Latest news with #JenniferMills
ABC News
27-06-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
The best new books released in June, from Charmian Clift, Gail Jones and more
June was another stellar month in the publishing world, as our regular round-up of the best new releases attests. We have a new offering from Gail Jones, a literary powerhouse who has made the Miles Franklin shortlist four times, and another Franklin-shortlisted author, Jennifer Mills, whose propulsive "bunker novel" is set against a backdrop of environmental catastrophe. But the best books column is also a showcase of fresh talent, with no fewer than five debut releases. Among them are a glimmering short-story collection and a queer literary thriller set in Melbourne. There's plenty to sink into this month — enjoy! Picador Australia Forget the flashy underground bunker — what if, in the case of environmental catastrophe, the uber-rich retreated to a space station? In Jennifer Mills's post-apocalyptic novel Salvage, Celeste, the sister of protagonist Jude, has done just that. Salvage is an impressive addition to an emerging collection of what I like to call 'bunker novels' — eco-fiction that reckons with the morality of self-preservation by the world's richest people (gold-standard 'bunker novels' include Eleanor Catton's Birnam Wood, Tim Winton's Juice and Naomi Alderman's The Future). As a child, Jude is adopted into the ultra-wealthy family of an Australian resources magnate. She grows up in luxury and seclusion and forms a lifelong bond with her adopted older sister, Celeste. But when the opportunity to flee the Earth appears, only the older sister is interested in a future asleep on a space station, waiting out disaster. Salvage is a propulsive novel told in multiple timelines. We see Jude and Celeste grow up, and apart. Years later, Jude is living in what appears to be a post-apocalyptic, post-war version of Europe. As part of a community of 'Freelanders', Jude drives a truck, fixes things and does what she can to help, all while keeping her true identity a secret. One day, an escape pod falls to the water, with a person aboard — could this be Celeste, returned to Earth? The Australian writer Mills is known for her bold experimentation with novels The Airways and the Miles Franklin-shortlisted Dyschronia. With its page-turning story, Salvage is an easier read but Mills's passion for the environment — and glorious descriptions of the natural world — are still front and centre. – Claire Nichols Summit Books I read Lucy Nelson's debut in the course of a single mesmerised sitting. A short-story collection tied together by theme, each narrative reflects on women who are not mothers. Some have chosen not to be; for others, it is a result of circumstance. In Ghost Baby, a woman undergoes an abortion and finds solace in a podcast about mothering. In the title story, a shy housewife learns to visualise giving voice to the things she most wants to say while seeing a therapist; yet it is in those moments of waiting to see him that she becomes aware of how waiting has shaped her life, for both good and ill. In Swooping Season, the protections people use to fend off swooping birds become a potent metaphor for living with grief. Centred on a ballet dancer, The Feeling Bones tenderly depicts the shape of a family in all its felt and physical contours, from the womb to the end of life. Across the stories, characters are often brought out of a state of semi-seclusion or taught to see their relative isolation in a new light. Those around them seek or offer companionship, becoming surrogates for absent figures in the characters' lives. We are encouraged to think about how people might nurture and mother one another, as well as the aspirations they carry in life. Nelson skilfully evokes broader landscapes and personal histories for her characters. Contoured and lean, each story gracefully arcs and coils. Within the space of a passage or single line, resonant details glimmer. Probing and gorgeously realised, Wait Here marks the arrival of a luminous new talent. – Declan Fry Dialogue Books Jamaica Road is a coming-of-age story, set within the Jamaican diaspora of Britain during the 1980s. The story begins with Daphne, the sole Black girl in her class in South London, who is coming to terms with her Black British identity. Every day Daphne scours the papers for mentions of people like her and is disheartened when she sees them presented as criminals and degenerates. When Connie, a young boy recently arrived from Jamaica, joins her class, they become fast friends. As Connie's relationship with his mother's fearsome partner, Tobias, worsens, he seeks shelter with Daphne, literally and figuratively. We follow the pair coming together and apart across the decade as they tackle all the country has in store for them. Both Connie and Daphne are children made to grow up too fast. While the characters are fictional, the dark history of police riots and racial profiling from South London in the 80s is straight from Smith's own research. While this dark environment pulses in the background, Jamaica Road's main focus is the family and community that keeps its main characters nourished. Jamaica Road reads almost like a play, with dialogue that comes to life on the page. It is a character-based, highly readable and unapologetically Black story about 80s Britain — and a love letter to the resilience and spirit of the Jamaican community. – Rosie Ofori Ward UQP In the acknowledgements of his debut literary thriller, Thomas Vowles thanks his mother and then apologises for not writing a novel that "delights" her. It may not be "delightful", but Our New Gods is a clever page-turner set in Melbourne's queer scene, which morphs from a gay coming-of-age story to a narrative that trades in paranoia, jealousy and obsession. Young Ash has recently moved to Melbourne, escaping the misery and emptiness of his father's home. Desperate to connect, Ash launches himself on the dating apps and meets the charismatic James. While they don't initially connect romantically, James invites Ash into his world, taking him to parties, meeting his friends and daring him to be bold. Ash is often out of his depth as he discovers even the local pool is a lavish queer space where "brightly coloured speedos were the uniform". As a guide, James is a life source for Ash whose desperation to escape extreme loneliness motivates his choices, which become increasingly self-defeating. Unease intensifies after Ash attends a bush rave with James and his boyfriend Raf; there, Ash recovers the body of Raf's former boyfriend, Booth, in a lake and becomes fixated on the idea that Raf murdered Booth and now Ash wants to protect James from a similar fate. As Ash reflects: "The difficult task of our lives was to act in the face of uncertainty. But how? To act, one had to make a choice within the treachery of ambiguity. How could this not inevitably lead to tragedy?" Within this "treachery of ambiguity", Vowles skilfully plays with our sympathies and plants seeds of discontent and disconnect which pushes the reader to the tragic end. A compelling Australian debut. – Sarah L'Estrange NewSouth It's a crime that Charmian Clift's marvellous writing is not better known. The past few years have helped ameliorate this neglect with a series of new publications and republications, including Clift's unfinished novel, The End of the Morning, her daughter Suzanne Chick's 1994 memoir, Searching for Charmian (republished in 2025), and We Are the Stars, her granddaughter Gina Chick's 2025 memoir. This month sees the arrival of her glorious second solo novel, Honour's Mimic, first published in 1964. It tells the story of Kathy, a woman learning to find herself outside the confines of marriage and children. Kathy is convalescing on a small Greek island following an automobile accident. She and her sister-in-law Milly are outsiders and objects of curiosity on the island, something Clift nimbly and gracefully captures (while out walking, Kathy notes the "quick shy ripple of teeth" she encounters from the men). Kathy is so vividly drawn, she burns a hole through the page. She is a person who feels deeply and wants to savour the marrow of life. She begins an affair with a wiry, wolfish sponge diver, Fotis. Delicately sketched, intimating things just so, Clift evokes their burgeoning attraction in slow, aching, pointillist detail. The book offers a fascinating portrait, too, of Greece in the 1950s: the small, close-knit community; scant electricity; the ships, barbers and taverns, and the houses hung precariously from cliff-faces, alongside public buildings dating from the Italian occupation during World War II. Raw, real and remarkable, Clift charts one woman's journey into the "expansive reckless" wonder of the world. Her evocation of Kathy and Fotis's interior lives is furious, grand and eclectic. Honour's Mimic is a superbly realised portrait of the links between true love and mortality. It is about how being in another country can unmoor and perhaps free you to find "a passionate affirmation of that old lost desire to face challenge and danger, to be brave, to dare for the truth". – Declan Fry Text Publishing Acclaimed Australian novelist Gail Jones explores the subterranean as well as the surface in her 11 novels (Black Mirror, Five Bells, The Death of Noah Glass, Salonika Burning, just to name a few). Her latest, The Name of the Sister, is a story of the missing. Those people who slipped away or were taken, who fell into mystery or were snatched away. Even more, it's about those left behind, the grieving and the searching, those who fill that missing space with hope, speculation and story. Angie, a freelance journalist in Sydney, is intrigued by the story of a woman found on the side of the road outside Broken Hill. Found, rather than lost or missing. The woman can't or won't speak and nobody knows who she is and what has happened. As Angie pursues the story, she is drawn in by the numerous people who project their own losses onto this woman, who claim that they recognise her, "dead cert, for sure, one hundred and one per cent". Meanwhile, Angie's romantic relationship is unstable, and her family history of silence and secrets lingers in the shadows. Her fierce best friend is the lead detective on the case, too, and so this is almost a crime novel, but not quite: "She had no wish to contribute to the criminal hunt or its shady forms of titillation." Jones takes us into this story with her usual eye for surprising detail and exquisitely realised description: the "windy hollow of the city's loud darkness", punctuated by memories, music, shared song lyrics and the sound of hopeful searches. – Kate Evans Allen & Unwin When you're 10, summer holidays seem like they last forever. It's a feeling Kiwi author Jennifer Trevelyan captures and infuses with unease in her debut novel, A Beautiful Family. A family of four heads to a popular holiday spot on the North Island coast for their annual five-week break. The story is told from the perspective of the younger sister, who remains unnamed for most of the book. It's the 1980s and her days are sound-tracked by the Split Enz album, True Colours, which she listens to religiously on her walkman. In the absence of digital distractions, time takes on an expansive quality. The narrator's 13-year-old sister, Vanessa, is now "too cool" to play, so she befriends a boy, Kahu, who tells her a story about a girl who went missing from the town a few years earlier. The pair spend their days exploring the beach and a nearby lagoon, looking for clues in their hunt for the missing girl. Around halfway through the novel, Trevelyan begins ratcheting up the suspense, and what began as a portrait of family dynamics becomes something more sinister. The missing girl's mother, a sad figure who collects wildflowers to lay at a makeshift memorial for her daughter, is a distressing reminder that however idyllic the beach appears, danger is never far away. What that danger is exactly is hard to say: is it the wild surf? The creepy next-door neighbour? Or does it come from within? Fractures grow in the parents' marriage as the narrator's mother disappears for mysterious walks on the beach while her father is at home watching cricket on TV. Their youngest daughter, small and easy to miss, has learned how to blend into the background. But she's always watching and leaping to conclusions, unchecked by her parents who are caught up in their own affairs. As the adults in her life become increasingly unreliable, the narrator sees the fragility of her family for the first time. "Now I understood that a family wasn't a particularly solid thing — it was a bubble purely of our own making and just like a bubble, it could burst." In the book's final pages, Trevelyan brings together the narrative threads in a gripping denouement. It's an atmospheric and satisfyingly pacy read that serves up a welcome slice of sun-filled escapism. – Nicola Heath Doubleday Liquid features an unnamed and unmoored protagonist. Two years after finishing her PhD, she is spiralling. She reflects, "My career had gone nowhere. My love life was non-existent. And as for sex, here I was, home alone on a Saturday night with a chick flick playing on my laptop because I didn't own a TV." Determined to change her life, she resolves to marry rich, planning 100 dates over the summer. Given her published PhD is a take-down of modern marriage, she feels perfectly placed for this endeavour. The writing is sharp, witty and fun. Our protagonist is a skilled commentator and, with cutting barbs, the dates become academic case studies on America, whiteness, class and sexuality. As a queer woman and the daughter of an Iranian father and Indian mother, she grapples with what it would mean to marry for the sake of comfort, particularly in the pressing whiteness of LA. In the final third of the novel, the tone shifts, as the protagonist travels to Tehran to see her father. Despite speaking Farsi and her olive skin, as an American in Iran she is an outsider. Everything that normally comes with ease or familiarity is met with sanctions and dead ends. She identifies this is not the fault of her destination, but where she's come from: "It wasn't my father's people who had invented the term 'Third World', and they hadn't defined the terms by which its inhabitants were forced to live." With a critique of American imperialism at its centre, Liquid is both a sexy and highly political piece of literary fiction. – Rosie Ofori Ward Tune in to ABC Radio National at 10am Mondays for The Book Show and 10am Fridays for The Bookshelf.
The Guardian
12-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Salvage by Jennifer Mills review – urgent post-apocalyptic novel proposes a better way of living
What does it mean to build a new world from the wreckage of a broken one? This question lies at the heart of Jennifer Mills' mesmerising fifth novel, Salvage – but it's one that her gruff, defensive protagonist Jude would rather avoid. For most of the novel, Jude has her head down and is hard at work, cooking, fixing engines, caring for other people. She's a survivor whose adaptative mechanisms involve leaving everything and everyone behind: 'Things will be simpler when she's on her own. Belonging nowhere, carrying nothing.' We meet Jude in the village of Northport in the Freelands, on the precipice of a dangerous journey, a narrative moment that both anticipates resolution, and disorients the reader. Mills doesn't rush to explain how Jude got to Northport or where she's going; the plot is revealed slowly through the novel's intricate design. Although Jude tries to convince her friends to stay away, to her immense vexation they won't let her play the role of the lonely hero – and Mills, anyway, has no truck with narrative models organised around a single exceptional protagonist. Jude is on a salvage mission, of sorts, but the reader's questions about what she is saving and why are not answered immediately. Mills devotes her energies instead to building the near-future world of the novel. The contours of the lands traversed by Jude are recognisable to readers in 2025. They are shaped by war and climate crisis, by inequality, by the chaos of extractive capitalism. Here the rich live in locked compounds and pods, the poor labour out of sight. Plants still grow but the seasons are 'haywire'. The Freelanders live in a post-national deregulated zone between 'nervous powers' in the postwar era. Together they are building a community according to the principles of distributed democracy, patching up roads that were bombed, reinhabiting abandoned villages; wresting, as Ursula Le Guin, one of Mills' most important influences, might put it, wild oats from their husks. Both writers are preoccupied with how people form viable communities and Mills' pays as much attention to the labour of care and repair as she does more traditional novelistic magnets like conflict and resolution. If you can help, help, the Freelanders remind each other. They welcome refugees, share resources and repurpose the flotsam that washes up on villages dotted along their shores. It's hard work, building this new world, and although she never hesitates to volunteer for manual labour, Jude tires of the affective slog of community; the tedium of committee meetings and consensus-based decision-making. To salvage is to be resourceful and by sharing what they salvage, the Freelanders are able to take care of each other and survive. In Jude's difficult course from fierce independence to apprehensive acceptance of the radical interdependence required to create a better world, Mills provides her reader with a timely model of resistance to despair and passivity. When a piece of space junk washes up on the shores of Northport, Jude must reckon with all that she has left behind. The rest of the community is almost as quick as Jude to identify it as a life-support pod from the Endeavour Station, a much-publicised spacecraft that served as a refuge for the megawealthy from conflict on Earth. All on board were presumed dead but, by some miracle, the pod contains a skeletal survivor, barely holding on to life. Jude knows at once that this is her adoptive sister, Celeste. The principal narrative arc of Salvage – Jude's quest, if we must – concerns this frail body: whether Jude will reveal her connection to Celeste; whether the sisters will have a chance to reconcile. In flashbacks we learn about Jude's many lives before her arrival in the Freelands: orphaned in infancy, adopted by a wealthy mining family, raised by Celeste and a dwindling domestic staff in a lonely compound. She runs away as a teenager, keeps running and taking on new names – only to realise that 'she has spent most of her life in flight, and outrun nothing'. A third narrative thread brings the reader into Celeste's dreamy, desperate consciousness as she wakes and falls back into torpor in space. The reader recognises before Jude does that the sisters are conjoined by their conviction that to survive this violent, unpredictable world requires isolation and hard protective shells. Even so, it is a vision of her lost sister that keeps Celeste alive as she floats away from the world. The three narratives converge at the climax of the novel, which is surprising and generous in its optimism. The resolution of the plot realises Mills' larger thematic ambitions and demonstrates her technical accomplishment. It's a beautifully structured novel, complex but never messy, and speaks in urgent tones to our contemporary moment. Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion Around Jude and her kin, Mills has crafted a novel that amounts to an argument for centring care and community in our strategies for survival. 'It was difficult,' Jude observes in an interaction with a Freelander early on, 'to unlearn habits of scarcity and competition and possession.' And yet as Salvage insists, with grace and conviction, we must. Salvage by Jennifer Mills is out through Pan Macmillan Australia ($34.99)
The Guardian
02-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Deliciously addictive', ‘dripping with suspense': the best Australian books out in June
Science fiction, Pan Macmillan, $34.99 What does it mean to build a new world from the wreckage of a broken one? This question lies at the heart of Jennifer Mills' mesmerising new novel, Salvage, which tracks the fortunes of two estranged sisters: gruff, defensive Jude and spectral Celeste. This is a work of speculative fiction, set in a near-future ravaged by war and climate crisis. To survive the chaos, Jude is convinced she needs to shed her past and avoid attachments. But she's wrong, and the arc of the novel tracks her realisation that building a new world requires care and community. Salvage is a timely and surprisingly optimistic manual for navigating our present polycrisis. – Catriona Menzies-Pike Nonfiction, Simon & Schuster, $36.99 Most self-help books are peppered with personal stories that illustrate their advice. Though the tone is light and chatty, with bullet-point takeaways, that's not what you'll get from The Introvert's Guide to Leaving the House, by frequent the Guardian Australia contributor Jenny Valentish. Instead the book reads like the memoir of a writer who has learned how to help herself. The mirror Valentish holds to readers is not always flattering. She explores tendencies toward grandiosity and the unpleasant impacts inwardness can have on other people. For that reason, her efforts to understand her limited appetite for socialising offer something rare for the self-help genre: genuine insight. – Alyx Gorman Short stories, Simon & Schuster, $32.99 Lucy Nelson's debut collection of stories is centred on women – of a wide range of ages and in many different contexts – who don't have children. Some have chosen their childlessness, others have not. While they differ in the intensity and kinds of emotions this provokes within them, it is never the defining aspect of their lives. Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning Nelson is interested in models of family and of connection, in bodies and their betrayals and consolations, in the lives that women forge for themselves when faced by the unexpected. These stories are fierce and tender, often quirky and hilarious, and driven by great compassion. – Fiona Wright Fiction, Allen & Unwin, $34.99 Shokoofeh Azar migrated from Iran to Australia a decade ago as a refugee, having been arrested multiple times for her work as a journalist investigating human rights abuses. Her second novel is as vividly imaginative as her first, The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree: it opens as a gigantic, mysterious tree suddenly sprouts up in the family home of teenager Shokoofeh, our narrator. No one outside the family seems to be able to see the tree but it brings with it mind-expanding freedoms – just as the Iranian revolution begins and reality grows violent. This novel is packed with ghosts, magical palaces, fortune tellers and folk stories; it could be described as magical realism, though Azar writes with a flair that sets her apart from the South American giants that have dominated the genre. – Sian Cain Fiction, UQP, $34.99 Thomas Vowles' debut is one of the most tense and disturbing novels I've read in a long time. Ash, new to Melbourne, has fallen in love with James, a man he met on Grindr. At a house party he witnesses a violent interaction involving James's new boyfriend, Raf. Ash is desperate to find out the truth about Raf – trouble is, no one believes him, and his unrequited feelings for James might be clouding his judgment and grip on reality. Vowles' background as a screenwriter is evident in the deliciously addictive – and stressful – way the story unfolds, with the narration becoming unreliable, and unhinged as Ash descends into madness. – Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen Poetry, Giramondo, $27 What history forgets, families remember. In her debut collection, Chinese Fish, Grace Yee forged a bridge between the two and announced herself as a poet to watch. In Joss: A History, she continues that potent project – blending family testimony with archival fragments to trace her connection to colonial Bendigo. These are poems of grit and ritual, erasure and persistence, bureaucracy and grace, gold dust and Chinese cemeteries. Here, among the segregated gravestones, Yee captures the cruel, beautiful and ever-messy work of making a place in the world. 'What dreams weather beneath these mounds,' she writes, 'what fierce agitations churn the night.' – Beejay Silcox Science fiction, NewSouth Books, $34.99 Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion This is a really charming and fun reworking of the Dracula story that reimagines the Demeter – the ship that transports Dracula to London in Bram Stoker's novel – as a spaceship, 2,293 days into her voyage transporting humans from Earth to Alpha Centauri. The Demeter is a chatty spacecraft – in fact, she is our narrator, haphazardly trying to keep her passengers from dying at the hands of the ancient vampire who has made his way onboard. If you know the Dracula story, you'll find this enjoyable – there is a distinctly unhinged touch to the humour that I suspect Terry Pratchett fans will like. – SC Fiction, Simon & Schuster, $34.99 The pernicious pleasantries, the boardroom politics, the happy hours and the sad snack drawers: all the grinding machinations of office culture crescendo to a quivering peak in Sinéad Stubbins' very funny, very horrifying novel Stinkbug. An advertising agency gets restructured (likely story); everyone is sent on a work retreat (likely story); it might actually be a cult? (likelier than you think). Like a chunnering conversation with your worst colleague, Stinkbug is claustrophobic. Stubbins faithfully captures the cadences of corporate small talk and dials them up into a nightmarish cacophony of efficiency reports and pitch decks. You'll want to work from home for ever. – Michael Sun Fiction, Text Publishing, $34.99 Gail Jones is a prolific writer – this is her 11th novel – but The Name of the Sister is somewhat of a departure. Fans of her lucid, beautiful prose won't be disappointed, but this is a thriller, set in Sydney and Broken Hill. Familiar themes – identity, the nature of truth and memory – remind us of other books Jones has written (including One Another and Five Bells) but The Name of the Sister is dripping with suspense and intrigue. Driven by complex female characters, this novel is an intellectual page-turner. – Joseph Cummins Fiction, Ultimo, $34.99 When Eva Novak returns to Australia, mysteriously summoned by her long-estranged sister, she is shocked to find Elizabeta dead in her home. The pair haven't spoken for a decade, since the crash that killed Eva's young daughter; Elizabeta was behind the wheel and hadn't strapped Gracie in. Broken by grief and fury, Eva has two weeks to sort through the estate of the woman who killed her daughter – a task she sets to with a detached purposefulness that becomes increasingly devastating under Peričić's taut prose. But as she sifts through the house for all the documents she needs, Eva uncovers a far more complicated picture of what really happened that day – and how trauma can twist memories and recast entire lives. – Steph Harmon Nonfiction, Murdoch Books, $34.99 Nathan Dunne, an Australian journalist, was living in London when he decided to go night swimming in Hampstead Heath. In the cold water he experienced what is known as depersonalisation: a severe dissociative illness that left him unsure about who he was and what was real; a terrifying and debilitating state of having no sense of self: 'In a single moment, a split second, I had been locked away, condemned to wander in a body that was not my own.' This fascinating account charts his recovery, his research into a little-understood condition and his discovery of a whole community of people who have experienced it. – SC Fiction, Hachette Australia, $32.99 Historical novels set among the mid-century upper crust aren't that unusual but choosing an Australian prime minister's wife as a heroine certainly is. Though the novel opens with Harold Holt's disappearance, the 'year' in the title isn't quite accurate: instead Zara reflects on her memories of their entire relationship since 1927, in digestible, dialogue-heavy prose. Although you know from the outset that the story will take a tragic turn, the opening chapters of Kimberley Freeman's novel are fun and foamy. As Zara Holt was a fashion designer, there's a generous helping of very good frocks, too. – AG
RNZ News
21-05-2025
- Business
- RNZ News
Employer of Winston Peter's hecker launches investigation
A Wellington worker's heated exchange with Winston Peters at a very public press conference has landed him hot water with his employer, who happens to do a fair bit of work for the government. The heckler was wearing a lanyard that indentified his employer as engineering company Tonkin and Taylor. It raises a heap of questions about what people can and can't say when they are off the clock. Employment law specialist Jennifer Mills spoke to Lisa Owen.
