2ser Book Club - Mike McLeish's The Drop Off

Fiona Harris and Mike McLeish are both what you might call a triple threat; they act, they write and they direct. Fiona and Mike have also collaborated to write a novel The Drop Off, based on their successful web series of the same name.

Every morning at Baytree Primary Lizzie, Megan and Sam convene over coffee as their kids trundle off to class. They’re a self contained trio; Lizzie a midwife, Megan a former model turned designer and Sam an ex-chef. Enthusiastic parents in activewear need not apply, these three have their morning friendship and that’s enough for them.

But then tragedy strikes the school as the beloved lollipop man dies. And somehow Megan has been roped into producing the end of year play?!

Madeleine Watts is a writer whose work has appeared in the White Review and the LIfted Brow. Her novella Afraid of Waking It won the Griffith Review novella prize.

In The Inland Sea, our narrator has left the comfort of university with barely a vague plan for what comes next. On the advice of a friend she falls into a job as an emergency call centre operator. There she listens day in and day out as disasters befall callers around the country. Jotting down these moments in her notepad she becomes fascinated with the kind’s of tragedies filling her world.

I’m sure many of us have been through exactly this; you know that life is supposed to begin but where’s the start button, and what’s the first step?!

The Emergency call centre offers constant reminders of disaster; floods ravage northern Queensland while fires ring Sydney. Our narrator tries to understand the impact of all this while following the script and transferring the call; police, fire, ambulance.

Against all this tragedy our narrator is heedless to her own safety. Emotional and physical well being are hazardous and fate is there to be tempted.

The Inland Sea was written about Sydney in 2013 around the time Madeleine Watts left for New York, but it’s themes resonate with our present as we try to come to grips with a world seemingly on the brink.

Madeleine’s unnamed narrator is a careful and lyrical chronicler but we are constantly left to wonder at her detachment from the events around her. There is so much feeling and so much anticipation but we know that the stories being told are not reliable.

And it is storytelling that is at the heart of The Inland Sea. The narrator’s story, our story of Australia and the trajectory it is taking us towards destruction are habits we need to break. The Inland Sea is a story telling us that our stories are inadequate; that we need to change the stories we are telling and craft new ones that might offer some semblance of hope.

Chris Flynn is the author of three novels including The Glass Kingdom and A Tiger in Eden. His latest is Mammoth and it is an absolute treat. Basically it’s a road trip across time that challenges our human centric world and introduces the best fossilised narrator I’ve ever met…

I’m rambling so let me introduce to you Mamut, a 13,000 year old Mammoth skeleton.

In an auction house in New York the fossils of a Mammoth and a Tyrannosaurus Bataar while away the hours before their sale by recounting tales of their past. The strange pair are joined by a prehistoric penguin, the pharaoh Hatshepsut and a pterodactyl and the group take us on a journey into our modern world by way of the destruction us bipeds have caused to create it...

Mamut tells us his story at the end of the ice age. Taking up the tale when he is unearthed by a group of nineteenth century explorers. As his skeleton garners attention he is shuttled around the world and displayed, stolen and bartered through key moments in history.

Mammoth is a rollicking tour across millenia taking the reader from the deep time of prehistory right up to the 21st century, where these artifacts of times past seem to exist only as curiosities for collectors.

Within the auction house the fossils discuss their histories and through their eyes we see the arrival of bipeds who slowly come to overrun the landscape. The fossils at first deride the flimsy upright hominids only to reflect that they should have seen the destruction they would cause.

Chris Flynn has imbued each of his fossil narrators with a unique voice. For example Paleo the penguin has spent much of his history post exhumation over the bar in a Boston Tavern and has the sort of sardonic combative attitude you might expect from a reluctant barfly.

Tyrannosaurus Bataar came back in the nineties and sounds like a skater boy and of course Mamut with his venerable nineteenth century unearthing is a ponderous patrician gentleman.

Flynn brings each of these unique fossils to life and in doing so casts a shrewd eye on our world. We are not the saviours of the planet, nor the apex predators we might hope in the eyes of a millenia old former apex predator. And we may not even be the end all; as the fossils see deep time and know they’ll be bones long after we’ve gone.

Mammoth defies the conventions of the novel and in doing so gives us the perfect existential read for our current moment.

Stuck inside? No worries. Get yourself a copy of Mammoth and traverse time and space and get a little insight on our now in the bargain.

Vivian Pham is a debut novelist and her pathway to publication is quite extraordinary. Vivian is at uni now but the writing of the Coconut Children began when she was a high school student. Her first draft developed out of a novella she wrote as part of a program at The Story Factory. Now only a few years later these beginnings have seen The Coconut Children published and drawing international praise.

The Coconut Children takes us to Cabramatta in the late nineties. Vince has just returned to the streets of his youth. He’s not yet old, but has become legendary after a two year stint in juvenile detention.

Vince’s mates immediately enfold him in their protective care and they take to running rampant through the suburb and making up for lost time. School is still on the cards, if for nothing more than a stage to cause havoc.

As the suburb and the schools struggle to contain Vince’s vitality, Sonny can only watch on from afar.

Sonny and Vince were childhood friends. But now Sonny is grappling with her own growing maturity and cannot fathom that the almost mythological figure of Vince might even notice her as she watches from the window next door…

In Sonny and Vince, Vivian has crafted two polarised images of young first generation Vietnamese children, struggling to understand themselves and their identity against that of their parents who sacrificed so much to begin life again in Australia. The novel’s title comes from a story Sonny’s father relates about how coconuts overhang bodies of water so that when they drop they will be carried to new climes to begin life anew. It’s a bittersweet story that feels as much self fulfilling wish as truth.

I’m not going to have time to describe everything that enthralled me in the Coconut Children. I do want to draw attention to Vivian’s incredible evocations of masculinity and the ways she explores what it means to be a man.

Vince is not simply a thug or a criminal but he has been boxed into this role. Coming from a violent family situation he has little else to turn to when he finds that he is now viewed as a man.

Somehow though Vivian opens up a range of subtle and varied male relationships and relationships between men and women, that show the many ways of being available to Vince. The most powerful of these is between Vince and Sonny and well… well it’s not my job to give the whole story away now is it?

That is the Coconut Children and it is an incredible debut from Vivian Pham that I can thoroughly recommend for everyone's quarantine reading list.

Mirandi Riwoe is the award winning author of the Fish Girl, which took out Seizure’s Vive la Novella award as well as a short listing for the Stella Prize. Mirandi also writes Victorian era detective fiction under a nom de plume and she has a new novel out called Stone Sky Gold Mountain.

Now novels come to us in strange ways and sometimes a novel just finds its time. There is so much about Stone Sky Gold Mountain to discover and I think the humanity and the fact that it is a novel about outsiders and the way we, as a nation, have treated people outside the mainstream has some things for our current time.

Stone Sky Gold Mountain transports the reader to the Queensland gold fields of the mid nineteenth century. Siblings Ying and Lai Yue have left their homes in China and travelled to Australia to seek enough money to restore their family.

Ying must disguise herself, passing as a boy, lest her gender see her taken advantage of and brutalised. As a male she discovers freedoms but also sees the restrictions she lives under.

When the pair realise they cannot survive on mere gold dust they move to Maytown; the settlement established to furnish the goldfields.

In Maytown, Meriam and Sophie live on the outskirts. Meriam longs for her old life and bristles at the town’s treatment of her as the maid of a sex worker.

Stone Sky Gold Mountain is separated from us by a century and a half but it is immediately apparent that our present has not diverged so far. Ying and Lai Yue’s story highlights a long history of racism against Asian and specifically Chinese Australians that we still see rising up indiscrimatorily in response to Covid 19. It’s a racist response that seems all the more strange when we consider that Stone Sky shows us English and Chinese migration to Australia is not so separate in time and a mere speck in the thousands of years of history of the traditional owners of this land.

The book is lyrical and heartbreaking. As we move through terrain that is beautiful and beautifully wrought and see it through the eyes of those who must endure it as their lives are an endurance at the hands of the men who control so much of daily existence.

As I said books find you at strange times. Stone Sky Gold Mountain has arrived at a time when we cannot go outside to transport us in time and space and show us a beauty and land that has been marked with brutality. So at a time when we are seeing the best and worst of people, Stone Sky shows us something of both and perhaps offers us a chance to be better.

Alison Evans is the award winning author of Ida and Highway Bodies. They are a spectacular author of Australian YA and with so many high schoolers being home schooled at the moment, you could do worse than grabbing a copy of Alison’s catalogue. Especially the brilliant Euphoria Kids

The story centres on Iris and Babs. They both go to the same school but they don’t know each other. In fact nobody really notices Babs, not since a witch cursed her and she periodically becomes invisible.

Iris has friends but not the human kind. Iris grew from a seed in the garden and has always had more kinship with the fairies and dryads that live in the bush. Until one day when Babs appears to Iris on the Bus.

As their friendship blossoms they meet the boy. The boy is new at school and is on a journey discovering who he is; including his name.

With their friendship connecting them to the magic around them, Iris, Babs and the boy start to experience true companionship and happiness. That is until the fairies warn Iris that the witch who cursed Babs has returned to the forest...

Euphoria Kids explores what it means to be young and queer and finding out about yourself. It delves into the loneliness of not being understood, but also the joys of meeting your people. It’s a wonderful story that blends the supernatural with the everyday and shows what real magic can look like in the world.

It’s a pretty strange and scary time right now and I don’t mind saying that having a little magic injected into my world is often just what I need. It’s also a book that reminds us how powerful connection is. I don’t think many people could watch Iris, Babs and the boy build their friendship without wanting to look up an old mate and see what they're up to...

Nate's life is school, the youth center, home, rinse and repeat. He's just trying to get by and keep his head down. At home he shares a room with his twin three year old brothers, because his dad Dec needs Nate’s room for his horticultural business. Nate’s step mum Nance is barely older than Nate and she’s been systematically cut off from the world through Dec’s control and refusal to parent in any way.

School feels like a halfway home on the journey to adulthood. A situation not helped by Nate’s mysteriously burnt out English teacher who seems determined to inspire the kids through the power of words. To cap it all Nate’s just discovered the youth center is facing closure and there’s little the kids who need it most can do.

Nate’s got plenty of ideas; his notebooks are full of writing, but Nate has no power and hence no hope. The one day someone sprays the youth center wall with poetry stolen from Nate’s journal and he starts to realise he might have something to contribute after all.

On a hot, humid, Australian summer day a van waits by an isolated road as an eight year girl disembarks from her school bus. As the bus disappears the van accelerates, its occupants dragging the girl inside and drugging her into unconsciousness. The young girl is being taken to the clearing and she is to be the eleventh of the twelve; children of the mother.

Freya lives in seclusion defiant in her freedom and independence but also captive to her secrets. When the news reports a kidnapped child her mind immediately races to her son and she fears for his safety.

Hetty and Ness have been friends since childhood and now they are in Toronto discovering something of life and their selves. The two friends are in Toronto to escape, to adventure, and discover more about themselves. The sort of trip that has become an essential part of the growing up process.

Ness idealizes Hetty. She sees her friend as effortlessly wonderful in all the ways Ness feels she is not. But we aren't always what we present to the world and as Ness learns more about herself what will become of her love for Hetty?

Jake Hunter has only just arrived in the Tasmanian town on Dunton. He’s sought out the remote Tasmanian town to escape unnamed troubles back in Melbourne, but is struggling to adjust, especially because no one has connected the electricity in his tiny police issue accommodation.

Early one morning Jake is called in to the search for a boy, missing from the local campgrounds. The boy is quickly found, cold and terrified in a decrepit vineyard, reporting a monster that had pursued him. When Jake investigates he discovers the body of an aged woman. She’s quickly identified as the retired headmistress of a nearby school for troubled girls. The first thing Jake notices is each of her finger nails have been removed; gruesome enough, until the postmortem reveals further horrors…