Escaped down the coast for a week or so but feeling a little homesick? Not likely, we agree, but there's something comforting about reading a book set in a location you're familiar with. While Canberra's not a popular place to set a story, here are some of our favourites.
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Secret City
Edith Trilogy
It's worth reading Frank Moorehouse's Grand Days and Dark Palace so you're familiar with Edith Campbell Berry by the time she gets to Canberra in Cold Light. She's a charming protagonist, a spirited young woman rebelling against conventions of the time, just as Australia itself was trying to figure out its place in the world. Dark Palace won the Miles Franklin Award in 2001 and Cold Light was shortlisted in 2012. Cold Light begins in 1950s Canberra, when the city was in its infancy and Edith joins a committee to help build its future. There's politics, sex, and a conversation to be had about where we all, Canberra and women, fit into it all. Reviews called the three books the "most ambitious fictional trilogy in Australian literature". Keep your eye out for the theatre production of Cold Light at The Street in March.
Snake Bite
Christie Thompson's Snake Bite, published in 2013, was one of the bleakest and most confrontational books I've ever read. A coming-of-age story, it didn't gloss over anything. Drugs, sex, isolation, depression, dysfunctional families ... all set in Kambah. Protagonist Jez is just 17, negotiating her sexuality, dealing with issues most of us don't believe are happening in our well educated middle class town. Thompson said she wanted to write about the Canberra people rarely see ... "the people who live here are just people, like anyone else". Not the cheeriest book you'll ever read but it will get you thinking.
Rip Off
While there's not much Canberra-based action in Rip Off, the third book in Kel Robertson's Brad Chen crime thriller series, the book opens with a lovely description: "It was mid-November 2007. There was sewage in the big lake at the heart of the city, a deadly horse virus had emptied the TABs and the longest election campaign in the nation's history still had a long way to go." There are references too to cockatoos, Canberra Avenue, Canberra Airport, the Duntroon Golf Course and classically inclined matrons from Canberra's more prestigious suburbs. Robertson's a public servant by day, writer by other times, and his award-winning books are full of dry humour and enough intrigue to keep you guessing.
Only Daughter
Like Gone Girl but set in Canberra. How's that for a tag line. Canberra is, says author Anna Snoekstra, the perfect setting for a troubled teenaged protagonist, living through one of the city's hottest summers, and permeated with a sense of looming danger, both real – the 2003 bushfires – and unnamed, and therefore creepy. The daughter of the title, Rebecca Winter, goes missing, and 11 years later, a young woman, as a way of getting out of being arrested for shoplifting, claims to be her. Perfect summer reading.
What's your favourite book set in Canberra? What should have been on this list?
