Ambelin Kwaymullina, Liar’s Test (The Silverleaf Chronicles #1), Text Publishing, June 2024, 272 pp., RRP $24.99 (pbk), ISBN 9781922790873
Liar’s Test is a fast-paced, first-person fantasy novel of impressive imagination. If you have been reading, for instance, Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros or the Fire Sermon trilogy by Francesca Haig, you will know the kind of taut, heart-stopping, and ethically challenging read you are in for here.
Kwaymullina is an experienced writer who manages to keep a tangle of complex issues in balance throughout her novel — questions of deception for good and not-so-good purposes, the pull of heritage and culture, several kinds of shared knowledge, and the divisive splits of ideology and theology, not to mention the ways power can be wielded.
There are worlds within worlds, alliances, enmities, and a goal that is embedded in rescuing what is best in nature, history and social connection. The heroine, Bell, is a Treesinger, one of a clan of people beset by colonisation and illness. She finds herself suddenly one of seven candidates for ultimate authority among the ruling Risen people. She is to undergo a series of contests and tests that will eventually eliminate and in fact kill most of the seven.
In addition she must face the murderous bully of a high priest who is rigging each contest, she must know when and why the ruling queen might be lying to her, and somehow stay connected to the one soul with whom she has a chance of love. Bell will need help, and she will need to listen to others, absorb knowledge, and perhaps go so far into the feared abyss that she will not have energy enough left to return to life.
It is quite a ride. Ambelin Kwaymullina is a major prize-winning First Nations writer from the Palyku people of the Pilbara region of Western Australia, and this novel does indeed honour the voices of indigenous peoples colonised by powers indifferent to their welfare.
Teaching notes are available on the publisher’s website.
Reviewed by Kevin Brophy
