Final Draft - Great Conversations

2SER 107.3FM

Great conversations with authors from Australia and around the world.

  1. 7월 14일 ·  보너스

    Book Club - Johanna Bell’s Department of the Vanishing

    Johanna Bell is an award winning author of fiction, poetry and children’s books. Her new novel Department of the Vanishing won the 2025 Tasmanian Literary Award for Best Unpublished Manuscript. For more than twenty years Ava has toiled away at the Department of Vanishing cataloguing species as they go extinct. The pace of the work has been increasing and as is always the case there’s never enough hands. Humanity is on the brink of a mass extinction event. Birdsong is falling silent and people didn’t even notice it disappearing. It’s Ava’s job to archive the remains, even as her personal life teeters. But in her dying mother’s confused words Ava finds something. Maybe hope. Maybe a clue to the mystery of her father, long missing, and a song that contains more than any might assume… Department of the Vanishing is a visually innovative novel that weaves a mystery around just about the saddest thing I can think of. I love the birds that visit my house and as I read I couldn’t bear to think of not hearing the Magpie’s warble, or the chittering of the Galah calling me out to give it some seed.  Casting the end of birdsong as the emotional heart of the novel was effective at getting me hooked on the mystery and serves as an interesting plot point as we come to realise the most versatile call of all may lurk deep within the department. There is a resonance to the idea that silence falling is the advance call of life ending. Through Ava we get a sense that the world isn’t doing ok. She’s over worked at living behind a massage parlour where the women are wonderful but the ambiance is lacking. Her partner is a dick and now the natural world is dwindling to so-much space in manila folders available to those ready to parade through the archives. Bureaucracy gone mild.  The book itself is crafted as a kind of off-kilter file. Imagine a cork board linked by red twine and you’re on your way to imagining Ava collection. It is through these disparate files, recordings, and police reports that the reader is offered the opportunity to get to the heart of the mystery. Ava’s sure there’s more to all of this death and destruction, and that it’s somehow linked to her family. To the disappearance of her father all those years ago. As I read I knew that this was something unique. Moreover, Department of the Vanishing wasn’t going to serve itself up to me, I would have to work to figure it out. If you enjoy creative fiction, zines, and interactive texts, this one’s for you.

  2. 7월 7일 ·  보너스

    Book Club - Antoun Issa’s Rebirth

    Antoun Issa is a Lebanese-Australian journalist and co-founder of Deepcut News. Antoun has a new book out entitled Rebirth and with the byline a “Love Story from the depths of war.” Rebirth chronicles Antoun’s mothers experiences of the beginnings of the Lebanese civil war in the 1970s and her subsequent migration to Australia. The novel centers around the experience of the pseudonymously named Khalil family and their eldest daughter Laila. Laila works as a seamstress, supporting her father’s income for the family and giving her some small degree of autonomy in moving around Beirut between home and her work. Laila is of an age when her family would be seeking a match, and for her to marry, but Laila is jealous of her independence, her role as a support to her family, and is also secretly in love with the handsome hairdresser she sees coming to and from work. Laila might reasonably worry about the approval of her family and the politics of relationships in a close knit community. When war breaks out and factions around the city close off territories she comes to understand that simple things such as living and dying can be easily overturned by desperate men with guns. In a short while she will see her life and her love transformed utterly. Rebirth is a deeply personal and tremendously affecting novel. In crafting the book Antoun Issa meticulously crafted stories from locals in Beirut and his  mother’s own reminiscences. He takes these interviews and transforms them into a vibrant narrative evoking both the history of the time, but also something of the community and what is being lost as it is felt by those who would come to mourn it eternally. When I read the book it was against the backdrop of a new war unfolding in Lebanon, with invading Israeli forces uprooting town much as Rebirth describes the uprooting and displacement of the Khalil family. As that conflict escalates I turn again to Rebirth as a source for understanding what is at stake and the generational trauma visited on those who are driven from their lands. Rebirth is a vessel for that memory. It is also a testament to the humanity of the people who are caught in the middle of conflict. Those who become casualties but often don’t get memorialised as the fighters do because they are poor, or not strategically important in the schemes of little men with big guns. This is an incredible work of narrative non-fiction and a generous invitation to all readers to understand both the history and the personal consequence of a decades long conflict seared into the hearts of so many Lebanese diaspora across the world and in Australia.

소개

Great conversations with authors from Australia and around the world.

좋아할 만한 다른 항목