My short story ‘Skylights’, appears in the just-released Griffith REVIEW 30, the annual fiction edition. You can read the first page or so online here (and my story ‘Snapshots’, published in an earlier Griffith REVIEW, is available in full here). ‘Skylights’ stands up as a short story (I hope) but it is also the only existing chapter of what will (I hope) become a novel about war crimes trials and culpability.

This fiction edition of Griffith REVIEW has an Asia-Pacific focus. I’ve only picked around it so far, finding terrific fiction by Nick Earls and Jane Camens, and Kate Holden’s tense and taut memoir about Shanghai. Julianne Schultz’s introduction is worth a read too. She muses on the recent Australian federal election, and in particular in the leaders’ revelations about their favourite books: Cloudstreet for Gillard and The Lord of the Rings for Abbott.  I agree with Schultz when she says, ‘It is a shame that by the choice of their favourite books, our political leaders seem to be saying that reading fiction is something done as a young person, or simply for entertainment.’ Apart from that, the actual choices are ho-hum. Re Cloudstreet: lots of people would agree with Gillard, I suppose, and it’s a book I love, and it’s somehow apt that ‘our Julia’ should laud ‘our Tim’, but it’s a such a worthy and such a safe choice, almost as if a committee formed and sat around debating how she should answer the question. Re Lord of the Rings: noise and colour and ridiculous amounts of violence, ponderous tangents, a weird spirit world and simplified moral codes.

Schultz has some penetrating things to say about making sense of complex events through storytelling as well as the limitations of journalism to join the dots of history. You can read her full introduction here.