The Monthly

1 month ago | themonthly.com.au | Jo Chandler |George Megalogenis |Madison Griffiths |Richard Denniss

It’s 4.30am when two grey-haired women pick their way by torchlight across the logging coupe in New South Wales’s Bulga State Forest. They plant a pair of green plastic chairs in the churned earth under a monster tree-harvester. They get some help bolting onto the machine – chunky D-locks looped around their necks, the weight nestled on rolls of towelling. Then it’s just the two of them. Dawn dials up the birdsong and illuminates a wash of mist rolling through the trees they have come to save.

1 month ago | themonthly.com.au | Helen Elliott |George Megalogenis |Jo Chandler |Madison Griffiths

The Irish author returns to the setting of his acclaimed novel ‘This Is Happiness’, for an exalted mystery of a baby abandoned at Christmas Here is the opening line of Niall Williams’ new novel: “This is what happened in Faha over the Christmas of 1962, in what became known in the parish as the time of the child.” The narration – measured, intimate – continues, talking of miracles, of Faha itself – probably, ah no, certainly the last place in all of Ireland where anything happens.

1 month ago | themonthly.com.au | Simon Webster |George Megalogenis |Jo Chandler |Madison Griffiths

Coming back to Perth after a decent stint away, one can feel a bit like Rip Van Winkle waking from his 20-year snooze to find his village near unrecognisable, the American Revolution having come and gone. The changes were perhaps not so drastic at my in-laws’ place – there were now purple creepers in the garden beds, and a new armchair in the living room – but things were still different, slightly askew. And it wasn’t just decorative. Open a window and you’d feel it: change was in the air.

1 month ago | themonthly.com.au | Madison Griffiths |George Megalogenis |Jo Chandler |Richard Denniss

In a Quiet cul-de-sac in Wodonga, on the border of Victoria and New South Wales, Serena Brejcha retrieves a two-metre-long banner from its cardboard sheath. Quietly, she unfurls it. It is barely January, and her house is still decorated with many a Christmas ornament. Given the banner’s scale, she and her husband clasp a hold of each end so I am able to read its provocation.

1 month ago | themonthly.com.au | Alex Miller |George Megalogenis |Jo Chandler |Madison Griffiths

New short fiction about a life changed by an incident on a remote property outside Sydney, where the city’s youth come to drink and shoot guns When I heard the first shot I was alone in the cottage that afternoon, sitting at the kitchen table answering a friend’s letter. I stopped writing and looked up. The shot was followed by several more in quick succession. One or two sounded to me to be rifle fire, the snap of the echoes going back and forth across this narrow neck of the valley.