Hannah Kent laughs nervously when asked if she introduces herself as a “writer” now. She radiates an air of shocked gratitude that is at odds with her status as Australia’s most recent literary prodigy. Lip caught up with Kent to find out more about the path she had travelled, and what it means to be…
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I admit that I know very little about New Zealand. But until I read the Griffith Review’s 43rd, New Zealand-themed edition, (Pacific Highways, edited by Julianne Schultz and Lloyd Jones), I didn’t realise how much I didn’t know. I spent four days there once as a short stopover on my way to the US, but…
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The man underworld dwellers call Hades has a knack for making things disappear beneath the decomposing heaps of his junkyard. But when two dying orphans are delivered to him in the dead of night, he takes pity and raises them as his own. Twenty years later, there is a killer on the loose in…
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Christie Thompson’s debut novel relates contemporary Australian adolescence with brutal honesty. As her characters come of age in the grimy outer suburbs of Canberra in 2009, they manifest all the ennui and self-sabotage of the teen years. 17-year-old Jez is bored and disaffected. Her days in a suburb on the fringes of the national capital…
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In its opening sentence—‘My name is Constance Schuyler Klein’—and its title, Patrick McGrath’s Constance declares itself a narrative concerned with identity, although an identity that is anything but stable. Constance is a young woman living in Manhattan and working as an editor in the 1960s. She has recently married an English professor several years her…
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It was a young art teacher. Or was it a student teacher in geography class? It could have been his biceps half-hidden by navy t-shirt sleeves, or those tight skirts she paraded around in (did she even wear underwear?), or maybe it was something about his stubble that made you imagine it grazing across your…
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You could be forgiven for thinking The Asylum, the latest novel by Australian author John Harwood, was written during the height of the nineteenth century sensation novel. Harwood’s work effortlessly imitates this style of writing with its melodramatic Gothic tropes – stolen identities, madness, forbidden lust and family secrets – though the novel’s cleverness occasionally…
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Allyse Near’s Fairytales for Wilde Girls is a refreshingly original debut. Though clearly inspired by a range of fairytales, ghost stories, literary works and poems, Near uses her affection for these genres to develop an entirely new fantasy world, one where she can explore the pitfalls of young adulthood. The novel follows Isola Wilde, a…
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Apparently we’re at the cusp of the fourth wave of feminism, with formidable ladies like Amanda Palmer and Malala Yousafzai at the battle front. It’s all a bit tiring, really—to think that after an ocean of feminist thought, we have not yet toppled the old-age patriarchal values which restrict equality. Unfortunately, it’s true: in many…
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All books have an aim. Sometimes the author clearly states the aim, sometimes they gradually find it. Regardless, the reader goes on a journey through the realisation of that aim. Whether it be to explore small town life through a love story or to solve a murder mystery where the detective holds an enticing secret,…
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Several F-words spring to mind to describe the writers anthologised in Destroying the Joint. Fabulous. Fiery. Funny. Feisty. Fierce. And, perhaps most importantly: Feminist. The pieces contained in this book originated as impassioned responses to Alan Jones’ awful and offensive remark in August 2012 that ‘women are destroying the joint’. Notable Australian women were asked…
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I think I’ve mentioned before that crime fiction is almost a guilty pleasure for me – I read a ton of it in high school, and still pick it up when I don’t want to have to think too hard about the plot or the characterisation. I do realise that the appeal of crime fiction…
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I spent the night before my first day of teaching in an excited loop of hushed masturbation on my side of the mattress, never falling asleep. Quite an opening, right? This is how Alissa Nutting’s Tampa begins, plunging the reader straight into the highly sexualised interior monologue of Celeste, a twenty-six year old school teacher….
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Reading Lottie Moggach’s debut novel Kiss Me First is like experiencing an extended claustrophobic fever-dream. From the perspective of an intense and unreliable narrator, this slow-burning novel explores obsession, connection, loneliness and identity, all through the mode of online communication. Leila is an intelligent, antisocial and reclusive young woman who lacks empathy or self-awareness. Following…
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