Lola in the Mirror by Trent Dalton, HarperCollins
This is journalist Trent Dalton’s third novel and it deals with hopes and dreams in the most terrifying places. Lola is 17 and living in an orange 1987 Toyota HiAce van on a scrap yard by the Brisbane River. When Lola was a baby, Erica plunged a knife into the neck of “the monster who pretends to love them” and mother and child have been running ever since. Lola dreams of being an artist and imagines her works exhibiting at the Met in New York, but her daily reality is elbow deep in a dangerous underground drug world. Can she escape? Love and fate dance together with a dash of Dalton magic.
Prima Facie by Suzie Miller, Picador
Prima Facie is the one-woman play which premiered in Sydney in 2019 and took the world by storm. This is Miller’s novel based on her towering piece of theatre and while it doesn’t sizzle with the same frisson that only live performance can deliver, it’s just as thought-provoking. Tessa is a young, charismatic, brilliant defence barrister who relishes the cut and thrust of cross-examination in court. Then the tables turn with a terrible irony. Tessa is raped by a colleague and like so many women in this far too familiar situation, must decide whether to confront her abuser and testify or let him get away with it. She knows the system
