Shirley (Ronnie Scott, Hamish Hamilton)

Ronnie Scott’s second novel marks the beginning of a great remembering—in which artists reflect on the summer of 2019-20, a summer that we previously thought was going to be marked solely by bushfires. Shirley begins on new year’s eve. Our narrator has broken up with her sweet but hapless boyfriend, who wants to start experimenting with men. Her new downstairs neighbours know something of her celebrity mother’s scandalous past. Her family home is being sold. But in the way of real life, Scott so deftly focuses on the minutiae—making meals and replying to emails—that Shirley’s overarching questions seem almost peripheral to the protagonist’s compelling daily existence. In contrast to Scott’s debut, The Adversary, in which the characters are still trying to work out who they are, Shirley, in many ways, is a more mature work: it’s about learning to love people but rely on yourself. One of the welcome similarities between the two novels is the perceptive way Scott writes about the transformative nature of parties, when the tiniest spark with a new person can represent an entire expansive future—Shirley is bookended by twin festivals that will be familiar to many Victorians, the first at the beginning of summer and the last festival of 2020, before our worlds shrunk to four walls. For readers who enjoyed Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow, Shirley is an accomplished exploration of the claustrophobic relationship between mother and daughter.

Emily Westmoreland is a bookseller and the program director of Willy Lit Fest. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

Books+Publishing pre-publication reviews are supported by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund.

Category: Reviews