphor that can make a reader put what they’re reading down and stare at a wall for a while.

I recently applied for a job as a copywriter. It was for an organisation that works with a range of arts organisations. It made me feel a little more comfortable selling my whimsical fiction-writing soul out to corporate just to pay into my superannuation again.

I sailed past the initial application. I recorded a video.

I boldly claimed that my writing and editing skills were superior to what AI could generate.

Fortunately, I have both the audacity and the receipts to make that claim. I’m a published fiction author, I was a high school English teacher for two decades, and I’m close to finishing my Masters in… hold up, writing and editing.

I didn’t get the job.

And it was because I refused to use AI for those tasks. My rejection had all the mealy-mouthed corporatese of not aligning with our methodology, maximising productivity, pivoting roles. They called AI a ‘collaborative partner’ as though it was an equal to Jenny From Accounts. To tell a writer, in a writing job, that they should be fine with the ethics of feeding the machine.

Looks like it’s a hill I’ll die on. But I’m glad there are so many others of you who’ll happily frolic alongside me at my hillside picnic. It’s chaotic, it’s experimental, it’s full of fucking heart and human blood and guts, and it’s nourishing.

While I was writing this, I noticed a sign in the UQ library. It was offering students resources for how to use AI responsibly in our studies. Nah. I’ll be right. AI doesn’t use my own work responsibly. Disrespect it. Disrespect those who demand you use it. Disrespect AI data centres being built. Loudly disrespect those who use it.

Because my Masters-level skills were disrespected.

I’m genuinely disappointed that I was passed over for a copywriting position—not because I lacked the skills, but because I refused to make AI the centerpiece of my writing and editing process. I have Master's-level training in writing and editing, years of developing the ability to think critically, shape compelling arguments, refine tone, and produce polished work that reflects human judgment and creativity. Apparently, none of that carried as much weight as a willingness to let a machine do the heavy lifting. It's frustrating to realize that the qualities I spent years cultivating can be dismissed so casually in favor of efficiency and automation.What makes it even more disheartening is the message it sends about the profession itself. Copywriting has always been about understanding people, crafting authentic communication, and making thoughtful editorial decisions—skills that come from experience, education, and genuine talent. I have no objection to technology as a tool, but I refuse to pretend that outsourcing the core of the creative process is the same as being a skilled writer. If declining to rely on AI is enough to disqualify someone with advanced writing and editing expertise, then it raises serious questions about what employers actually value and whether craftsmanship in writing still has a place in the industry.

Source: ChatGPT cruft. The first and last time Ringrose will ever use it, but at least she enjoyed the irony of making the machine critique itself.

Dani Ringrose (she/her) is a sub-editor and salon host for Jacaranda Journal. She is a gothic and horror author from Brisbane/Magandjin. Her debut novel The Lyrebirds was shortlisted for the Glendower Prize for an unpublished manuscript at the 2025 Queensland Literary Awards and the 2024 Richell Prize. Yes, she can be hired as a freelance editor and won’t feed your work into the AI Sarlacc.

JJ Recs

Toowoomba Carnival of Flowers—Recommended by Talia, Subeditor

It runs from the 18th of September to the 5th of October and has stunning floral displays, good food, and fun activities. I highly recommend their opening parade, but the second week's FEASTival is an absolute must!

Summer Season by Elizabeth Taylor—Recommended by Alex, Subeditor

Taylor's one of my all-time favourite authors, and her ability to capture the intricacies of human nature is second to none. The bright setting and floral motifs make this one a great springtime read.

Rite of Spring by Kris Kneen—Recommended by Dani, Salon Supervisor and Subeditor

Rite of Spring is an atmospheric tale of a couple who try to repair their marriage by moving to a remote island. It is deliciously gothic, creepy, seductive, wholly wet, and smutty as an orchid in bloom.

The Four Seasons Recomposed: Spring 1 by Max Richter, Eldbjørg Hemsing—Recommended by Leisl, Subeditor

A recomposed version of the classical Vivaldi piece, it instills the feeling of new growth, of sun-streaked rain and freshly bursting flowers.

It's a happy kind of chaos that feels exactly like its name: Spring 1.

The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde—Recommended by Roseleigh, Subeditor

It's a fabulously fun novel set in an alternate 1985 where there are no computers, but there are dodos, time travellers, and vampires. It follows Thursday Next, a LiteraTec (literary detective) as she hunts down a mysterious man called Acheron Hades, and ends up following him straight into the novel Jane Eyre.

The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion by Beth Brower—Recommended by Millie, Co-Head of Social Media and Marketing

It follows Emma in 1883 London as she meets eccentric characters, gets up to mischief, and drinks lots of tea.

Watermelon Salad—Recommended by Jemma, Co-Head of Social Media and Marketing

Basically just a green salad but you add cubes of WATERMELON. It gives your salads such a fresh pop that reminds me of the lightness and freshness of spring. Especially when you pair it with something heavy like a steak.

Creative Spotlight

Script to MANUscript: An Interview with Alli Parker

By Jemma Green

Imagine reaching out to an award-winning author, begging for an interview, spending hours researching and planning what questions you’re going to ask, scheduling a VERY early morning time to meet over zoom, and then after all of this realising that you, rather foolishly, recorded an interview with no sound. Couldn’t be me. Actually, yeah it could be.

But after much scraping and grovelling and offering up my soul in apology (emailing) I was able to secure a second interview (which thankfully had sound this time) with bestselling author Alli Parker. A screenwriter and novelist, Parker’s two books—At the Foot of the Cherry Tree and Until the Red Leaves Fall—explore a culturally diverse Australia, the pains of war, and the type of love between people that spans oceans. Her work is a melding of heritage and generational storytelling, of mending the national fractures caused by conflict.

Aside from having a lot of patience with technical difficulties, Parker also had a lot to tell me about her reason for writing, how to approach research, and the importance of advocating for yourself as a creator.

JJ: You come from a background in screenwriting. You've written episodes of famous shows like Jack Irish, but you've also written bestselling books. Do you feel that you are more drawn to either screenwriting or novel writing?

Parker: I feel like screenwriting and novel writing, they have their own strengths and weaknesses, and there are things that I like from each of them. For screenwriting, it's a really collaborative process. You're always working with either other writers or directors, producers, production designers. You're working with cast, editors—a lot of people to get the project to the screen. Whereas with novels, it's a lot of a smaller team. You're only really you're working with yourself and you work with editors and publishers obviously, but it's much more dependent on the way that you want to take the work. Often the decision will always rest with you as opposed to it being necessarily a compromise or a negotiation or a discussion that happens with lots of different people.

JJ: How do you feel your experience with screenwriting influences your process when you're writing novels?

Parker: It's definitely complimentary. Screenwriting is a very structured process because of the way that things come to be as a script. Often when you're working on a television show, you have multiple writers writing across the same series, but they'll be writing different episodes. So the way that a writer's room usually works is you have all the writers of every episode in the room, plus maybe one or two other voices. And they basically talk through the entire series from episode one to episode six, ten, twenty, however many series there are, however many episodes there are in [each] series. So the writer who's writing episode three will sit in on the meetings for episode one and so we can pull story lines through. And as a result that means that everything has to be planned.

That sort of aggressive need to structure everything before we even start writing a word of anything creative really has helped me with my manuscripts because I'm a big planner. I like to have everything all laid out. Not to the nth degree. I don't know everything that's going to happen and I don't plan it down to like the minute details of each scene. I still give myself room to play, but having a structure that I use for every project definitely comes out of a screenwriting background. One of the pieces … of feedback that I've had on my books is that the dialogue is really good, which I'm sure comes from screenwriting.

JJ: I feel like that would be incredibly helpful because I feel like a lot of writers (myself included) get a bit lost in the weeds with like the writing part. So I think having that kind of clear plan makes it a lot easier to approach it.

Parker: And it's not even necessarily like the main character enters the room, sits down, has a cup of tea, and does things and then the plot happens. It's usually just like the main character in their usual place. They meet character number two, things start to change, make sure we set up X, Y, and Z so they're in place there for the rest of the story. Like it's not necessarily really detailed beats or anything like that, but I know the crucial beats for this scene and that's what I have to structure the whole thing around.

JJ: No, I imagine that would be very helpful. I should start doing that actually. This is good advice for me.

JJ: When transitioning from screenwriting to novels, how did you navigate querying and securing an agent and a publisher? Was it very different to the way you were used to working with screenwriting?

Parker: With screenwriting, I really got a lot of my jobs through word of mouth and connections. With manuscripts it was really different because I realised I probably needed to get an agent because I didn't feel like I knew enough about how the industry worked. And so, actually the way that I ended up getting my agent was through a friend. He knew that I was working on At the Foot of the Cherry Tree (my first novel) and he knew the story and he was really excited about it. His wife is an author and so he mentioned it to her and she got really excited and offered to introduce me to her agent and to her publisher. It was one of those things where it was absolutely a friendship thing, but it was also [because] I worked really hard to get my work to a publishable level.

And you know, I never [went] to my friend and said, "Hey, I'm writing a book. I know your wife is a published author." I just went, "Hey, I'm writing a book and I'm thinking about getting an agent," and he was like, "Oh, we should speak to you should speak to my wife," and so it was just one of those things where because we were good enough friends, he just offered that. To be honest, the entire process of getting At the Foot of the Cherry Tree published was like this incredible story of just all the stars aligning perfectly and everything doing exactly what it was meant to.

JJ: Oh, that's excellent that you had such a kind of—I don't want to say seamless because I'm sure there were difficulties at times—but such a good experience with getting your book published.

Also, this isn't one of my questions, but it's something that I just thought about when you were speaking: do you ever feel when networking that it can be awkward when you're bringing up what you're working on to people? Because sometimes if I'm ever talking to other people who write or I'm talking to writers like you and they're like, "Oh, what are you working on?" I get all like, "Oh, me?" I feel like maybe it's just tall poppy syndrome in a way where it's like I don't want to like be seen to be bragging or something. Do you ever feel that?

Parker: So, here's what I will say to you: you are a young woman and I think what I try to encourage all young writers to think about when they're talking about their work or if someone asks them about their work, is that if someone's asking about your work it’s because they are genuinely interested, right? They want to know. They're not asking to be polite. Maybe they're asking to be polite, but so what? They're asking, right? So take advantage of that opportunity.

I have a persona that I call Author Alli because I do feel this and I used to feel this a lot when going to networking events and speaking to people and I'm just like “oh my god” … but then I'm just like no, Author Alli would go in there and she'd be really calm, she wouldn't be in anyone's face, she'd just be really polite and diplomatic and say, “oh, you want to know about my book? Yeah my book is called At the Foot of the Cherry Tree and it’s based on the true story of the first Japanese war bride.” And I just talk about it and there's no cringe. You never know what is going to happen because if I had never said anything to my friend, if I had gone, "Oh my god, no. I don't want to talk to you about it because it's so embarrassing," my book would never have happened.

The other thing that I say is go into every conversation with the confidence of a mediocre white man. Seriously. Own the room. Like do you think that Doug, who has written the worst science fiction—like it's like 200,000 pages long, 200,000 words long—do you think he's going in there and going, "You know what? I'm not going to tell the head of Harper, the head of fiction at Harper Collins about my book because she might find it a bit cringe." No, he's walking straight up to her and going, "I'm going to talk to you about my science fiction book.” You just have to be like, "What would Chad do?" Because Chad's walking into the room with confidence.

JJ: That is great advice. Actually, I feel like I need a sticker that says, "What would Chad do?" And I just need to look at that every day. We can sell them as merch for Jacaranda. You know what? In the next meeting, I'm going to be bringing this up.

Parker: I would put one on my water bottle.

JJ: You have two published books—At the Foot of the Cherry Tree and Until the Red Leaves Fall. Both of these have been bestsellers. They've both been nominated for awards. When you were writing these books, did you expect the tremendous success and the glowing reception that you've had?

Parker: I mean, you don't ever expect it. You hope for it. Of course, you hope for it. Like, you want to be you want to be the huge bestseller that sweeps everything, but you don't expect it because then the thing is that it's so easy to be disappointed. So what I try and do for every book is I pick one achievable thing and then anything past that is gravy basically. Anything else is a bonus. So for At the Foot of the Cherry Tree, it was the first review I got from an Asian reader, an Asian Australian reader, and I was like, if they like it, then anything else is great. I'm happy with anything else that happens after this. And they loved it. I was like, brilliant. That's it. That was my one thing that I wanted to achieve with this book.

With Until the Red Leaves Fall, I dedicated the book to a really close friend of mine and it was them reading it and if they loved it, then I was happy. They obviously loved it as well. They actually helped me launch it in Melbourne, which was really special, too. Basically as soon as I hit those two things, I was just like, cool. Anything else that happens, happens, and I'm just going to enjoy the ride. I really think that that's such a great way to think about it because it's easy to shift the goalposts on yourself, especially when something's coming out and it feels so wildly out of your control. Like it can be like, I just want to see the arcs and the early reader copies. Okay, I've got the arcs, now I just want to see the final copies and that'll be when it feels real. Like the reality is it never feels real. You lose sight of the fact that actually, once upon a time, all you wanted was your book out in the world.

JJ: Both your books are inspired by your Japanese-Australian heritage and your family. Your first book in particular is almost biographical in the way it tells your grandparents story. What drew you to writing about this?

Parker: My grandparents story was something that I always wanted to write ever since I was a kid and I kind of realised that I maybe could write a story about them. I don't think I was ever really that serious about it until I sort of hit my late teens. It was kind of one of those things where I was like, “one day I'll tell Grandma’s story when I'm a good enough writer.” And then it took a really long time until I finally went, "Oh, okay. Maybe now's the time that I start looking at this story that's always been sort of sitting there in the back of my mind."

I was working at a public production house in Beverly Hills and I was reading lots of scripts for the executives there, analysing whether I thought they would be good to represent the writer or whether they'd be worth going into production. And I was reading so many scripts a day and they were all so awful. Like they were so bad. And so I just remember sitting there one day, I'd finished another awful screenplay and I had to summarise it. I had to talk about its strengths and weaknesses. I had to give it a report so that the executive producer could then go back and talk as though they'd read it… I finished up that report, sent it off and I was like, "Okay, so I know I'm not the best writer in the world, but it's better than what I've just read on behalf of a Hollywood producer.”

I mean It's really interesting to think about it because I have notes from things that I wrote probably ten years ago, maybe more than ten years ago. Almost like a little magpie, I have all these notes from all this time and I think about the version I would have written when I was eighteen and the version that I would have written when I was twenty-three and I just shudder to think about what that actually would have looked like. My understanding of the world has shifted in the years before I started writing the book and the discussions that we all started to have as a society. Particularly around race and white privilege. All of that has informed the way that I've written At the Foot of the Cherry Tree. It was a book that had something to say. It's always been a story that has had something to say. And it wasn't until I was older that I realised what I wanted to say with it and how I wanted to say it.

I started doing all of the research and I wrote three drafts of the screenplay. Then I was shopping it around in 2020 and obviously the entire film industry shut down [that year]. No one was really making anything, let alone a very expensive period drama. Then all of the producers were asking me if I had anything based on existing IP, [so I thought], if I just write it as a book then I have the IP and someone can option it. I pivoted to writing the manuscript, I brushed up on writing prose because I hadn't written prose since I was a teenager. I had the screenplay as a really solid foundation for the story and just started feeling my way through. Got my agent. We had Harper Collins involved pretty early on and then it was a couple of rounds of edits and then she was out.

It was one of those things where suddenly, it felt like the timing was actually right for it. And I think sometimes stories need the right timing.

As somebody writing historical novels, I imagine you must have a lot of research to do. How do you approach this?

Parker: It’s such an interesting process and it's one that I really love. I often start with something specific. So, obviously with At the Foot of the Cherry Tree it was my grandparents. That was where I started. With Until Red Leaves Fall I really wanted to do something in the theatre and I wanted to do something about the civilian internment camps in Australia during World War II, particularly for Australian born Japanese people. I basically had these little worlds that I knew I wanted to explore and then I just had to learn about the worlds.

With Cherry Tree I actually read a book—I mean not a huge amount because it's not a very well-known part of history—a few years before I started researching in which a professor had interviewed many of the men who had served as part of the occupied forces. That really became a foundational text and then from that, the professor obviously mentioned a whole bunch of other books and so then I went and found those at libraries or secondhand bookstores. A lot of men who served as part of the occupying forces were writers or journalists themselves so I chased the works that these men wrote too. I used Trove as a resource (which is the newspaper archive) and that was fantastic. I also had a huge amount of media from my grandparents because they'd been in lots of different newspaper articles. They'd been on the radio heaps. They'd been in like SBS News, ABC News, 7:30 report. And so I went to all of those media archives and requested previews of all of those so I could see them.

And then for Until the Red Leaves Fall it was a similar kind of process, finding books that were written about that period. Although it was a little bit different because there weren't as many books and I specifically wanted them particularly around the theater, [particularly] the female experiences of writers and actors like Ruth Park and June Salter. Those women had written a kind of biography which I got my hands on. I read all of those and that was really interesting because they all had very different experiences of the same time period. The thing that was really difficult for me was actually doing research into the civilian internment camps because most of the Japanese and Australian-born Japanese who were held in these camps were deported to Japan and they took their stories and their histories with them. There's been a lot more research into the American and Canadian experience of the internment camps because they're much more intense. And so I used that and kind of blended it in with the Australian experience. But yeah, research is the most fun. It's also the most procrastinatory.

You have another book in the works. How much can you tell me about it?

Parker: Um, I don't think I can tell you very much. It's more historical fiction. Um, and I'm genuinely enjoying building the world. It's going to be multiple points of view, so we're spending time with lots of different people, which is really fun.

I've got one more question left and that is why do you write?

Parker: It's interesting to think about why and I'm not sure I have a concrete answer. It's the one constant that I've always had, I think, through my whole life. It was funny today actually. I caught up with a friend of mine. We used to be best friends in primary school. And she was talking about me today and she goes, "It's so cool because I remember you used to write stories all the time and now you're like a published author with two books."

Writing is how I make sense of the world. I generally write to figure my way through something I don't always know what it is when I start. I have a joke with some of my author friends that writing is cheaper than therapy, but sometimes that is what you need. And when I don't write for a while, I find that I do become a grumpier person. It's just my one creative outlet that I've never let go. I've had so many hobbies, so many different hobbies, and none of them have stuck in the same way that reading and writing have. So I think the fundamental part of what makes me me is writing. And I think that's it's just that's just who I am. That's why I write.

Alli Parker is a Japanese-Australian bestselling author and screenwriter, with a background in script editing and script co-ordinating. She lives on the stolen land of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. In 2023, her debut historical fiction novel, At the Foot of the Cherry Tree, was published by HarperCollins Australia, a novelisation of the true story of Australia’s first Japanese war bride and Alli’s grandmother. It became an instant bestseller, was shortlisted for the 2024 Australian Book Industry Award – Matt Richell Award for New Writer of the Year, the Dymocks Book of the Year 2023 and was longlisted for the Aus Indie Book Awards 2024.

In 2025, her sophomore historical fiction novel, Until the Red Leaves Fall, was published by HarperCollins Australia, set in the 1950s Melbourne theatre scene, tracing the untold histories of Australia’s civilian internment camps and asking the question: what happens when you let the truth get in the way of a good story. It was shortlisted for Dymocks Book of the Year 2025. She wrote episodes of crime drama series Jack Irish, romantic thriller series Secret Bridesmaids’ Business and mystery telemovie series Ms Fisher’s Modern Murder Mysteries.

Jemma Green is an emerging writer and editor based in Magandjin/Brisbane. She has a BFA in Creative Writing from QUT, her work has been featured in multiple publications, and she currently works as the Co-Head of Social Media and Marketing at Jacaranda Journal. Artistically, her focus lies in exploring humanness and connection.

Instagram: @girlinhertwentiess

Behind the Scenes Bookclub

This month, we have a very special book review for all our readers. Or should I say, book reviews. With the recent announcement of the Miles Franklin winner (congrats Fierceland!) our team at Jacaranda thought we would check out all the brilliant, sharp, and well-deserving titles that were longlisted for the award this year. If you’re looking for your next homegrown fav we’re positive you’ll find them among these books.

First Name Second Name by Stephen MinOn

Review by Kiv Valenny

When Stephen Bolin dies, his corpse—now a Jiāngshī—embarks on a journey home, trekking from Brisbane to Innisfail. As we follow along, Steve MinOn’s writing immerses us into beautiful and sentimental landscapes, exploring through the Jiāngshī’s discerning eyes what Australia truly means to immigrant families. 

In a time of living among One Nation voters, First Name Second Name is an important piece of literature that reminds us how intricately Australian life is woven with multiculturalism. Riveting, educational, and bursting at the seams with wit, it is a novel that makes us evaluate how we interact with the land we call home. 

“When Stephen had heard Pauline Hanson deliver her maiden speech, there was a visceral feeling about his objection to it. His intellect was offended by her racial politics, but his body also gave its own reaction. The speech raised his blood pressure and caused him to cringe—not out of embarrassment, but as if he was ducking. Was she talking about him? About his father? His family on his father’s side? She was wrong and she was stupid, and he was prepared to argue against her ideas intellectually.” 

Elegy, Southwest by Madeleine Watts

Review by Millie Biggs

Set on the brink of environmental collapse, Elegy, Southwest follows a young married couple as they road trip across the southwest of the United States. While Eloise is an academic researching for her thesis on the desiccating Colorado River, her husband Lewis is a land artist grieving the recent death of his mother. What starts out as a seemingly happy relationship slowly unravels over the course of the novel. 

“These were moments when I was so happy, so filled to the brim with love for you, that I felt the emotion hit me wavelike, and absolute.” 

The book focused very heavily on deserts, dams, canyons, and other landscapes the couple passed through while on their travels. Picturing these sights was interesting to begin with, but I felt that it eventually became quite repetitive. These sections, which delve into geography and climate change, were clearly thoroughly researched, but unfortunately written in a way that came across as info-dumping. Instead, I would have preferred if the reader got more insight into the relationship between Eloise and Lewis and its suspicious breakdown.  

Despite Elegy, Southwest not making it to the Miles Franklin shortlist, the book certainly touches on important themes that we, as a society, cannot ignore. It is for readers who don’t mind a slower-paced read where themes of loss and grief steadily build throughout the novel – in terms of both the marriage and the environment. 

“The guilt of finding it beautiful, even as the fire is destroying everything it touches. It is hard not to respect something that can cause so much damage, and to recognize how small and ineffectual you are out there on its periphery, subject to its haze or smoke or bits of ash on the window screen.” 

Discipline by Randa Abdel-Fattah

Review by Dani Ringrose

If it wasn’t for the well-publicised treatment of the author Randa Abdel-Fattah at the hands of organisations such as the Adelaide Writers Festival, this book would feel implausible. It follows the interconnected stories of Hannah, a journalist, and Ashraf, an academic. They negotiate a society that barely acknowledges the truth of the genocide of Palestinians, and face the consequences of speaking out about it. The novel begins with the arrest of a high school boy for protesting, a now all-too-familiar action in our society. Hannah finds herself unable to speak up or comment in her newsroom, and Ashraf wants to further his PhD research by working with the arrested student. 

The novel captures the whiplash Australian society and media induces: the push and pull of witnessing a live-streamed genocide, politicians unwilling to do anything about it, authors and artists boycotted for speaking out, all against relentless capitalism. And for a book exposing such a weighty issue, it is filled with pathos and black humour. 

“Hannah closed her eyes and squeezed the bridge of her nose as she surrendered to self-pity. Gaza was being bombed and her plans for a one-hour power walk were ruined. This was life had been reduced to. The grotesque and the banal all folded into one another so that everything was inflected with existential meaning.” 

Tenderfoot by Toni Jordan

Review by Dani Ringrose

Andie is a young girl immersed in the world of greyhound racing: the tracks, the training, the betting, the odds that someone her age shouldn’t know so well. And oh yes, the dogs, including her favourite, Tenderfoot. When her father leaves suddenly, she is left with her unstable mother and her penchant for pretty things. Andie’s world is full of secrets, half-truths, mysteries, and a black bag. She’s a child conflicted by her desire for independence and her genuine vulnerability. An absolute nostalgia hit of the corrupt, transient edges of Brisbane in the mid-70s. 

This is an incredibly buoyant story for a childhood lurking at the edges. It sits perfectly alongside those other stories famous for children comprehending a world too adult for them:  To Kill a Mockingbird and Boy Swallows Universe. 

“There are things that no one tells children, at least not in so many words. If, however, you’re even slightly observant – and all children are; their entire reality has been constructed piecemeal from things they’ve seen and heard – unsaid things float in the air, in inferences and winks, and are absorbed like oxygen. In the back of my mind I knew that a feed of milk and sugar an hour and a half before a race will slow a greyhound, which is useful if it’s the favourite and your money is on a dog with longer odds.” 

Little World by Josephine Rowe

Review by Dani Ringrose

A body of a child is in a wooden box in a remote desert location in Australia. But unlike so many other narratives that would move this in a mystery or thriller direction, the discovery is a nucleus around which the interconnected, philosophical threads revolve. The dead body is that of a young saint, and she is conscious of the other characters’ lives as they interact with her. In this novella, it doesn’t really matter how the saint arrived there, or what those who discover the body decades later will do with it. What matters is the minutiae of their lives, beautifully detailed in Rowe’s beautiful prose. 

This compact little gem, at 133 pages, is literary fiction at its most distilled. It’ll drift through your head, as all the most persistent voices of ghostly saints should do. 

"And what of the first, the former life, now? ... What of cold honeycomb, and bright oil, and hurt dog, and how long, how long since she has felt rain on her face? Her only careful cache of echoes and afterimages saved from that time confused and crowded out, subsumed by the clattering inner workings and ramblings of others." 

You Must Remember This by Sean Wilson

Review by Talia Wright

A beautiful and devastating exploration of memory-loss and old age. Grace’s memory is patchy and untrustworthy. She’s a ghost to the present, consumed by the past, and unaware of the future as it passes her by. Sean Wilson’s novel offers the reader entry into a mind riddled with dementia. The non-sequential chapter format creates an unmoored feeling; it is a puzzle that doesn’t quite fit together. We see Grace’s childhood in a neglectful household, her workdays, marriage, and motherhood in immense detail, while her time in the nursing home is hazy, temporally disoriented, and often interrupted by memories. You Must Remember This is first and foremost about witnessing another person’s life – the entire thing – and having compassion for every version of her and her family even when it’s hard to sympathise with their actions.

The experimental form of You Must Remember This does something that words often fail to do: it encourages understanding and compassion for a diagnosis that confounds and frustrates in equal measure. This novel is a not-so-gentle reminder to us all that our experiences may be wildly different, but we must see the human being and sympathise with unseen struggles. You Must Remember This is a quick but truly impactful read.

“She wakes in her bed early in the morning and stares at a ceiling that has changed colour overnight. The ceiling above her is as white as fresh snow, a rose in the centre with a leaf that wraps around a light fixture. She rolls to her side and watches the tree in the courtyard sway gently in the breeze. Below it, she sees white stones stained brown in places and the bricks of the walls and the ground, but the courtyard looks different. It looks off balance, out of proportion, as if the courtyard has been picked up and shaken and placed in a new arrangement.” 

Salt Upon the Water by Lyn Dickens

Review by Niamh Wood

Set upon the coast of colonial-era South Australia, Clarissa FitzRoy travels the world in search of a figure from her past, Colonel William Light, South Australia’s Surveyor General. Across the novel, both protagonists grapple with the ethics of contributing to the colonial project of Australia while carrying with them the scars of their own countries’ colonial pasts. The discussions of identity, white supremacy, and social expectation are particular strengths of the novel, especially as one protagonist looks toward the future in search of acceptance and the other seeks truth and meaning in the past.

While the story itself is compelling, I felt that the shifting of perspective and time period slowed the momentum of the narrative. In pivotal narrative moments, I wished for a greater immersion in time and place, rather than action unfolding through dialogue. What was a relatively short novel could perhaps have grown into something more expansive and immersive. The shifting of setting in time and place could have been opportunities for great, rich, immersive descriptions of these wonderful settings, but this is an opportunity I feel often missed. Despite this, there were many moments of beautiful prose, and overall, the story was engaging and meaningful.

“The bright match flare of the flame, the quick tug of the basket, the weightlessness upon my feet. Around me there are gasps and cries, but I lean forward, gripping the side of the gondola as we are borne upwards into the air. The gardens diminish, their mysteries and labyrinths laid bare for all to see. For a moment, I see my cousin’s upturned face among the spectators. Then the world spins away and there are no cousins, no pleasure-seekers, no relatives. Just the uncertainty of shifting air, a bracing wind on a spring night, the meandering shape of the Thames coiling through an ancient city, and lights in the windows of St Paul’s Cathedral.

I’m flying.

The silk globe draws us skywards. A watch-light by the patriot’s lonely tomb; A ray of courage to the oppressed and poor. That is how Shelley describes it. Ballooning. And liberty.”

My Heart at Evening by Konrad Muller

Review by Niamh Wood

Set in 1832 Van Diemen’s’ Land, My Heart at Evening is a novel based on the actual suicide of historical figure, Henry Hellyer, a surveyor for the ‘Van Diemen’s’ Land Company’. When an unnamed protagonist is sent to investigate Hellyer’s death, he is forced to grapple with his own past as a convict, rumours of Hellyer’s scandalous past, and the horrors of colonial violence. One of the great strengths of My Heart at Evening is in its rich exploration of place—the depictions of the Tasmanian landscape provide an atmospheric and immersive backdrop to the narrative.

With sustained parallels to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the novel unpacks and observes the oppressive systems of power and control that shaped colonial Tasmania—and Australia broadly—and that continue today. While far from inclusive, the novel acknowledges the reality that a colonial past does not simply remain in the past but meaningfully persists today. Despite this, at times the story perhaps struggles to strike the right balance between its focus on the mystery element, and the staggering colonial violence by which it is shrouded.

“Many had been left leaning by nature’s hand and resembled fleeing bodies, frozen with their arm’s outflung, their mouths agape. Some had fallen entirely but remained alive, their boughs crawling horizontally through the air, in defiance of gravity, an image expressive as the searching of human hands.”

I Want Everything by Dominic Amarena

Review by Niamh Wood

I Want Everything is a satirical novel about literary scandal, performativity, and the ethics of devouring of artistic subjects in desperation for recognition. The novel pokes fun at Melbourne’s artsy share-houses through its aspiring but perpetually-blocked writer protagonist, his more-interesting and successful girlfriend, and his captivating new muse.

While some plot points moved in a slightly predictable direction, I appreciated that this narrative forced its protagonist to reckon with his own limitations. His self-confession of his problematics, the revelation that he doesn’t actually care and will live and die by his aspirations, and the confrontation over his limited capacity to write and know women, took this novel beyond a satirisation of insecure artists and into a more meaningful critique of patriarchy, fame hunger, and exceptionalism. While the final twist was not altogether surprising to me, it was nonetheless an entertaining read that I recommend picking up—especially if you’re in an artsy share house.

“Ruth and I had met at a dinner party in Northcote two years prior, the other guests all writers, upright literary citizens, who together were a bitchy bunch, venting attention-starved spleens over jackfruit quesadillas and citronella candles, griping about who was getting what grant and why they didn’t deserve it, whose middling Oz Lit novel was most worthy of contempt.”

Fierceland by Omar Musa

Review by Niamh Wood

Omar Musa’s Fierceland is a sprawling family saga spanning decades and incorporating several perspectives. When semi-estranged siblings Roz and Harun return to their homeland of Malaysian Borneo for the funeral of their father, a wealthy palm-oil baron, they are forced to face the truths of their past. Both Harun and Roz search for meaning, purpose, and peace in lives distant from their pasts—Harun in the US, and Roz in Australia—but find their father’s legacy not simple to outrun. Both are traumatised by a childhood trip deep into the very rainforest that would be destroyed by their father’s palm-oil empire, and would supply the family’s immense wealth. Roz and Harun search for stability and purpose down very different paths, both deeply burdened by the grief of their journey into the forest, and the destruction that followed.

This is an immersive, engaging novel that gave considered, respectful treatment to its characters—each are dynamically flawed, sympathetic, redeemable, errant. The narrative is a well-executed sprawl across the globe, while the prose is lyrical and poetic. I appreciated also its depiction of a complex sibling relationship: that a sibling may be a figure of resentment, hate, fierce protection, and ultimately, unconditional allyship. Roz and Harun show that a shared home, set of parents, and pivotal experience does not a shared childhood make, as they repeatedly negotiate with their differences in expectation, freedom, and choices.

“I AM FOREST

skinned alive,

shrieked through the mill,

shat out as plank & board, muscled down factory line,

grunted into place, picked & pondered & cleaved, dovetailed & grooved,

chiselled & stained, lathed & lacquered … there I kneel, legs spread, a procession of

perfectly produced tables,

prostrate on all fours.”

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Unlike Home

by Dr Niamh Wood

I never imagined the end times would look so beautiful.

Snow sprawled across the hills. It clung to the trees and perched upon the branches. It gathered steadily and silently. White morning light peered through an opening in the curtains and spilled across the bedspread. I knew as I woke that something in the air was different.

I’d never seen the earth like this. Never in all these years on this property. I walked into it, barefoot in my pyjamas, entranced by the snow, surprised by the blistering cold.

The dogs sniffed at it, unsure like me. A toe off the front step’s edge to test it was real. Still, the snow continued to fall. The morning was silent.

Inside, fumbling with socks and boots, my hands shook. A child on Christmas morning. I turned, bright-eyed, eight years old, in search of Mum and Dad, or Joey, still eleven, still eager to play. The kitchen was still and dark. I’d call him later.

Then, clad in wool and scarves and rubber boots, I leapt off the front veranda and into the snow. We made snow angels, me and the dogs, and discovered how wet snow is. Down the hill, at the base of the property, the river continued past, slow but uninterrupted. It was a relief to see it flowing onward, proof that something remained as usual.

We ran along the river, rolled down the hills, shivered in unwavering delight. I rolled snowballs, then rolled more, continuing long after my fingers went numb. Stacking them atop each other, little snowmen appeared one by one, with twiggy arms and crooked smiles.

By noon, the ice figures were dotted around the garden, far outnumbering the dogs and me, each one dressed in something from my own body. I shivered under the damp, grey light of the early afternoon.

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