Tiddas (Anita Heiss, Simon & Schuster)

Prolific author and academic Anita Heiss has created a fascinating subgenre of popular women’s fiction, dubbed ‘choc-lit’, as a way of celebrating Australia’s Indigenous culture and promoting it to a wider audience. Her latest novel Tiddas (an Aboriginal word for sisters) celebrates the almost familial bond between best friends as it follows the lives and loves of five middle-aged women who meet for a book club in Brisbane. With Tiddas, Heiss makes small attempts to subvert the genre. Not everyone lives happily ever after and the ending is somewhat incomplete, possibly hinting at a follow-up. The narrative is not as tight as it could be, as Heiss flits between each tidda’s drama, making it hard to properly engage with each of the characters. Her previous ‘Manhattan/Paris Dreaming’ books were a lot punchier, managing to blend the personal and the political through a more singular story arc. The foregrounding of identity politics and female friendship elevates Tiddas above the more sex-and-shopping centric women’s novels on the market. There’s still plenty of fun to be had in Heiss’ idiosyncratic fiction, but Tiddas lacks the escapist joys of her previous novels.

Emily Laidlaw is online editor at Kill Your Darlings

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

Category: Reviews