WEEKENDER PAGE 36 ON THE SHELF EDITED BY ELVIRA SPROGIS AFTER Morris Gleitzman Penguin, $19.99 This is the last book, though third chronologically, in Gleitzman’s powerful series about a Jewish boy’s struggle to survive in Nazi-occupied Poland. The previous three books are: Once, Then and Now. In After, World War II is in its final stages but its horrors are still omnipresent. In Felix, Gleitzman has created a smart, loyal and brave character for children to cherish. Stacey Dombkins TOUGH Wayne Grogan has carved out a singular niche for himself with his gritty style, writes IAN KIRKWOOD. TALES REDEEMED: Terror Australis, by Wayne Grogan, published by Deep Line Books, $24.95, or $6.95 as a Google eBook. PICTURE: DARREN PATEMAN BOOKS T error Australis is Wayne Grogan’s fifth book – four novels, one volume of prose poetry – and it continues to tread the path of redemption from addiction that is home ground for this singular artist. Grogan, who spent time in Newcastle before leaving the wharves to become a full-time writer, is a very good novelist. The characters in his books are alive. His language is bold, original and often arresting. This is not flip-through material. There are sentences here that take a second and even third reading. Not because they are difficult to digest, but because they stick in the brain and their originality deserves more than one passing glance. To Grogan, the Botany Bay wharves are ‘‘huge stacks of containers broken over by floating clouds of petrol fumes’’ . A ‘‘grub in a beanie with an Adam’s apple like a tomahawk’’ is in deep conversation with ‘‘another soiler’’. The son of a famous crim was so inept with his fists he ‘‘couldn’t knock a drunken sheila off a toilet bowl’’. And on it goes. Much of Grogan’s output traverses a William S. Burroughs-like affection for the langour of the smackie’s life, and he is utterly convincing in describing the grubby horror of life on the nod. Plotwise, Terror Australis follows a bookseller and reformed junkie, Rory, as he gumshoes the nether reaches of Sydney for the fallen daughter of a moneyed family, “a beautiful girl fallen in the trashy reaches of the Sydney heroin underworld’’. She turns up, but not before Rory, who is also a rapist in remission, uncovers an Islamic terror plot and tries, but fails, to seduce the near menopausal book buyer and confidant who hired him to find her friend’s absent daughter in the first place. As I have said, Grogan’s language is never less than arresting. I found it a hard book to put down, although – and I hate to say this – sections of the plot worked less well than others. Grogan says his main thrust – and I use the word deliberately – in Terror Australis is the still-present influence of our convict past as a trigger and a reason for a national attitude of sexualised violence towards women. As he quotes from Germaine Greer at the start of proceedings: ‘‘Women have very little idea of how much men hate them.’’ In this regard, his rapist creation Rory, who marks his territory with surreptitious pissings wherever he goes, is a disturbing piece of work. He is obsessed with Ivan Milat and ‘‘butchering ends brought to young bodies’’, trawling through online dating services for new conquests he then terrorises with blindfolds, backhanders and worse. If Fifty Shades of Grey is bondage lite, then this is the real McCoy at street level. Crime fiction as high art. While Grogan is hardly the first writer to tread this path, he is carving out a singular niche for himself in Australian literary circles, mixing an unusually potent sense of grammar with a clear eye for convincing detail. His first novel, Junkie Pilgrim, setting the tone for the material to follow, traversed addiction and corruption in the now familiar settings of Kings Cross and the Sydney waterfront. Vale Byron Bay told a tale of the smart set heading north to the border; Heavy Allies was about the Nugan Hand Bank, a choice real-life slice of Australian history centering on the 1960s and ’70s links between the heroin trade and the CIA via Kings Cross and the Golden Triangle. Jim Morrison Jesus Complex is prose poetry, a la the Lizard King himself, as Grogan channels his inner Doors leader out into the ‘‘stoned immaculate’’ nether reaches of the imagination. Like many writers, Grogan struggles to make a full time living despite the critical acclaim his work has received. A second-hand book seller – like Rory in Terror Australis – Grogan writes not so much because he can, but because he has to. Because the alternative, as Rory says, is to ‘‘stand in reflection with a van behind me full of books I don’t have much confidence in, purchased for too much . . .’’ Much better, for us as readers, that he continues to write. PETERO: My story Petero Civoniceva with Larry Writer, Pan MacMillan, $34.99 Big Petero’s life story is pretty much as you would expect – straight up and down with no frills. Civoniceva achieved everything rugby league had to offer, winning grand finals and State of Origin series and playing in more Test matches than any Australian forward. He has been an understated character. Robert Dillon MRS ROBINSON’S DISGRACE: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady Kate Summerscale, Bloomsbury An 1800s trial of a couple in the English middle classes seeking a divorce is the premise of this story. Isabella Robinson is accused of adultery and her most intimate secrets, recorded in a diary, are read out as evidence. The author takes a rather staid and factual approach to the writing. Jacqui Jones