So many great books this year (see also Top 5 Crime, Science Fiction and Fantasy).   This is an all Australian Top 5 fiction for 2017 (in no particular order and with four international honourable mentions).     Jock Serong’s On The Java Ridge moved away from crime and created a humanist thriller out of Australia’s border protection policies.               Michael Sala’s The Restorer centred on a family trying to put a violent past behind them in 1980s Newcastle.               Mark Brandi’s debut, Wimmera, was a timely exploration of child sexual abuse and its impacts.                 In City of Crows, Chris Womersley explored the power of belief in seventeenth century Paris.                 Another great debut, Tony Jones created Australia’s very won Day of the Jackal in The Twentieth Man.                 Honourable (international) mentions: House of Names by Colm Toibin was a retelling of Greek myth. Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan, a historical novel set in the New York shipbuilding yards in World War II. Spoils by Brian van Reet…

When The Restorer opens, Richard, a neighbour, is watching a family move in to the burnt out wreck of the house next door. From the outside this is a nuclear family – father Roy, mother Maryanne, an eight year old boy Daniel and a teenage girl Freya. But both Richard and the reader can sense from his first interactions with Roy that something is not quite right. Michael Sala’s new novel, part coming of age story, part (recent) historical fiction centres around abuse within a family. Domestic violence is emerging as a theme of some recent Australian literature. Not long ago we had Katheryn Heyman’s Storm and Grace which focused on an abusive, destructive relationship. But domestic violence has also raised its head in recent debuts by Holly Throsby and Cassandra Austin. As the family move their possessions into the house a storm is brewing. The narrative that follows reflects that on coming storm. Roy is trying to be the man that his wife desperately wants him to be. He throws himself into the restoration of the house as if it is his personal metaphor and that its renewal will be enough to demonstrate his fidelity and love. But as the…