Book Reviews for Brothers and Sisters by Charlotte Wood

It’s easy for an anthology to be lost among the highlights of Christmas season books, but this collection of stories, Brothers and Sisters, by some wellknown and some fresh Australian voices, deserves a prominent place. It’s a measure of the strength of the form, and of the calibre of contemporary Australian writers using it, that the writing is keen, sharp and challenging. Of course, we all relate as readers to the notion of siblings, even those ‘only children’ (like the first-person narrator in Ashley Hay’s sensitive ‘The Singular Animal: On Being and Having’). Nevertheless, it’s Wood’s strength as an anthologist to draw together a splendidly diverse, but not uneven, collection of stories. Noone would be surprised by the crisp brilliance of Robert Drewe’s ‘The Paleface and the Panther’ or the sheer intensity of Christos Tsiolkas’ ‘The Disco at the End of Communism’ or Charlotte Wood’s own tender, raw exploration of loneliness and connection between sisters, ‘The Cricket Palace’. And there are some great finds among the new voices. The standouts for me in this collection were Nam Le’s ‘The Yarra’ (it’s breathtaking in its power and pacing) and Cate Kennedy’s ‘Beads and Shell and Teeth’. It’s a beautiful, moving, insightful and original story, worth the price of this terrific collection on its own.

This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine (November 2009, Vol 89, No. 4) is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2009, Thorpe-Bowker.