SLEEP CAPRICORN by Jack Norman was launched on Saturday, December 6th at The Lord Newry Hotel, Fitzroy North. Our original plan was a picnic in the park but the malevolence of Melbourne weather was not to be bested. At the last minute the venue was changed to the nearby Lord Newry Hotel and we were lucky enough to be able to commandeer their (nearly) empty pool room for a couple hours. It was a great vibe, with Tom Roberts prints on the wall, the Brisbane Ashes test on silent in the top corner, and a scorching Melbourne temperature of 19.5 degrees. Thank you to everyone who came out, even Pac-Man guy, and thank you to the Lord Newry Hotel who were not expecting a flash book launch but welcomed it all the same. Below is the full text of the speech delivered by As you read, imagine the sounds of a seventies table-top pac-man game burbling up gently from the side of the room.
SLEEP CAPRICORN is available here: https://bonfirebooks.org/product/sleep-capricorn-by-jack-norman/
Welcome everyone, thanks for coming. My name is and I’m here to say a few words about Jack Norman’s short fiction collection, Sleep Capricorn.
First up, I have to say I remember exactly why I got interested in this book. I’d been following the publisher Bonfire Books for a few years. Great operation, happy to support them.
But this book in particular grabbed me before I even read a word of it. I don’t want to sound too shallow, but it was the title that grabbed me. Sleep. Capricorn. So many associations and evocations you could make.
There’s a mystique to it. Once you start to read the stories, and find out they are mostly set in North Queensland, above the Tropic of Capricorn, you put two and two together of course.
But that title. Man, I love a good title. And not only is it emblematic of the setting of the stories, there is something of the vibe transmitted here too. Sleep. Capricorn. It’s both mysteriously gnomic, but quite inviting too.
And then you get to the stories, and they’re just as inviting and evocative as the title.
On Substack, the writer said Jack had a “quiet mastery” to his writing. And I agree completely.
Sleep Capricorn is a work that announces itself quietly but confidently. It draws you in with a strange stillness, plenty of dry humour, and it charts currents of meaning beneath the everyday social world of, for want of a better word…normies. But many of the characters in these stories are North Queensland normies. Which is a different kind of person.
Jack grew up in this area, and so did I. I’ve rarely written about it myself. There’s a kind of sweaty mundanity to life in the north, but there’s also something unique about it.
It’s an old cliche, but you can only see the uniqueness of a place you lived in once you’ve left it. However, there’s a danger we can get schmaltzy, nostalgic, once we realise there was some substance to the places of our youth.
In more sentimental writing, these sites become idylls or keys to unlocking the person the writer will become.
Of course, the danger of trying to avoid sentimentality, can also lead to a surplus of self-consciousness, navel-gazing, a kind of reflexivity that can become a chore for the reader.
But in Sleep Capricorn, we have a distinct lack of this type of self-consciousness. And while it’s by no means Ozploitation, it definitely holds a distinct Australian sensibility. But Old Mate Jack never quite puts on the bottle cork akubra.
I mentioned that quiet mastery before, and it’s something that takes a lot of writers a long time to learn. When you’re starting out, especially as a young male writer, there’s a tendency to get showy. A kind of exhibitionism takes over. “Look what I can do!” This is quite a common occurrence for people who have a natural talent for prose.
But Jack’s debut is not full of pretentious literary pyrotechnics. There’s an assuredness in these stories, and a voice that is completely its own, untethered from fashion or the grasping need to impress.
Yet impress me it did. Most of all the book’s control: the sentences are pared back while somehow also being packed full of detail, resonant images, and crystalline emotions. It may be quiet mastery, but it is still mastery.
This book brilliantly renders North Queensland (like I said a place rarely written about in Australian fiction) while attuned to universal themes of family, love, loneliness. The wit and open-heartedness of it all makes me hopeful for the future of our country’s literature.
A debut like this does not appear out of nowhere. It’s the result of persistence, discipline, and I daresay stubbornness.
And it’s no small thing either to find a publisher who recognises the spark in a new writer’s work. Bonfire Books has taken that chance, and we’re all the beneficiaries of that decision.
So with that, it is my absolute pleasure to introduce Jack Norman, and to officially welcome Sleep Capricorn into the world. Please join me in a round of applause to celebrate this remarkable debut
.