Final Draft - Great Conversations

Matthew Ryan Davies is the author of the young adult novel This Thing of Darkness, which was highly commended in the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards. Today I’ve brought in his debut adult novel Things We Bury.

Transporting us to the town of Pent, Matt offers up a portrait of life in a regional town through his central family, the Hardings.

It’s a sad fact that tragedy brings us together.

Dane, Jac, and Josh don’t get together as much as they should. Spread out across the country; Jac in Sydney, Josh all over the country as his TV work takes him and Dane, who never left Pent. It just never seems like there’s enough time.

Now the siblings must converge on their hometown after their father is in a car accident that leaves him in a coma.

It’s not just the accident. Each of the siblings has their own drama eating away at their peace. The reunion isn’t destined to go smoothly. Pent is no longer the same town they grew up in, but the ghosts of the past still rest there.

While their father remains in a coma, questions emerge that have them wondering if there is more to his accident that they first assumed. What had been happening in their dad’s life that could lead him to do something desperate?

Things We Bury blends suspense and mystery with character driven storytelling.

It’s instantly relatable because no matter how wonderful or fraught your own family relationships we have all of us had to negotiate family dynamics that seem to shift underneath us as we grow.

Josh’s return to Pent is wrapped in scandal. He left the town and changed his name to become someone in entertainment. Now having realized his dream he is dogged by an incident that has blown up on social media and left him hiding his face beneath a baseball cap.

Jac has returned with a surprise. She’s engaged, but doubting herself, and the person she’d most like to tell is lying in a coma. Jac was always their father’s favourite, which makes it harder to deal with the possibility he did this to himself.

Dean has had to step up in his dad’s absence and is questioning more than ever the path he chose. Can he really ignore his own dreams any longer to run their father’s company.

In each of the siblings stories and in the hovering questions around their father’s crash we have the specter of mental health that too often gets ignored, especially amongst men.

The title Things We Bury hints at secrets and these drive the narrative forward but also remind us of the difficulties we can face when we feel like we have to go it alone.

Through the shifting perspectives, as each chapter moves through a different character point of view, we see the siblings' struggles and also hear as they question what might have been on their father’s mind. Together they question how he was feeling and come up against the usual suspects of stoicism and a fear of seeming weak in front of others.

While the central mystery of why drives the siblings to try and uncover their father’s state of mind we are also offered parallel narratives of their own struggles. It’s an effective and expansive look at the fact that mental health is a concern we all share and that we deal with it best when we deal with it together.

Things We Bury is a page turner that offers us valuable insights. I went in looking at the mystery and found I was most gripped by the personal stories of each of the Harding family…7

Book Club is produced and presented by Andrew Pople

Want more great conversations with Australian authors?

Discover this and many more conversations on Final Draft every week from 2ser.

Get in touch with Andrew and Final Draft. We love to hear about what you’re reading!

Twitter - https://twitter.com/finaldraft2ser

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/finaldraft2ser/

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/finaldraft2ser/

The Final Draft Great Conversations podcast is all about books, writing and literary culture. We're dedicated to exploring Australian writing, looking into the issues that drive our storytelling to discover more from the books you love.

These are the stories that make us who we are.

In the next instalment of our irregular, ongoing series featuring incredible book podcasts Andrew is joined by Kate Mildenhall & Katherine Collette from The First Time.

The First Time is a podcast about publishing a book for the first time. Kate and Katherine describe The First Time as one part reality show, one part writers’ master class, featuring Australian writers and industry insiders, exploring the logistics of publishing a debut.

Final Draft is produced and presented by Andrew Pople

Want more great conversations with Australian authors?

Discover this and many more conversations on Final Draft every week from 2ser.

Get in touch with Andrew and Final Draft. We love to hear about what you’re reading!

Twitter - https://twitter.com/finaldraft2ser

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/finaldraft2ser/

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/finaldraft2ser/

Claire G. Coleman is a Noongar writer, from Western Australia, now based in Naarm. Claire’s debut novel is the award winning Terra Nullius as well as the author of The Old Lie and the acclaimed non-fiction book, Lies Damned Lies. Calire’s third novel, the one I want to talk about today is Enclave.

In the community of Safetown residents live a comfortable life, secure in the knowledge they are protected by the wall. Within that concrete edifice security patrol their streets and drones surveil the airway to ensure even the smallest transgression is met with swift consequences.

Christine has spent her entire life basking in the comfort her fathers wealth and Safetown’s security provide the daughter of an influential family. Sure her father is a distant figure, her mother a high functioning alcoholic, but they’ve just bought her an apartment and extended her a line of seeming unlimited credit.

Safetown was built to protect families like Christine and she should be happy with this safety. Except her best friend Jack is missing and Christine has begun to notice her servants, people who don’t look quite like her…

I think the potency of Enclave will hit readers in different ways.

On a first pass, Enclave seems to have taken the worst of the days headlines: Trump’s wall, fake islands in the South China Sea, almost sentient algorithms watching our online behaviors. Enclave has taken these ideas and extended them to their horrific conclusion. This can seem like a grossly distended version of reality and may strike some as Escher-like, while to others it’s a kind of dystopian porn.

Coleman sets us up in Safetown, allowing us to walk alongside Christine, but it is not with the sort of familiarity or sympathy we might expect from an anointed heroine/protagonist.

When we finally meet some of Christine’s house staff, and I mean really meet them as something other than background to Christine’s perpetual catastrophic personal life, we realize they are exclusively people of colour. Again this is not subtle, not eased on to the reader. Safetown is a kind of twisted white-supremacy fantasy and it bears an awful similarity to multi-million dollar neighborhoods across the country.

At this point it would be easy to see Enclave as commentary on the wrong turn society took too-long ago and Christine as an exemplar of our own generation coming to the realisation we are on the wrong side of history.

But this is Claire G Coleman and just as the reader starts to feel safe that they know where Christine’s story is heading she pulls back the proverbial curtain.

Fans of Claire’s first novel Terra Nullius will know her ability to stage an about face that changes everything you thought you know about the story.

Enclave is a dark tale of excess and the absolutely destructive path of privilege. It exposes racism by showing the absolute mundanity of the everyday actions that reinforce power. There were times as I read that I thought the book was moving too slow, not showing me anything I needed to see. But that was Claire lulling a reader like me, someone who’s lived close enough to privilege to not see it, into believing that this world could exist.

The horror she paints of a segregated society and rampant excess doesn’t look terribly different to a real housewives episode and therein lies the power.

Enclave is an absolute recommendation from me but beware. It’s a story that has your expectations in its sights and knows that we don’t change anything by maintaining the status quo…

Book Club is produced and presented by Andrew Pople

Want more great conversations with Australian authors?

Discover this and many more conversations on Final Draft every week from 2ser.

Get in touch with Andrew and Final Draft. We love to hear about what you’re reading!

Twitter - https://twitter.com/finaldraft2ser

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/finaldraft2ser/

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/finaldraft2ser/

The Final Draft Great Conversations podcast is all about books, writing and literary culture. We're dedicated to exploring Australian writing, looking into the issues that drive our storytelling to discover more from the books you love.

These are the stories that make us who we are.

Brendan Colley is a Hobert based writer. He won the University of Tasmania Prize for an Unpublished Work in 2019. Brendan is joining me today with his debut novel, The Signal Line.

Geo has returned to Tasmania following the death of his father to sell the family home. The triggers a reunion with his brother Wes who has followed in their father’s footsteps becoming a cop. Wes is not having any of Geo’s talk about selling, the house contains too many memories.

Geo needs the money to fund his auditions and fulfill his dream of joining a Symphony Orchestra. That dream is Geo’s true a north, a journey that has taken him far from Tasmania.

Geo’s arrival sets the stage for an untimely family conflict, one of supernatural proportions.

Join me as we discover Brendan Colley’s The Signal Line...

Final Draft is produced and presented by Andrew Pople

Want more great conversations with Australian authors?

Discover this and many more conversations on Final Draft every week from 2ser.

Get in touch with Andrew and Final Draft. We love to hear about what you’re reading!

Twitter - https://twitter.com/finaldraft2ser

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/finaldraft2ser/

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/finaldraft2ser/

Today I have brought in for you a book that I have been reading over the long weekend. Yassmin Abdel-Magied’s latest book it’s a collection of essays called Talking About a Revolution. Now before I tell you about the book I want to introduce Yassmin Abdel Magied…

In her own words Yassmin is a Sudanese Australian writer, recovering mechanical engineer and award-winning social advocate. Yassmin was born in Khartoum, Sudan and her parents moved the family to Australia when Yassmin was a baby. Yassmin is a mechanical engineer who left her dream of working with formula one and worked on oil and gas rigs.

Yassmin turned the story of her early life into the successful book Yassmin’s Story, and in some ways Talking About a Revolution is a successor of that book. Yassmin has also penned a middle grade series beginning with You Must Be Layla, which is being optioned for the screen.

Yassmin is a talented writer whose career and life experience have been broad. Which is all important to begin with because she has also been, in her words, the most hated Muslim in Australia.

Yassmin Abdel Magied is based in London these days after a social media post five years ago went viral for all the wrong reasons, leading to her receiving death threats and having to move house. Never mind the fact that she was raising an important social justice issue.

Talking About a Revolution collects essays written around that time as well as across the intervening years, as well as original essays for the collections. I won’t try to take in the length and breadth of the collection because it’s just not possible in our limited time together.

I will highlight the opening sortie from the book ‘Words Means Things’ where Yassmin takes on Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophy of Language to ask the question; if words gain meaning through usage then who gets to make the rules about the ways we use language. What follows is an exploration of the ways cultural usage can be approved or derided, rejected or appropriated.

The essay explores how media is able to sway, not just our take on the news but how we perceive events as right or wrong, worthy or distractions. We are asked about who controls the ideas that are broadcast out into the world and in turn who gets to decide what words mean what and in whose mouths we will accept the truth.

It’s a great discussion because in exploring ‘words’ it not only acknowledges the sometimes tenuous link between signifier and signified, it also reminds us that meaning is created through action as well as sounds. Silently taking the knee speaks volumes, as does silently walking past racism whether it be on the street or in the administration.

I’m still working my way through this collection and its array of ideas. I’m hoping to have Yassmin join me again on Final Draft so keep an ear out for that.

Book Club is produced and presented by Andrew Pople

Want more great conversations with Australian authors?

Discover this and many more conversations on Final Draft every week from 2ser.

Get in touch with Andrew and Final Draft. We love to hear about what you’re reading!

Twitter - https://twitter.com/finaldraft2ser

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/finaldraft2ser/

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/finaldraft2ser/

The Final Draft Great Conversations podcast is all about books, writing and literary culture. We're dedicated to exploring Australian writing, looking into the issues that drive our storytelling to discover more from the books you love.

These are the stories that make us who we are.

On today's show Andrew is joined by Jane Rawson with her new novel A History of Dreams

Adelaide in the 1930’s. Margaret, Esther and Phyllis are studying to be witches under the guidance of their friend Audrey. The friends have founded the Semaphore Supper Club with the dream of changing people’s minds and helping men and women dream of a more equal world.

As the group finish school and enter the so-called ‘real world’ they find that society doesn’t want female adventurers and university graduates. It would rather see women at home; married and pregnant.

The friends believe they can change their corner of the world, but they are not the only force that wants to manipulate the country's dreams. As a conservative force rises across Australia the people in power turn their attention to women’s place in the world. And these men have very dark dreams indeed about where women fit in.

Final Draft is produced and presented by Andrew Pople

Want more great conversations with Australian authors?

Discover this and many more conversations on Final Draft every week from 2ser.

Get in touch with Andrew and Final Draft. We love to hear about what you’re reading!

Twitter - https://twitter.com/finaldraft2ser

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/finaldraft2ser/

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/finaldraft2ser/

As we’re welcoming Danny to brekkie it got me feeling little nostalgic about Book Clubs involvement with the Breakfast Show. It’s a history that extends back about six years

Way back when Nic Healey was hosting he brought me along from our regular weekend book chats and Tuesday book club was born. Now like some sort of community radio time lord we’ve had multiple regenerations from Tess, to Alex and Willy bringing us to Danny.

So in honour of my nostalgia I’m going to look back in order to look forward.

One of my favourite Australian authors, Sulari Gentill has a new book out. Sulari is well known and loved for her Rowland Sinclair mysteries, set in 1930’s Australia. Her new novel however is a stand alone. It’s called The Woman in the Library and promises to be a real page turning whodunnit.

I have read it though… Sorry

But a few years back Sulari released another stand alone page turner that absolutely knocked me out with its clever ideas and mind bending twists. And so, until I can get you the latest Sulari Gentill, The Woman in the Library, I’m going to offer up my thoughts on her 2017 novel Crossing the Lines.

Madeleine D’Leon is a crime novelist searching for her next big mystery to write. Ned McGinnity is a literary enfant terrible waiting for his muse to strike.

Madeleine is intrigued by the voice in her head, could it be her next Detective? He’s a novelist, arrogant, the type who would only write so-called serious literature. Only he’s got himself embroiled in a murder, the sort he would never deem to write but one that he must solve in order to save his friend.

Ned doesn’t do genre, wouldn’t stoop to conquer until he stumbles on the almost too delicious temptation of writing a protagonist crime author becoming embroiled in a mystery.

Crossing the Lines unravels through entwined chapters of Madeleine and Ned writing each other’s stories and slowly sinking deeper into the pull of the mystery. Ned is beset by danger from every quarter as he races to solve the mystery of the editor and critic, a man who destroyed his first novel. Madeleine is vexed by the possibility that she may be losing her mind.

In Crossing the Lines, Sulari Gentill asks and tantalizingly hints at many a reader’s questions about the writer’s creative process. Madeleine and Ned are the voices in each others heads and both need each other to finish the story. They must give themselves over to the story and only through visiting this other life can they get their words onto the page.

Often when I speak to authors they tell of characters that occupy their own space in the world. Crossing the Lines challenges the reader with the horrifying possibility that this voice may take on a life of its own.

It’s a special thing to be able to delve into the writing process and I can only imagine what it must be to find yourself in the middle of it; becoming a vessel for the action to be transferred to the page. The reader may well find themselves asking is Sulari fully in control of her creation?!

Between Madeleine, Sulari and Ned we see not only a crossing of lines but a blurring as reality infuses itself with the narrative and the mystery becomes more intense for being written as we read it.

Crossing the lines is a smart, edgy psychological thriller. It’s also a literary romp perfect for people who love their reading a little bit meta.

Today’s book club was an encore jazzed up with some tidier writing and a bit more audio skill. And isn’t that the beauty of books; they invite, nay welcome revisiting, always offering something new…

Once again welcome Danny.

If you want to revisit more books clubs they are available on the Final Draft podcast

The Final Draft Great Conversations podcast is all about books, writing and literary culture. We're dedicated to exploring Australian writing, looking into the issues that drive our storytelling to discover more from the books you love.

These are the stories that make us who we are.

Today Andrew is joined by Ben McKenzie & Elizabeth Flux the hosts of Pratchat

https://pratchatpodcast.com/

Final Draft is produced and presented by Andrew Pople

Want more great conversations with Australian authors?

Discover this and many more conversations on Final Draft every week from 2ser.

Get in touch with Andrew and Final Draft. We love to hear about what you’re reading!

Twitter - https://twitter.com/finaldraft2ser

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/finaldraft2ser/

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/finaldraft2ser/

Brendan Colley is a Hobert based writer. In 2019 Brendan won the University of Tasmania Prize for an Unpublished Work. This came after decades of writing and has delivered us, the readers, The Signal Line, his first novel.

Geo has returned to Tasmania following the death of his father. Geo’s back to sell the family home, little realizing that his brother Wes is living there while his marriage breaks down.

Wes followed in their father’s footsteps becoming a cop. He’s more like their father than Geo is comfortable with and he’s not having any of Geo’s talk about selling.

Geo needs the money to fund his auditions and fulfill his dream of joining a Symphony Orchestra. Their whole family have musical talent but Geo is the one trying to realize his. Geo feels no attachment to Hobart and wants to be rid of the ghosts of his father and the way he treated him.

Geo’s arrival sets the stage for an ultimately family conflict… and then a ghost train appears followed closely by an eccentric ghost train hunter.

What is Geo to make of the increasingly eclectic cast of characters appearing in his life and why does he feel so at home with them all?

The Signal Line is about the things that get us out of bed in the morning and equally keep us up at night.

Geo and Wes are each other’s foils; Wes had the talent to make it, Geo the drive. Their father’s descent following a shooting has left them estranged, Geo feels like he was raised by a different man.

Without the money from the sale Geo can’t fund his dream of becoming a concert violist and lately he’s come to question that dream.

When ghost hunter Sten arrives in Hobart Geo sees in him someone who has unflinchingly followed an impossible dream; to board the ghost train. Can Geo find the same kind of certainty in his dream and is he ready to do what it takes to make it come true.

Let’s start by addressing the elephant (or ghost train) in the room. Yes this book has at its core a big whack of the supernatural including a spectral train driving through its core. The supernatural in The Signal Line is handled with a dab hand such that while it literally possesses a ouija board and a lamp it never tips the story into the ridiculous.

Instead we have a story that speaks to the reader about longing and purpose. Wes and Geo are perfectly, albeit violently poised in a tense equilibrium. Both have a restless energy that has prevented them finding peace and driven them back together.

While the brother’s relationship is at the heart of The Signal Line, the book contains an irrepressible cast of strange and wonderful characters.

And of course there's a freakin ghost train. I cannot overstate how exciting the presence of the train is and yet it fades (pun intended) as we lose ourselves in the book’s relationships. There’s absolutely something about a story that constantly surprises you with elements that you are coming.

The Signal Line is a definite candidate for fave read so far this year.

Book Club is produced and presented by Andrew Pople

Want more great conversations with Australian authors?

Discover this and many more conversations on Final Draft every week from 2ser.

Get in touch with Andrew and Final Draft. We love to hear about what you’re reading!

Twitter - https://twitter.com/finaldraft2ser

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/finaldraft2ser/

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/finaldraft2ser/

The Final Draft Great Conversations podcast is all about books, writing and literary culture. We're dedicated to exploring Australian writing, looking into the issues that drive our storytelling to discover more from the books you love.

These are the stories that make us who we are.

Steve Tolz is a novelist and screenwriter. His first novel, A Fraction of the Whole, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Guardian First Book Award. His second novel Quicksand won the 2017 Russell Prize for Humour.

Steve is joining me with his latest Here Goes Nothing

Angus Mooney is dead. He’s not that happy about the fact and is even less impressed about what comes next…

Waking in some sort of afterlife Angus finds things are a little strained. He’s not sure if this is heaven or hell and he never expected either. Wherever he is is busy. There’s an influx of guests and the powers that be are struggling to manage the crowd.

Moving between Angus’s new afterlife and his final days Here Goes Nothing takes the reader on a bizarre, acerbic, and laugh out loud funny journey through the big questions as asked by a guy who is pretty sure he won’t understand the answer.

Final Draft is produced and presented by Andrew Pople

Want more great conversations with Australian authors?

Discover this and many more conversations on Final Draft every week from 2ser.

Get in touch with Andrew and Final Draft. We love to hear about what you’re reading!

Twitter - https://twitter.com/finaldraft2ser

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/finaldraft2ser/

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/finaldraft2ser/