“The Morbids” by Ewa Ramsey is about a self-punishing, traumatised, anxiety-ridden young woman who slowly comes back to life through the power of love, friendship and kindness. On the surface, this would all appear to be another take on a familiar formula: it’s elevated beyond the sum of its parts thanks to Ramsey’s ability to create perfectly-drawn characters who haunt your heart, and its exploration of the heaviest of themes — personal tragedy, crushing guilt, and loneliness — with a dry wit that keeps it buoyant.
The titular ‘Morbids’ are a support group for people living with death-related anxiety. Caitlin attends meetings every Tuesday as a result of a fatal car accident two years ago, when she walked away unscathed, but laden with an irrational sense of culpability; a brutal form of survivor’s guilt that effectively eviscerated the life she knew, which had her climbing the corporate ladder and planning international vacations with her best friend Lina.
Now Caitlin is a borderline alcoholic, works the bar at Sawyer’s, and has isolated herself from Lina; not maliciously, but unconsciously; a manifestation of her trauma. When Lina announces her upcoming nuptials in Bali, and a handsome doctor named Tom enters her life, Caitlin is forced to confront her anxieties, possibly rooted in events preceding the car crash…
“The Morbids” is quietly devastating but ultimately heartening and life-affirming. It’s an intimate and moving account of the myriad ways in which kindness can change the notes and beats of our existence. Ramsey is a new voice in Australian fiction to celebrate.
ISBN: 9781760877538
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Imprint: Allen & Unwin
Pub Date: September 2020
Page Extent: 368
The only thing wrong with Peter Swanson’s “Rules for Perfect Murders” (published in America as “Eight Perfect Murders) is that it spoils — by necessity — the plots of eight classic crime novels. But if you’re okay with that, or better yet, have already read them, and you’re a crime fiction connoisseur, Swanson’s latest is tremendous fun: a twist-filled, pacey psychological thriller, and a love letter to the golden age of crime fiction.
There is a lulling quality to Luke Horton’s writing — emblematic of its narrator, Tom, who suffers from a panic disorder that often makes social interaction traumatic — that makes his acute examinations of the complex ecosystem of a deteriorating relationship, and machinations of friendship, all the more piercing. His prose is spare and disarming, but purposeful; choreographed, even; a writer at the height of his powers, unspooling his narrative with remarkable precision.
In “Infinite Splendours” Sofie Laguna exquisitely, compassionately and wrenchingly transmutes the legacy of trauma into art.
In “Trust” Chris Hammer creates a microcosm of secrets, scandal, and skulduggery enmeshed in the threat of constant violence. In his hands, Sydney becomes a city of shadows; a place where menace lies around every corner, and dark intentions brew within every building. A malevolent cabal has spread long tendrils of corruption through every facet of the New South Wales government — and veteran newspaperman Martin Scarsden is determined to expose it.
When John ‘Whitey’ McLaren witnesses an act of police brutality against an Indian man mistaken as black, the former mayor of a nearby town attempts to intercede. Tased to the ground, he suffers a stroke and soon dies — ‘soon’ being a relative term, because “Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars.” is Joyce Carol Oates at her most loquacious.
Do we own our stories, or do they own us? And how do we claim ownership, reconcile our past and move forward, when our own recollections are defective? When our memories are based on the testimony of others?
Mallard, Lousiana is a town so small it can’t be found on a map. It’s a town of light-skinned black people — a town where “nobody married dark” — and its inhabitants are raised to make future generations lighter still. But its citizens are still susceptible to unjustifiable and endemic racism of the time; and of today. They work menial jobs for white people; and they’re the target of extreme prejudice and violent hate crimes. Take the father of the Vignes twins; lynched once in his front yard, then again in the hospital. Which is just one of the factors that leads to their abandonment of Mallard in 1954, when 16-year-old Desiree and Stella Vignes abscond to New Orleans.
“A girl comes of age against the knife… but the woman she becomes must decide if the blade will cut deep enough to rip her apart or if she will find the strength to leap with her arms out and dare herself to fly in a world that seems to break like glass around her.”
In her second novel, Kate Mildenhall writes about a woman in extremis.