Lion Attack! (Oliver Mol, Scribe)

Creative nonfiction, which straddles the line between reality and make-believe, has been growing in profile as a genre. When an author consciously writes something that is mostly true but sometimes not, the reader doesn’t quite know how to process the story. What resonates with Lion Attack!, however, is that the truth of the story doesn’t matter, it’s the sentiment that fuels it. Lion Attack! is the first book from Australian writer Oliver Mol, co-winner of the Scribe Nonfiction Prize for Young Writers in 2013. Marketed as a memoir, it’s a collection of fragmented memories of growing up in the US and of life for a lost and aimless 20-something in modern-day Australia. I had a few quibbles: the prolific boganism of the secondary characters in Melbourne and Brisbane is a little overdone, and Mol’s narrative voice can be cloying in its self-centeredness. The latter criticism, however, is also what makes this memoir refreshingly and brutally honest. Mol has written a no-holds-barred commentary on life from a privileged, white, straight male perspective that will appeal to a younger Generation Y readership. Lion Attack! is similar in humour to Kirsty Chambers’ It’s Not You, Geography, It’s Me or Kellee Slater’s How to Do a Liver Transplant, but is a unique take on the creative nonfiction genre.

Chloe Townson is a bookseller at Riverbend Books in Brisbane