BOOK REVIEW OF WIMMERA BY MARK BRANDIÂ
Recommended by: Beth
I’m not sure what I was expecting when I first picked up Wimmera by Mark Brandi. The cover evokes a certain nostalgia that pulls me back in time to my own 80’s childhood growing up in a rural community even smaller than Wimmera. Although Brandi’s novel is set in Victoria around the Grampians, it felt very much like my home town in the NSW Snowy Mountains, in fact it could have been any small town in rural Australia.
There is a certain kind of naiveté to small town living, this knowledge that bad things happen, just not here. It’s that pervasive belief that stays with us, even after we know the truth, or grasp and guess at the truths of life; we still allow ourselves to believe that evil is everywhere else, even though we know better.
Brandi throws us head first into it all. Two little boys make a gruesome discovery in a river and just as quickly Brandi snatches us back and pushes us into the past, back to before and we are now following two other little boys, yabbying in creeks and dams and playing backyard cricket in the long hot summer stuck somewhere between their boyhood and manhood.
Ben feels it all coming, feels it all deep down inside. Fab does too, but neither boy has a language for it all and so secrets stay secrets, dirt is hastily swept under the rug and the cycle of silence continues.
Brandi’s brilliance lies in the sparsity of the details, allowing the readers minds to make the necessary leaps to colour between the lines as though we too are part of the township, a bystander of tragedy in an astonishingly accurate portrait of small town Australia; so accurate that if we were to open our closets and push back behind the winter coats we may just see Wimmera’s skeletons staring back at us.
Wimmera is Brandi’s first novel and the 2016 winner of the Crime Writer’s Association Debut Dagger Award. Available in store for $29.99