The Bedside Bookstack – April 2025

Dusk by Robbie Arnott, Picador, 2024

Ah Robbie! He just gets better and better. I read and loved his 3^rd book Limberlost backin Feb and was lucky to have a fast follow up with Dusk. There’s still a mythic poetry to his words and his natural landscapes are a place of beauty and treachery. His characters, especially in this, are quiet. They don’t say a lot and they think before they do. As a reader, it created space, a wonderful silence in the white noise of daily life. What a gift!

Floyd and Iris Renshaw have a reputation gifted to them by their convict parents. Life has always been a struggle but they have each other. They decide to hunt a puma with a high bounty attached to it and are changed by both the natural world and the humans in it.

The Season by Helen Garner, Text, 2024

In her own words, Helen Garner describes her intention for this book, “Really I’m trying to write about footy and my grandson and me. About boys at dusk. A little life-hymn. A poem. A record of a season we are spending together before he turns into a man and I die.”

And it’s Helen Garner, so that’s what we get, quotidian moments turned poignant in her hands. How many people can liken the photo of an AFL mark to “twisting supplicants in a Blake print”?

My mum is dying. My children only ever had her as a grandparent and soon she’ll be gone, so there was a lot about the close grandparent/grandchild relationship that was hard to read for me here.

Everyone says it’s a book about much more than AFL (Australian Rules Football) which is true but I also think you need to have at least a slight interest in the game to get you to the end.

Elizabeth is Missing by Emma Healey, Penguin, 2014

This is such a clever premise. A narrator with Alzhemier’s disease tries to solve two mysteries. In current time, her good friend Elizabeth has gone missing. She is also trying to uncover what happened to her sister Sukey, who disappeared more than fifty years ago.

Anyone who is already living the looping memories and repetition with a loved one may want to do a bit of skim reading. I did. But the need to find out what happened kept me there until the end.

Orchid & the Wasp by Caoilinn Hughes, Oneworld, 2018

Holy moly! Caoilinn Hughes is also a poet and this is clear in the opening pages. The rich intensity of language is a total explosion. I could hardly breathe for the first pages, pulled into the vortex of her words.

I think it would be impossible to keep up that intensity for 340 pages. I certainly wavered as a reader. Sometimes I didn’t really know what was going on and I was too tired to go back and nut it out but don’t let that put you off. Read it just for what she can do with her words.

life’s not a paragraph by Rosemary Lewis, Catchfire Press, 2023

I talked to Rosemary about this memoir for the April Books at the Bowlo. It’s about the 15 years she lived in Hobart and ran a B&B, That’s obviously a simplification. There’s love and loss, new friendships and directions. It’s a story for now, with an older woman and younger man and a total re-invention of her life at 52 but this all happened in the eighties and she’s nearly 95, so it was especially interesting to hear her take on events with even more life experience behind her. The general gist is do it all – live life and just go for it!

First Name Second Name, Steve MinOn, UQP, 2025

Stephen Bolin has just died. His last request was that his sisters take him back to where he was born in far-northern Queensland. When they don’t, he makes the journey himself as jiangshi, a type of ghost-vampire. We meet his family through the generations from a Chinese gold-panner to Scottish ten-pound-Poms.

I’m not finished this one yet but my current realist leaning has a preference for the fascinating stories from his family’s past over the current wanderings of his undead body.

If you enjoyed reading this and want to hear about the next bookstack, subscribe to my bi-monthly newsletter below.