Wayne Holloway-Smith’s Rabbitbox is an extraordinary verse novel about a young boy and his mother living under the shadow of an abusive father.
It’s written with a delicacy of touch, so despite the brutal subject matter, the story is actually a tender one — about a mother’s love and a child’s need for solace.
The family lives at 24 Coalbrook Street, a house ruled by fear:
he sat THERE, it says, broiling in his bitter dad- chair and the mother, she sat THERE, the mind says, without daring a look back over her shoulder, the TV on the washing out the whole house holding its breath — (page3)
Welcome back to Recommended Reads, my weekly selection of three books I think deserve a place on your reading list.
This week’s picks continue the format introduced in the first edition: a standout new release, a backlist title worth rediscovering and a wildcard choice.
As always, each recommendation comes from a book I’ve previously read and reviewed, so every title has my personal endorsement. I’ve also included links to the original reviews if you’d like to explore any of the books in more detail.
Whether you’re looking for your next weekend read or simply adding to your TBR pile, I hope this week’s selections offer plenty of reading inspiration.
Last week the shortlists for the Western Australia Premier’s Book Awards was announced. The awards celebrate the best of WA writing across fiction, non-fiction, poetry, children’s, young adult and emerging writer categories, with winners to be announced in September and sharing in a prize pool of $120,000.
Having had the privilege of judging the awards in 2024, I know just how difficult the judges’ task will have been. Western Australia consistently produces an extraordinary depth and breadth of literature that punches well above its weight, making every shortlist a remarkable achievement in itself.
Interestingly, I have not read a single book on any of the lists (see below), although I have a few on my TBR and am familiar with most of the novels. I’m especially looking forward to exploring the fiction and emerging writers list over the weeks to come. Expect reviews in due course — hopefully before the awards are announced in September!
Note that if you live in Perth, the State Library is hosting a one-day literary festival — Stories from the West — on Saturday 8 August, giving you a chance to learn more about these books and their authors. More info here.
Four books into A Year with Iris Murdoch and I can happily report that The Unicorn, first published in 1963, is my favourite of her novels… so far.
It’s what I’d describe as a “melting pot” of a novel. It’s almost like Murdoch threw together Gothic mystery, horror, suspense, literary fiction, the big house Irish novel, a locked-room mystery and even a touch of fairy tale to see what would emerge.
At times it felt positively medieval in tone and outlook, though I presume it was largely set at the time in which it was written.
The story centres on Marian Taylor, a young school mistress who takes a high-paying job at Gaze Castle on a coast renowned for its “great cliffs of black sandstone” (page 11). She expects to be teaching children, but on arrival discovers she has actually been hired as a companion to a woman her own age.
Hannah Crean-Smith is the enigmatic mistress of the “castle” (essentially a grand country house, rather than the medieval fortress the name might suggest). Beautiful, wealthy and generous, she showers Marian with lavish gifts, yet she has no friends and never ventures beyond the boundaries of the estate.
A small coterie of people — all employed by Hannah — orbit around her, treating her with an almost reverential care, although the reasons for this are never fully explained.
Welcome to the first edition of Recommended Reads, a weekly feature highlighting three books I think deserve a place on your reading list. Each is a book I’ve previously read and reviewed, so every recommendation comes with my personal endorsement.
I’m hoping this will be a fun and useful way to discover your next great read — or simply add another tempting title to your TBR pile. I’ll be publishing Recommended Reads every Wednesday, giving you plenty of time to track down a copy before the weekend’s reading begins.
Every week, I’ll recommend:
New Release: a book published within the past two years, one that’s usually still available on bookshop shelves.
Backlist: an older title that’s stood the test of time and is well worth rediscovering.
Wildcard: anything goes! It might be a forgotten classic, a remarkable memoir, a gripping non-fiction story or simply a book I can’t stop thinking about.
For each book, I’ll share a brief introduction and point you towards the original review if you’d like to read more.
According to the Oxford Dictionary, an elegy is “a piece of writing, drama, art, etc., imbued with a sense of mourning or melancholy affection for something”.
That’s a pretty apt description for Madeleine Watt’s second novel, Elegy Southwest, which reads like a beautiful and poignant love letter to a lost partner.
In the first years after we were married, I often experienced moments I thought of as paroxysms of love. These were moments when I was so happy, so filled to the brim with love for you, that I felt the emotion hit me wavelike, and absolute (page 63).
The story follows a young New York-based couple, Eloise and Lewis, on a road trip through the American southwest in 2018. It’s written in the second person, with Eloise addressing her partner directly, after many years have passed.
The story is essentially her looking back on their relationship, trying to puzzle out where the cracks first appeared, because although we, the reader, can figure out that something has happened, we don’t know what it is or when it occurred, and part of the experience of reading this novel is putting together the pieces in a way not dissimilar to Eloise.
Fiction – Kindle edition; Penguin Modern Classics; 112 pages; 2017. Translated from the Italian by Jamie McKendrick.
Behind the Door is the fourth book (out of six – see ** below) in Giorgio Bassani’s Romanzo di Ferrara (The Novel of Ferrara) cycle, which I appear to be reading completely out of order. Fortunately, that doesn’t seem to matter.
Like both The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (my review) and The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles (my review), this works perfectly well as a standalone novel, though I love how Bassani keeps returning to the same city, revisiting its people and history from different angles and writing about it with such love and affection.
Bassani was born into a prosperous Jewish family in Ferrara in 1916, and all six novels are set there.
This one takes place between October 1929 and June 1930 and follows an unnamed Jewish schoolboy through his first year at upper secondary school, a period he later recalls as one of the darkest of his life. Looking back as an adult, he remarks that although he had “been unhappy many times” (page 1), few periods had been “blacker” than those months.
American chef Anthony Bourdain (1956-2018) became a household name when his non-fiction book Kitchen Confidential was first published in 2000.
Many of you reading this review will already be familiar with it, along with the TV shows that followed — A Cook’s Tour, Parts Unknown and others — which helped propel Bourdain to a worldwide cult following.
I was not one of those followers.
There’s no reason for this oversight. In fact, I can’t quite explain why I knew so little about him or had any interest in his career. I love food, I love cooking, I love travel, the very things Bourdain specialised in. It would seem I’d be a good fit.
Despite not knowing much about his life, I was acutely aware of his death. It was 2018 and I was working in a hospitality start-up. A young colleague who idealised Bourdain (and loads of other celebrity chefs) turned up to work in tears, devastated by news of his suicide.
But even that did not make me want to explore his work.
Denis Johnson’s novella Train Dreams is a perfect little nugget of a book.
In just 120 pages, it tells the story of a man living on the American frontier from the late nineteenth century through to the 1960s.
First published in 2011, it is essentially a Bildungsroman compressed into novella form, where years can pass in the space of a few pages.
The story follows Robert Grainier from childhood into old age. His origins are mysterious, even to himself. He does not know who his parents were or what became of them. He may have been French Canadian; he may have come from Utah.
His eldest cousin, a girl, said he’d come from northeast Canada and had spoken only French when they’d first seen him, and they’d had to whip the French out of him to get room for the English tongue. The other two cousins, both boys, said he was a Mormon from Utah (page 26).
All Grainier knows is that he arrived in Idaho on a train when he was six or seven years old and was raised by his Uncle Robert Grainier, the First, alongside his three cousins. His rootlessness marks him as a loner from the outset.
I had ambitious plans to read all the books on the Miles Franklin longlist, but with the shortlist announcement only a week or so away, that’s all it’s going to be — a plan.
Anyway, first cab off the rank is this novella about dementia with the apt title You Must Remember This.
Sean Wilson says the story was inspired by his grandmother, who showed similar symptoms to his protagonist, Grace.
In the book, Grace is an elderly widow, who lives alone and is having trouble with her memory. She often thinks that events that happened years ago happened only yesterday. She often forgets that her husband, Howard, is dead, and sometimes forgets her daughter, Liz, who is constantly checking in with her.
The things she remembers seem to find her more than she finds them. They come to her in pieces, out of order, like pages cut from a book and scattered in the wind (page 21).
And then there’s her wandering, out into the road, at night, in her bathrobe… and her subsequent placement in a care facility.
Reading Matters 
