Australia

Gerald Murnane’s Landscape with Landscape opens with a splendidly disgruntled preface. The book is a collection of six longish stories and was originally published in 1985, when it was panned by a reviewer. ‘Some writers may claim not to be affected by reviews or even not to read them,’ he observes in his preface: ‘I make no such claim.’ And he explains how this brutal notice (‘I call to mind easily some of the nastiest passages’) led to poor sales and the disappearance of the collection, his fourth book. There is some comedy in this alongside the spiky pathos. Murnane is about as close to review-proof as any writer can

A beguiling cinema advert back in the 1970s showed a young man with a series of doors closing around him with resounding clunks. First, he was hemmed in by the boredom of school, then work, and finally a mortgage – but as soon as he got the keys to his first motorbike, he could hit the open road and escape to freedom. Vroom, vroom. I seem to remember the initial scenes were in grim black and white, but when he got the bike everything switched to vibrant colour – although that may be false memory syndrome. He salutes other bikers with majestic waves – until he realises this makes him

‘I have had more direct clinical experience than almost any other forensic psychiatrist of assessing and managing lone-actor perpetrators of massacres,’ writes Paul Mullen, professor emeritus at Monash University in Australia, in his introduction to Running Amok. He’s got non-clinical experience, too. In 1990, when he lived near Aramoana in New Zealand, he was disturbed by gunfire one night. It turned out that the neighbour of one of his patients was busy killing 13 people. Afterwards, Mullen supported the survivors and his patient, who felt ‘anguish’ at not spotting the red flags to prevent the massacre. Mullen summarises what she told him about the killer: His mood was marked by

Lord Hawke, the grand old man of Yorkshire cricket and stalwart of the MCC, was not one to mince words. A century ago, the administrator rejected calls for the national XI to be led by Jack Hobbs. ‘Pray God no professional shall ever captain England,’ Hawke said. ‘We have always had an amateur skipper and when the day comes when we shall have no more amateurs captaining England it will be a thousand pities.’ It took 27 years. Elizabeth II would be less picky about commoners. She knighted Hobbs in her Coronation honours in 1953, the same year that Len Hutton, England’s first professional captain, led the side to regain

Cricket histories are a dangerous genre both for writers and readers. They can be incredibly boring, the dullest of all probably being John Major’s weighty tome, which said everything you knew it would say as drearily as you feared. So Tim Wigmore, a young shaver who writes on cricket for the Daily Telegraph, has entered hazardous territory. Speaking as a proud cricket badger, who even has a book by Merv Hughes on his shelf (Dear Merv, 2001), I will admit that I have read rather too many cricket histories, and I swore that it would be a cold day in hell (or possibly at the county ground in Derby) before

Michelle de Kretser, of a Sri Lankan family living in Australia, is an exceptional novelist – perhaps among the ten best at work in English today. She has been recognised with literary prizes, but it’s surprising that she hasn’t made quite the impact on the public she deserves. She is one of those writers who one presses upon intelligent acquaintances and whose books reward rereading. One of her regular subjects – she is a novelist of bookish, intelligent lives – is the inability of the Australian intelligentsia ever to read an Australian novel. As the author of The Life to Come, perhaps the best Australian novel since Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet,

Some books have good titles. Many books, sadly, have terrible titles. But a few rare books have the perfect title – the one that tells you briefly what the book is about, and also whether you want to own it. Richie Benaud’s Blue Suede Shoes is one such. If that title grabs you, you should go out and buy it now, because the book is brilliant. If it doesn’t, you have probably stopped reading this review already and turned over to Melissa Kite. Either you love Blofeld’s ‘My Dear Old Thing’ eccentricities or you want him slowly roasted over an open fire Harry Ricketts is a poet and critic who

Evie Wyld’s powerful fourth novel opens from the perspective of Max, a ghost who haunts the south London flat where he lived with his girlfriend Hannah. A ghost story is new ground for Wyld, the multi-award-winning Anglo-Australian writer, but her signature traits are immediately evident – poetic observations of unusual details; a pervasive sense of grief and palpable trauma, leavened with a wry sense of humour (Max notes his ‘strong urge to file a complaint’ about being a ghost); and an intricate plot that compels readers to delve into complex past events. As the book progresses, Wyld alternates sections from Max’s perspective, entitled ‘After’, with others: ‘Before’, Hannah’s perspective on

Among many other prizes for her stunningly original work, Alexis Wright has won Australia’s greatest literary honour, the Miles Franklin Award, for a novel of the highest literary merit representing Australian life. It is ironic, but sadly apt, that her epic Praiseworthy should be published in the year that Australians, offered a chance to give greater political rights to their indigenous peoples, have voted not to. Everything blends together: dream and reality, donkeys and butterflies, the Odyssey and The Wizard of Oz Wright is an Aboriginal activist as well as a writer. Praiseworthy, which has already won the Queensland Literary Award for Fiction, is an impassioned environmental Ulysses of the

The date 6 June 2021 was a grim day for cricket. As the world was adjusting to life after the pandemic, a Lord’s Test with a full house felt like ‘the promised kiss of springtime’. And so it was, until the final afternoon, when New Zealand challenged England to make 273 in 75 overs. The gesture was recognised as generous by all except the faint souls in the England dressing room, rendered frit by the possibility of defeat. Thousands of spectators, bewildered by five hours of fearful prodding, withdrew their consent. Cricket has witnessed more profound changes in the past decade than in the previous 100 years With ‘the Hundred’