Source : the age
As we head into the final month of winter, you can find stacks of new books popping up in your local bookshop. Here are 13 that might be up your street.
Sophie, Standing There
Meg Mason
Fourth Estate, $34.99, out now
Sorrow and Bliss was such a ginormous hit that it really changed the life of New Zealand-born-and-raised author, Meg Mason. It was her second novel, and her third emerged from the considerable success and fame she found with it. Sophie is a sound technician at writers festivals, who in her solitary life becomes obsessed with a particular writer. But this is more than a study of loneliness. As Mason says in the interview that you can read here, she wanted it to be a fast and easy read that name-checks other writers and employs some surprising techniques.
Blackbirding
Ryan Butta
Simon & Schuster, $36.99, out now
The term “blackbirding” refers to the 60,000 Pacific Islanders brought against their will to Australia to work in Queensland’s sugar fields between 1860 and 1906, and the practice is indicative of Australian historical euphemism to “obscure an action that is morally or emotionally or politically problematic”. Ryan Butta tells the stories based on documentation − it is not his right to tell the stories of the enslaved − and the egregious behaviour of the founder of the trade, Robert Towns, and the murderous James Murray is eye-opening and shocking.
Time Travel for Beginners
Jaclyn Moriarty
Ultimo, $34.99, out now
Jaclyn Moriarty had the idea for her third novel for adults, and 17th overall, about 20 years ago. At first, it reminded me of the 2019 French film La Belle Epoque. Single mother Anna hates her job at the Nut Bar but, after getting hit by a car, is offered a job as a time travel agent. Clients revisit significant events with the proviso they can’t change anything; meanwhile, other characters converge in Anna’s life. As Moriarty told Lenny Ann Low, “regret is designed to prevent you making mistakes again … the trouble is, it gets jammed in a loop.”
Screw Nice
Amy Remeikis
Hachette, $34.99, out now
Political analyst Amy Remeikis follows her bestselling On Reckoning with a take-down of what she calls “civility politics [that] lets us stand silent while we see someone with less social power than us being bullied in the classroom, society or workplace”. It’s crammed full of examples from Australia and the US of how politicians and commentators have their say, and the way in which they do so makes for a bracing read. Not surprisingly, Remeikis cites Orwell: “If you turn the other cheek, you will get a harder blow on it than you got on the first one.”
Now, Autonomy
Max Easton
Giramondo, $32.95, out now
If you fancy a trip through Sydney subcultures, Max Easton is your guy. In the third of his novels that navigate these worlds, we’re in 2024 and Helen is out of the share-house at the heart of Paradise Estate and in an apartment with Pat, who has secretly unearthed his memoir of life in the early 2000s. Sunny and Sio join them in a year-long lease on a vacant hotel − they call it “The Quarterly” − in which to stage “events” for their tribes and “save Sydney from itself”. But nothing is as simple as it seems, particularly Helen’s relationship with Maria.
Nuclear Archipelago
Elizabeth Tynan
NewSouth, $39.99, out now
The third in Elizabeth Tynan’s award-winning trilogy about Britain’s “nuclear colonialism” in Australia details the tests in the Monte Bello Islands in 1952 and 1956 off the Pilbara coast. The latter was by far the “largest bomb ever exploded in Australia”. As Tynan says, “none of the test sites were properly cleaned up … pristine environments such as the Monte Bello Islands were permanently scarred”. The full story remains untold as the British remain “stubbornly secretive”. Tynan reckons “Australians have a right to know exactly what took place on our soil”.
Mine
Adam Ouston
Transit Lounge, $$34.99, out now
Don’t be put off by the fact that Adam Ouston’s second novel is written as one sentence. Angel Down, the winner of this year’s Pulitzer for fiction, is also one sentence, but Daniel Kraus breaks it into paragraphs, each of which begins with the word “and”. Readers should trust authors, and Ouston’s digressive prose soon catches you in its rhythms. His narrator is an 80-year-old poet and environmental activist given to procrastination who wants to write a “hauntology” of Tasmania’s West Coast, but has tumbled into a mineshaft, his fall broken by his backpack. He may be trapped, but his mind isn’t and his consciousness roams far and wide.
The Hurt
Catherine de Saint Phalle
Transit Lounge, $32.99, out now
When she was 18 and struggling to survive in a lycee she despised, Catherine de Saint Phalle met Julien who, a few years older than her, “added voice and texture to Paris” with punk music and his black curls. De Saint Phalle previously wrote a memoir about her parents, Poum and Alexandre, and they feature wonderfully here as well. In writing characterised by vivid imagery − “Eighteen wasn’t very old, but I felt my childhood escaping me on roller skates” − de Saint Phalle relates the story of her relationship with Julien, and how writing it led her out of a later “forest of despair”.
Realms of Gold
A.J. Mackinnon
Black Inc., $36.99, out August 4
Most people take the car; some travel by trains or boats or planes, and some, such as Patrick Leigh Fermor, like to walk. But if you’re A.J. “Sandy” Mackinnon, you take a small Mirror dinghy and go as far as you can. He recounted his eccentric journey from Shropshire to the Black Sea in the delicious memoir, The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow; 18 years later, he’s back with an account of another intrepid, slightly bonkers, voyage in a similar dinghy, this time from the port in Romania where the first vessel ended up to Venice.
Eye of the Needle
Christopher Raja
Text, $34.99, out August 4
The end of innocence was a key theme of Christopher Raja’s first novel, The Burning Elephant. You could say Eye of the Needle has a similar focus, as one of his two narrators, Kris, a would-be writer in 1990s Melbourne, turns his back on family and slips into the dismal world of heroin addiction, while the other, Kadir, an Afghan cameleer on a scientific expedition venturing into the desert from Beltana in 1882, has his eyes opened about colonialism and its brutal consequences for the Indigenous population. But who is telling Kadir’s story?
Heresies
Richard Flanagan
Penguin, $36.99, out August 4
The Booker winner has never been shy about voicing his opinions, whether in print or on stage at writers festivals or elsewhere. He’s always enlivening − even if you disagree with him. This collection of pieces, published in a variety of outlets, ranges over the past 10 years or so. While Flanagan says that “writing, at its best, exists beyond morality and politics”, he takes a strongly moral position, whether he’s writing about cancel culture, Manus Island, Jillian Segal’s antisemitism report, free speech or salmon farming in Macquarie Harbour.
Alice’s Dreaming
Tom Griffiths
Black Inc., $36.99, out August 11
Historian Tom Griffiths tells the story of the writer Alice Duncan-Kemp, who was born on a station in Queensland in 1901. Her father died early and her mother stayed on the property, with Alice and her sisters finding friends among the Mithaka people and guidance from a remarkable Indigenous man, Moses Yoolpee, and others. There is some ambiguity about the source of her knowledge and the veracity of some of her writing, but nevertheless, writes Griffiths, she “participated in the most profound and important of Australian conversations” between Indigenous individuals and curious newcomers.
Three Shocks
George Megalogenis
Penguin, $36.99, out August 18
In the decade between the GFC and the pandemic, Australia became a majority migrant nation, saw the feminisation of the economy, and found that the interests of both its greatest ally and, separately, its largest trading partner, were no longer complementary to its own, says political scientist George Megalogenis. In the final of his detailed and characteristically accessible trilogy examining Australia’s diverse citizenry and place in the world, Megalogenis stresses the need for connection between city and country and, indeed, all Australians.
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