y separately published work icon The Saturday Paper newspaper issue  
Issue Details: First known date: 2020... 2-8 May 2020 of The Saturday Paper est. 2014 The Saturday Paper
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

Contents

* Contents derived from the , 2020 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.
Author Jess Hill’s Inner Power, Sarah Price , single work column

'Jess Hill’s incisive examination of domestic violence saw the journalist win the coveted Stella Prize last month. But the four-year project also took an immense personal toll. “All that advice about self-care … I didn’t do any of it. I almost pointedly didn’t do it. I thought: ‘You need to feel, even just one iota of the pain and suffering the people you are talking to are feeling.’ If I was feeling really relaxed and detached from it, I wouldn’t be able to write about it in the way I wanted to … I sort of had to inhabit it.”' (Introduction)

James Bradley, Ghost Species, Maria Takolander , single work review
— Review of Ghost Species James Bradley , 2020 single work novel ;

'While we are all currently distracted by the threat of Covid-19, the environmental crisis remains front and centre in James Bradley’s new novel, Ghost Species. Earth is “past the tipping point” and entering a phase called “the Melt”. Sea ice has vanished, even a northern summer lasts for six months, the ground is sinking as permafrost melts, forests are on fire and two-thirds of all wildlife has become extinct. The situation is becoming desperate. Enter a renegade, megalomaniacal tech billionaire, Davis Hucken – described by one character as “Doctor fucking Evil in a hoodie” – who believes the answer to the world’s problems lies in resurrecting extinct species. Having already revived mammoths and thylacines, he hires two young-gun Australian scientists, flies them into a luxurious facility in the Tasmanian wilderness and tasks them with reanimating Homo neanderthalensis.' (Introduction)

Ronnie Scott, The Adversary, Peter Craven , single work review
— Review of The Adversary Ronnie Scott , 2020 single work novel ;

'This is a rather extraordinary first novel. It is written in a style that ravishes the reader because it is constantly inventive and nervily inflected with a maximum suggestiveness. Ronnie Scott is superb at capturing the intimations and innuendos that any human heart – perhaps especially a not fully formed, post-adolescent one – is capable of. He is as good at evoking a world of young men who are a bit in love with, certainly not uninterested in, each other. But The Adversary is too talented a piece of debut fiction to be received with hands-off courtesy. The besetting problem of this putative novel that everyone should have a look at – to cotton on to a writer who has a wizardly quicksilver command of language – is that not enough happens in the book, and the author’s apparent belief that it does comes to seem like naivety.' (Introduction)

X