There’s nothing like a book that feels utterly fresh. Regardless of quality, a large number of books that cross my path seem to be a variation on a theme. Of course this is to be expected, but it does mean that when we stumble across a book loaded with originality- and brilliantly executed- it feels like a miracle. Peter Twohig’s debut The Cartographer is one of these books and the discovery is made even sweeter by its distinctly Australian flavour.

Did I mention Australian? Set in rough-as-guts Richmond, Melbourne in 1959, The Cartographer is overflowing with slang. The language makes the book a little difficult in parts, but it does work to firmly establish and maintain a strong sense of place, where the cops are as dirty as the criminals and ‘if you didn’t have a murder every five minutes or so, the silence started to get on your nerves’.

So when our plucky 11 year old narrator stumbles across a murder in progress when all he really meant to do was run away, it’s harrowing but not surprising. Such drama only adds to his burden- his twin brother recently died and his father shot through not long after.

To evade the murderer and attempt to make sense of an immensely confusing world, our hero begins to explore the streets of Melbourne, including its grimy underground tunnels. He maps everything he uncovers and marks the spots where unsavoury events have unfolded. From this, his alter-ego The Cartographer is brought to life, ‘and he will be the saviour of my people. Best of all, I would be practically indestructible’. But superhero or not, our narrator may not be able to extricate himself from the strange web of secrets and betrayals  that link his adventures together, and which will bring him face to face with the killer once more.

The Cartographer requires a generous suspension of disbelief. In the course of his rapidly expanding mapping project, our hero gets tangled up in exploits that are wildly improbable and the series of coincidences that fasten one event to the next are worthy of Jane Austen.

Yet experienced through the eyes of a boy who is equal parts spirit and loneliness, it works. His narration alternates between that of a regular kid and that of the superheroes he creates for himself. Along with The Cartographer, there is Railwayman who ‘is often armed with a pinch bar he found in a railway shed’ and The Outlaw, ‘who lives off… his secret underground grog supply’. Author Peter Twohig has drawn inspiration from the adventure comics he devoured as a boy and it reflects beautifully in the writing. When our hero assumes the superhero mantle for that extra bit of courage it’s gloriously delivered.

But the most wonderful element of our narrator is the earnestness with which he mixes with adults, repeats their phrases and forms his views on how the world works. It’s rich territory for a writer to mine and Twohig takes full advantage, making for some extremely funny passages: ‘If you’re one of those people who thinks that the last thing a kid who’s been chased by a homicidal maniac in an underground tunnel would do is revisit  the old haunt to reminisce and do a bit more exploring, then you don’t know much about kids’. He is also richly characterised, ensconced firmly in his 1959 setting without mawkishness or cliché.

Our hero is surrounded by an assortment of background characters who add significant colour to the story, including a careworn mother and a shady grandfather with buddies who are happy to teach an eleven year old the finer points of breaking and entering.

Yet it’s the sadness, running veinlike through the body of the work, that make The Cartographer so memorable. Our hero is barely coping with the loss of his brother and is constantly wondering why he was left behind and what he’s supposed to do next. Taking on the superhero identities and the bravado of a fearless explorer is a salve for the aching loneliness he can’t shake, and a defence against an unfair world.

It’s a fragile shield though and it regularly shatters in the form of fits where ‘I’d start to shake and drop things until finally I’d sort of disappear… and wake up vomiting’. At heart this not about comedy- it’s really about a young boy trying to rebuild himself after a devastating loss.

The Cartographer will draw comparisons with others that have so beautifully captured the voice of a child including The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and The Book Thief. Rather than being a pale imitation though, it is in a class of its own- smart, incredibly funny, charming and uniquely Australian. My hope is that such a strong debut marks the beginning of another fantastic year for Australian fiction.

The latter part of 2011 was crammed with so many big book releases that just to think of them was tiring. In early September my ‘to read’ books were stacked in a thick but reasonable pile; by December the ‘pile’ resembled a shoddily built skyscraper, enormous and keening this way and that at the slightest disturbance. There were simply too many books and not enough time. I sort of hoped that the first months of 2012 would afford me the chance to recover and make a significant dent in The Great Tower Of The Unread before Murakami and Eugenides in hardcover toppled onto my head one night while I was sleeping.

Fat chance. February will do nothing but set back my progress with a host of new releases I MUST have, major concussion be damned!

Anyway, here are five books for the coming month that I think you need to know about.

The Cartographer. by Peter Twohig

YOU MUST READ THIS BOOK.

Part 1 featuring the first five books in my list can be found here.

Open City by Teju Cole

Damn it, I thought recently, after finishing Open City. I said I wouldn’t declare any book to be the best of 2011! Yet Teju Cole’s momentous debut novel has sorely tempted me to break my own rule.

Open City follows half African doctor Julius through the streets of New York City. His random walks are a refreshing release from the rigours of his medical schedule. Like a series of diary entries he chronicles his daily experiences and the memories they trigger, whether it be his turbulent childhood in Nigeria, fractured relationships, or life as a medical student. Chance encounters affect him in small but important ways, as they do all of us. An inward looking soul, Julius meditates on the history of a city still gripped by recent tragedy and on the many tiny tragedies of modern life. Inexplicably, Julius’s experiences illuminate some of the most pressing social questions of the 21^st century without feeling like commentary or lecturing. As such, Open City is not a book you can simply read; it must be considered. As the reader you must be willing to relinquish the traditional notion of a narrative that builds towards a climax and appreciate one that simply undulates. The writing is graceful and rythmic, singular in its ability to contain a world full of ideas within the seemingly mundane experiences of one curious man.

Before I Go to Sleep by S.J Watson

Every year dozens of books are advertised as ‘thrilling’ but in actuality will arouse ‘derision’ and nothing more. Before I Go to Sleep is one of the few to deliver. And it really delivers. This is even more impressive considering the difficulty of the central idea: Christine wakes each morning with no knowledge of who she is, spends a harrowing day piecing a sense of self together then goes to sleep, totally erasing the day before. It’s a miserable cycle, and Watson powerfully evokes the desperation, shame and loneliness threatening Christine’s brittle grip on sanity. It’s impossible to relax into Before I Go to Sleep; there is a constant sense of something unsettled. As Christine slowly claws back  memories, this feeling swells like a cancer into something truly sinister. With skilful pacing Watson urges us toward the panic filled finale, and treats us to a rare thing in literature: a fitting end.

The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson

Jon Ronson is like that cool if not slightly neurotic teacher you had in high school, who caused you to think deeply but not realise it until afterward. In his typical meandering style, Ronson’s book starts with his hunt for a mysterious person sending riddles to academics all over the globe. This leads to a pressing fascination with the notion of the psychopath and he sets off on a journey into the world of mental health. From the famous quiz used to diagnose a psychopath, to the raging debate over treatments we are exposed to the limitations of the psychiatric industry. This is not to say The Psycho Path Test is a critique; far from it. Though this all sounds very dry Ronson is an affable narrator whose eye for quirk and for spinning a great sentence makes his work a treat to read. He regularly digresses into the stranger elements, including Scientology and its war on psychiatry, the man who thinks he is the Messiah, and one inmate who pretended to be a psychopath so convincingly that now he’s stuck in an institution. While The Psychopath Test makes some astute remarks about this industry, it never feels like hard work.

The Secret in their Eyes by Eduardo Sacheri

The Secret in Their Eyes follows Benjamin Chaparro, on the cusp of retirement after working in the courts of Buenos Aries for decades. Restless, he resolves to write a book about the only case that continues to haunt him: the murder of a beautiful young woman almost thirty years before. Through his recollections we journey back to a city on the brink of violent implosion. A sense of menace spreads steadily as Benjamin’s hunt for the killer also makes him a victim of the volatile political situation. However there are no gun fights or car chases to be seen here. This is a slow burn thriller that is as concerned with its quietly intelligent protagonist as it is the central murder mystery. Benjamin regularly reflects on dreams unfulfilled, a love never declared and a string of past mistakes. This beautiful reflection on the varying degrees of beauty, sorrow, regret and hope that make up one man’s life builds slowly but is well worth the effort.

The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh

An elegant novel revolving around the notion of redemption- how it is found, whether one can work to deserve it, or simply be beyond its reach. 18 year old Victoria is a distrustful and occasionally violent teenager scarred by a life in foster care. A void seems to hang where her future should be and only flowers hold appeal for her, particularly the old Victorian notion that different flowers hold vastly different meanings. This language of flowers is the only way Victoria can communicate meaningfully with those around her, and it becomes clear that they are key to releasing her from a life of loneliness and pain. In a year of novels with vast ideas there was a refreshing simplicity about this story of a damaged girl coaxed out into the world. Diffenbaugh has not compromised in her creation of the wonderful Victoria who feels startlingly authentic. Her experience is not a steady ascent to happiness as in a fairytale; Victoria is prickly, overly tough and constantly undermines her own progress, yet displays such vulnerability that we never stop cheering her on as she treads the uneasy road to salvation.

Ah, December. It’s the time of year when we look back as well as forward. It’s also the time of year when humanity’s strange proclivity towards list making finds an outlet and ‘best of’ lists start popping up everywhere: best movies, best albums, best political revolutions, etc. It really starts getting freaky when people on the Internet make a list of the best ‘best of’ lists.

The Guardian, Goodreads, The New York Times and more have released their ‘Best Books of 2011’ lists recently. After scanning their lists, I couldn’t help but reflect on the books I read this year and how I felt about them; as Salon’s Laura Miller noted in her roundup of 2011′s best fiction, ‘It was a particularly great year for fiction’. And I suddenly thought ‘Yes, Laura Miller, yes it has! I shall write a list of my own!’

However a love of reading combined with access to a book blog does not make me a critic. As such, I’m not calling this post ‘the best books of 2011’. Instead, this is a list of my favourite books for 2011. Not all of them were critical darlings but I adored them all for a variety of different reasons and derived such pleasure (or exquisite pain) from reading them.

The stringent process I used to decide my favourite books of 2011 consisted of staring out the window for a few days with a slightly glazed expression, trying to remember all the books I read and what I thought of them. I feel that this is similar to the Booker Prize judging and also perhaps what goes on in the United Nations.

Anyway. In no particular order, here are the first five entries in my list of Favourite Books for 2011. The remaining five will be posted tomorrow.

There Should be More Dancing by Rosalie Ham

The tale of elderly Margery Blandon, fending off her garish family and social services as they try and manoeuvre her into a nursing home, is one of the most underrated Australian novels of the year. Told in an unusual combination of first and third person, the humour feels so Australian in that way one can never put their finger on: understated with a faint trace of irony is the best way I can describe it. The characterisation is absolutely glorious, too. Margery knits obsessively, has a gigantic tote bag for all the knick knacks she seems to accumulate, and regularly polishes the framed picture of her beloved John Howard. There is also gentle sadness as Margery’s story as it illuminates the way the young and active steadily nudge the elderly to the margins of society. This is touched upon so expertly that it never makes the novel morose, just more thoughtful. This was such an unexpected and uniquely Australian story.

The Dovekeepers by Alice Hoffman

This is Alice Hoffman’s best novel yet, and an astonishing work of historical fiction. The Dovekeepers is set in the fortress of Masada, where 900 Jews heldout for months against an enormous Roman onslaught in 70 AD. We experience the siege through four women who have sought refuge in the fortress. They are bound together by their nurturing of doves, by the extreme tragedies that have stained each of their lives, and the further tragedies they know await them in Masada. The Dovekeepers is a rich, complex novel which achieves all it sets out to: the characters are finely etched, the prose is devastating, the voice of the each protagonist is distinct, and Hoffman’s attention to detail is staggering. Ancient jewish culture and the stark desert environment is vividly brought to life in this emotional and profoundly beautiful novel.