A mirror, a bell, a ticket, a leaf — in Godfrey Bonavia’s newly released collection Paraphernalia, these four unremarkable objects become the pivot points around which ordinary lives quietly, irreversibly shift.
Small things. Enormous weight.
The Perth, Western Australia writer has built his debut collection around a specific editorial conviction: that short fiction, handled with precision, delivers as much as any novel — and asks considerably less of a reader’s afternoon. The stories move across settings from coastal edges to urban streets, but the objects that anchor them share a common quality. None are accidents. Each marks a moment of decision, departure or change that the characters in question cannot easily walk back from.
That is not a modest ambition for a collection of short stories.
“Short stories respect a reader’s day,” Bonavia explained. “You can finish one in a sitting, return to it later, and notice something new. Paraphernalia is built to be reread, not rushed.”
Short fiction has found renewed interest in recent years, driven partly by writers like Lydia Davis demonstrating what compressed narratives can carry, and partly by readers whose reading time has fractured into smaller windows. Bonavia’s collection arrives into that context with a clear sense of what it is offering — not the prestige of the long novel but something the long novel structurally cannot provide: a complete arc, a clean landing and an ending that refuses to fully close.
“Readers often tell me they want stories they can complete between commitments without sacrificing depth,” Bonavia added. “This book is my response to that.”
The four objects at the collection’s core — mirror, bell, ticket, leaf — are worth pausing on. Each implies transition: reflection, sound, departure, fall. Bonavia chose them deliberately, and they signal a collection more interested in the moment before a life changes than in what comes after. Character, consequence and place are the declared priorities; in the stories that work best, all three arrive in the same paragraph.
Perth is not Australia’s most celebrated literary city — that distinction tends to travel east — but it has produced writers, Tim Winton most prominently, whose sense of coastal and urban Western Australian life carries a texture specific to the place. Bonavia writes from that same geography. The coastal edges and urban streets in Paraphernalia are not generic backdrops; they are observed from inside a particular quality of light and distance that the west provides in ways the eastern seaboard does not.
Paraphernalia is available now through Amazon and select online bookstores.
Whether you finish one story before dinner or move through the collection across a week, Bonavia has written each piece to stand alone, begin cleanly and end in a way that lingers. That refusal to fully resolve — the ending that stays with you past the final line — is what turns an ordinary object into something worth carrying.
