Category: Fiction

Australia, Author, Book review, Brendan Colley, Fiction, literary fiction, Publisher, science fiction, Setting, speculative, Transit Lounge

‘The Season for Flying Saucers’ by Brendan Colley

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Fiction – paperback; Transit Lounge; 304 pages; 2026. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

How could I not read a book with such an intriguing cover image and title?

Brendan Colley’s The Season for Flying Saucers is one of those new breed of eccentric and entertaining Australian novels that appear to be about one off-the-wall subject but are really about something else entirely.

I’m thinking Rhett Davis’ Arborescence, which is about people turning into trees but is really about grief and the unstable boundaries between humans and the natural world, and Jock Serong’s Cherrywood (review forthcoming), which is about a city pub that moves location but is really about community and belonging.

Or even Robbie Arnott’s Dusk, about the search for an elusive puma in the highlands of Tasmania, which is a thinly disguised call to leave nature alone.

In all these books, the reader has to accept a strange premise for the story to work.

Colley asks us to do the same in The Season for Flying Saucers. Here, a family in modern-day Hobart is being targeted by aliens from outer space, though their purpose is never fully explained. Yet this is not really a book about aliens. It is about family, connection and the need to believe in something beyond ourselves.

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Australia, Author, Book review, Fiction, Focus on WA writers, Graeme Dixon, Poetry, Publisher, Reading First Nations Writers, Reading Projects, Setting, TBR 2026 Challenge, University of Queensland Press

‘Holocaust Island’ by Graeme Dixon

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Poetry – paperback; University of Queensland Press; 80 pages; 2023.

Graeme Dixon (1955-2010) was a Noongar poet from Perth and the first person to win the David Unaipon Award in 1989.

His debut collection of poetry, Holocaust Island was first published in 1990 and reissued by UQP as part of its First Nations Classics series in 2023.

By all accounts, Dixon had a troubled early life. He was a member of the Stolen Generations, having been taken from his family aged three — following his parents’ separation — and then raised in institutions.

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Author, Book review, Fiction, Hachette Ireland, Ireland, Lisa McInerney, literary fiction, Publisher, Reading Projects, Setting, TBR 2026 Challenge

‘The Glorious Heresies’ by Lisa McInerney

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Fiction – paperback; Hachette; 384 pages; 2016.

Back in the day, when Twitter was a great place to chat books with like-minded people, Lisa McInerney’s Glorious Heresies was widely recommended to me.

After I purchased my copy in 2016, it went on to win the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and the Desmond Elliot Prize, and yet despite multiple attempts, I could not get beyond the first chapter.

But proving that sometimes books simply require the right moment to be appreciated, even if it means you have to wait an ENTIRE DECADE for that to happen (and for a sequel, The Blood Miracles, to be published), I picked it up again last week and loved it.

Set in Cork, Ireland, in the aftermath of the collapse of the Celtic Tiger, it tells the story of a group of marginalised characters whose lives become entangled after a murder.

It’s not a crime story, per se, but it does explore crime as well as the justice system, prostitution, addiction, physical abuse, single parenthood and the legacy of the Catholic Church.

It’s gritty and real and hard-hitting, but it’s also peppered with witty one-liners and colloquial language so that it never feels too heavy.

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1001 Books to read before you die, Author, Book review, Fiction, literary fiction, Muriel Spark, Penguin Modern Classics, Publisher, Reading Projects, Scotland, Setting, TBR 2026 Challenge

‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’ by Muriel Spark

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Fiction – Penguin Modern Classic; 136 pages; 2000.

Most people remember a teacher who made an impression on them — usually for the better. But did you ever have a teacher with dubious political leanings that only became obvious after the fact?

In Muriel Spark’s 1961 novella The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, a charismatic teacher holds sway over her young charges in ways that are unconventional but not overtly improper. Even so, her methods arouse suspicions.

Unable to identify any clear wrongdoing, school authorities instead question her students, dubbed the “Brodie set,” probing what she teaches and whether it is entirely appropriate.

‘I am putting old heads on your young shoulders,’ Miss Brodie had told them at that time, ‘and all my pupils are the crème de la crème’ (page 8).

It is through one of these “interrogations” that a former student betrays her teacher, and it is this betrayal which is the focus of this strange and peculiar novella.

I say strange and peculiar because I doubt if anything of this ilk would be published today. It’s got a weird syncopation going on, which is unsettling for the reader. It took me a while to comprehend the non-linear time frames that Spark adopts to tell her tale and to understand that little clues were scattered here and there for me to piece together.

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Alan Fyfe, Australia, Author, Book review, Fiction, Focus on WA writers, literary fiction, Publisher, Reading Projects, Setting, Transit Lounge

‘The Cross Thieves’ by Alan Fyfe

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Fiction – paperback; Transit Lounge; 208 pages; 2026. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Alan Fyfe’s latest novel, The Cross Thieves, is the second in his planned trilogy centred around the Peel region, just south of Perth, in Western Australia.

His debut T, was a chilling look at a community of junkies (my review) told in spare but evocative prose.

This instalment, a standalone, follows two brothers facing food insecurity and homelessness. After a small act of revenge — the theft of a cross (hence the book’s title) — they are drawn into a tense cat-and-mouse chase with the criminal underworld, including drug dealers and violent thugs.

It’s a propulsive read, but it’s also complex. Fyfe, who wrote the novel as part of his PhD at the University of Western Australia, employs what he describes as a “little known (and very old) structure called a ring composition” (Acknowledgements, page 199).

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2026 Stella Prize, Australia, Author, Book review, Fiction, literary fiction, Literary prizes, Miranda Darling, Publisher, Scribe, Setting

‘Thunderhead’ and ‘Fireweather’ by Miranda Darling

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Fiction – hardback; Scribe; 160 pages & 140 pages; 2024 & 2025.

I wouldn’t normally review two books in one post but Miranda Darling’s novellas, Thunderhead (2024) and Fireweather (2025), are a set, best appreciated if read one after the other, so it makes sense to write about them together, too.

Both books are a quietly radical look at marriage, domestic entrapment, societal expectations and mental health. Read back-to-back, they offer a powerful, if somewhat oppressive, account of what it is like to be coercively controlled by the person you should be able to trust most.

They follow the life of Winona Dalloway, a respectable middle-class wife and mother, a writer of romantic fiction who loses her sense of self in a whirlwind of chores, domesticity and child-rearing. (The name is a nod to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, but having never read the book, I can’t draw comparisons.)

In the first book, Winona is married to Him (always capitalised and never named), who’s successful and popular in the outside world, but controlling and manipulative within the family home.

In the second book, she’s divorced Him and has custody of their two young boys, but He consistently gaslights her, causing her to doubt her own memory and reality to the point where she begins to lose her mind.

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2026 Stella Prize, Australia, Author, Book review, Fiction, Literary prizes, Lucy Nelson, Publisher, Setting, short stories, Summit Books

‘Wait Here’ by Lucy Nelson

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Fiction – paperback; Simon & Schuster; 240 pages; 2025.

Wait Here, a volume of short stories by Lucy Nelson, has been long-listed for this year’s Stella Prize.

The judges described it as “virtuosic” and “glistening”, noting the collection’s “incredibly interesting and innovative” use of the short fiction form and the way each story varies significantly in tone, perspective and style. And yet, for me, each felt truly intimate, as if whispered directly into the reader’s ear — and heart.

Largely themed around motherhood, mothering and all the ways in which women who are childfree are judged, seen or set apart, I loved this entertaining, compelling and thought-provoking book. I ripped through it over the space of a weekend and wished I had taken a bit more time to linger over each story, there’s just so much to reflect on.

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Author, Book review, Fiction, Gráinne Murphy, Ireland, Legend Press, literary fiction, Publisher, Reading Projects, Setting, TBR 2026 Challenge

‘Winter People’ by Gráinne Murphy

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Fiction – Kindle edition; Legend Press; 272 pages; 2022.

Gráinne Murphy’s third novel Winter People could well have been titled Damaged People, for its three protagonists are all scarred by past events.

Set on Ireland’s wild Atlantic coast — “A place for people whose life had gone wrong on them (location 1417)” — during a single grey winter, it charts the stories of Sis, Lydia and Peter, three strangers who live quiet, secluded lives by the sea.

The novel alternates between their voices in successive chapters, and it’s not until the latter part of the book that the connections between them become clearer.

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Author, Book review, Faber and Faber, Fiction, historical fiction, John Banville, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting, Venice

‘Venetian Vespers’ by John Banville

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Fiction – Kindle edition; Faber & Faber; 319 pages; 2025. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

It was evening when we arrived in Venice. Sure enough, on emerging from the railway station we found, as I had grimly anticipated, the gathering darkness draped with a dismal, freezing mist, in which the gas lamps along both stone banks of the canal glowed like the puffball-heads of dandelions (location 284).

Venetian Vespers, published last year, is one of John Banville’s standalone novels.

This particular story is historical fiction, set at the turn of the 20th century, and is set in a wintry Venice, which provides plenty of Gothic atmosphere. Indeed, the watery city lends a certain creepiness, giving Venetian Vespers the feel of a Victorian ghost story — or perhaps even a vampire tale.

Reading it brought to mind all kinds of other novels (and films) with a similar ‘feel’ including Dracula (albeit not set in Venice), Daphne du Maurier’s Don’t Look Back (who could forget the little girl in the read coat in the film adaptation?), Henry James’ The Aspern Papers and Wilkie Collins’ The Haunted Hotel, among others.

And yet this is entirely Banville’s own creation: deeply disturbing and slightly creepy but written in lush, wondrous language and, strangely for one of Banville’s literary fictions, which tend to have loose narratives, very neatly plotted and deftly tied up by the novel’s end. I found it a truly rewarding read and felt bereft when I came to the end.

Like many books in his oeuvre, there are familiar themes and recurring characters that dedicated fans will recognise — and which I very much enjoyed spotting! These include a focus on paradoxes, ghosts, twins and doppelgängers, and red-haired characters, usually called Freddie, who may or may not be the devil in disguise.

His complexion was delicately wan, somewhat the colour of buttermilk, his hair was a mass of reddish curls—they might have been a cluster of many small, tightly coiled copper springs—while his eyes were of a shade of sea-green at once intense and almost transparent. His eyebrows were sharply arched at their centre points, which gave him a drolly demonic aspect. […] His thin-lipped smile was a crimson crescent; it was the smile of a rogue, merry and masked and much too winningly plausible (location 727-738).

Narcissism, depravity and violent sexual encounters are also trademark Banville themes present here, so readers must enter at their own risk — you have been warned.

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Author, Book review, Fiction, Fleet, literary fiction, New York, Northern Ireland, Phil Harrison, Publisher, Reading Projects, Setting, TBR 2026 Challenge

‘The First Day’ by Phil Harrison

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Fiction – paperback; Fleet; 224 pages; 2018.

Don’t you love it when you pick up a book knowing next to nothing about it and then get completely swept up in the story that, before you know it, you have devoured half of it and don’t understand where the time has gone?

Phil Harrison’s debut novel, The First Day, gripped me from the start. Harrison is a Belfast screenwriter, and while this is very much literary fiction, it’s fast and urgent, making it a real page turner.

The story is steeped in a Protestant evangelical world of mission halls, scripture and tight-knit congregations, a setting that would normally turn me right off, but something about the distant, omnipresent perspective, the dry, elegant, almost old-fashioned prose style, and the story itself — an illicit affair between a married preacher and a young woman he meets on the street — kept me on tenterhooks throughout.

Oh, and did I mention the setting? It’s Belfast, circa 2012, when the Troubles are over and the city is still in flux. That in-between atmosphere lends the novel a certain mood, somewhere between gloom and radiance.

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