Welcome to the inaugural – and occasional – column in which ArtsHub rounds up a few recent book and literary happenings in bite-size morsels because, as 80s slacker hero Ferris Bueller once put it, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”
Alas, our only Australian contender for this year’s Booker Prize – Charlotte Wood, who made it through to the shortlist nonetheless with Stone Yard Devotional – did not end up taking home the main award. She was pipped at the post by in a surprise win by Samantha Harvey, with Orbital. Described as a “love letter to earth”, Orbital follows the trajectory of six astronauts (from Japan, Russia, the US, the UK and Italy) aboard a space station. Harvey’s book was praised by the judges as being a “beautiful, miraculous novel”. She managed to beat the favourite, Percival Everett’s James, a reimagining of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in which, this time, Huck is merely a supporting character to Jim, the novel’s black, enslaved runaway.
