The Weekend is a perfectly balanced encapsulation of the human condition, its melancholy truths set to a delightful melody only Charlotte Wood — one of our greatest writers — could devise.
It charts the complex, resilient relationship between three friends, all in their seventies, who’ve just lost a member of their quartet. The sudden death of Sylvie brings Jude (former restaurateur), Wendy (acclaimed public intellectual) and Adele (once renowned, now out-of-work actress) to Sylvie’s isolated beach house over the Christmas weekend to purge the home. But the passing of Sylvie has destabilised the bond between these women; rocked the very foundations of their lifelong friendship. As the trio handle their personal grief, it quickly becomes clear Sylvie was vital to the group’s equilibrium, and they’ll have to re calibrate as a trio in order to retain what they once held so close.
Charlotte Wood’s ability to render complex emotions with incredible lucidity and sympathetic intelligence is exceptional. The Weekend is sometimes heart-wrenching, sometimes joyous, and never anything less than sharply poignant and true. It’s a book that has lingered in my memory, and alongside the new Strout, Patchett and Parrett, ranks among the best books I’ve read this year.
ISBN: 9781760292010
Format: Paperback / softback
Pages: 272
Imprint: Allen & Unwin
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Publish Date: 15-Oct-2019
Country of Publication: Australia
Middling among the distinguished author’s score of mysteries, but even the most routine Peter Corris novel offers incidental pleasures, and as a historical document of early-nineties Sydney, it’s well worth tracking down a copy of.
Gregory “Seth” Gallant is a sublime cartoonist and Clyde Fans is his opus; a graphic novel twenty years in the making, clocking in at close to 500 pages. It captures the key moments in the lives of two middle-class brothers from a broken home, Simon and Abe Matchcard, who detest each other, and the gradual collapse of their deserter father’s once-booming oscillating fan business, established in the 1930s, but unable to compete with the invention of air conditioning. The art is phenomenal; the thick lines intricate and expressive, the blue and grey colours accentuating the book’s melancholic tone. And the pacing is exquisite; there’s a cadence to Seth’s cartooning that compels readers to slow down and savour every page and panel. Anyone who questions comics as literature needs to read it.
Anna Hope’s Expectation is a profound and poignant portrait of the idealism of early adulthood and the lofty expectations attached to it, and what life subsequently does to undo it, or at the very least change our barometer for success and accomplishment.
In Olive, Again Elizabeth Strout once makes exquisite fiction from the stuff of ordinary lives, as the Pulitzer Prize-winning author addresses mortality in thirteen anecdotes set in Crosby, Maine, linked by the presence of Olive Kitteridge.
“Something had created itself from nothing — a dumpy old house had been filled, if only for this moment, with twenty-three different worlds, each of them rich and mysterious.”
