Source : the age
The book lover’s favourite season continues into October. Christmas is looming, which means publishers are bringing out the big guns: door-stoppers, page-turners and enough literary catnip to see us through to summer. There are heavy hitters making much-anticipated returns and a few unexpected turns from local favourites. So let’s take our reading inspiration from Rocky Balboa, whose creator, Sylvester Stallone, has a memoir out this month, and remember: “Nobody owes nobody nothing. You owe yourself.” To the bookshop, then.
Ply
Hernan Diaz
Picador, $34.99
After looking backwards in In the Distance and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Trust, Hernan Diaz has decided to jump a few centuries into the future. So, a slight change of scenery. An orphan grows up in a city where the state has disappeared, and becomes a “pincher”, someone who steals electricity from the grid to power underground concerts. She then gets caught in a scientific experiment that could change reality itself. Diaz is thinking about technology and capitalism in this, his third novel, with a rather wild adventure to carry us through.
All Heart
Mick Fanning
Simon & Schuster, $37
Most people know Mick Fanning as a three-time world surfing champion. Or, thanks to one extraordinary day in 2015, the guy who punched a shark (a difficult thing to leave off any CV). All Heart shows us a different side of him, with Fanning writing about the highs of his surfing career alongside the terrible loss of his three brothers and his father. Our reviewer Malcolm Knox was deeply moved: “Fanning’s story can be an inspiration and a model for every man and for every person.”
Full Circle
Chris Hammer
Summit Books, $35
Chris Hammer leaves behind the characters from his two crime series for this standalone thriller. Travis Somerland arrives at Montechino, the secluded estate of the extremely wealthy Clapton family, and finds himself caught in a dynastic power struggle where money has a rather loose relationship with morality. There are murders too, naturally. Think Succession with an Australian crime writer let loose on the Roys. After Scrublands and the Ivan Lucic and Nell Buchanan books, it’s a chance for Hammer to go somewhere new – and very affluent.
American Hagwon
Min Jin Lee
4th Estate, $38
Nearly a decade after Pachinko, Min Jin Lee is back. And she has not, it must be said, gone small. At more than 650 pages, American Hagwon follows John and Helen Koh and their children after the Asian financial crisis of 1997 turned their lives upside down. The family leaves Seoul for Sydney, then ends up in California. Lee is once again interested in what happens when a family crosses borders and tries to make somewhere new feel like home.
Inter Alia
Suzie Miller
Picador, $35
After putting the law on trial in Prima Facie, former lawyer-turned-writer Suzie Miller is heading back to court. Jessica is a newly appointed London judge, very good at dealing with swaggering barristers and taking on old legal prejudices. The robes, unfortunately, don’t get her out of the domestic juggle. Then her 18-year-old son is accused of a crime. The neat line between work and family vanishes in Miller’s second novel, which continues many of the interests she explored in her debut.
Tell Me Something True
Michael Robotham
Hachette, $35
Michael Robotham has written 20 novels, which feels like reason enough for a small celebration. For No.20, he’s finally coming home. The book was inspired by the first manuscript he attempted, written in his 20s while he was living in London and missing Australia, and is his first novel set in his homeland. Arlo Hackett emerges from 12 years in prison and heads home to Yulara hoping to put the past behind him. This is a Michael Robotham novel, so we can probably guess how well that goes.
The Steps
Sylvester Stallone
Seven Dials, $35
Fifty years after Rocky Balboa charged up those Philadelphia museum steps, Sylvester Stallone returns to where it all began. The memoir focuses largely on his arrival in New York in 1969 through to Rocky winning best picture at the 1977 Oscars. In between: very little money and a lot of rejection. This is Stallone before Stallone – and yes, those famous steps get their moment, too.
I Can’t Tell You But I Will
Magda Szubanski
Text, $55
Magda Szubanski’s second memoir is a very personal affair. At its centre is her relationship with her mother and the experience of caring for her as she was dying. Szubanski also returns to 2017, when she became one of the most recognisable campaigners for marriage equality in Australia. There’s a lot here we haven’t seen from her before, which is saying something for someone who has been famous in Australia for more than 30 years. This is Szubanski away from the punchlines.
The German Ward
Pip Williams
Affirm Press, $35
Pip Williams says this novel is a love story she had no intention of writing. Lucky for us, she did. In France during World War I, English suffragette and actress Tilda Taylor is working as a nurse when she begins a secret affair with a German doctor who is being held as a prisoner of war. Obviously, this is not ideal wartime nursing protocol. Their relationship is captured in drawings by artist Iso Rae, who is based on a real Australian figure, which resurface years later. Williams has gone digging through history again.
Tongue
Kathryn Crowcroft
Giramondo, $32.95, October 1
The human tongue: useful for talking, eating and – building an entire book around. Australian poet and scholar Kathryn Crowcroft’s genre-bending non-fiction debut follows a young researcher into a university archive as she investigates the rather strange cultural history of the organ. Gradually, all that research starts bumping up against her own life, particularly the silences between her and her mother. Mixing personal writing with archival material and images, this is one I’m very curious to get my tongue around.
The Lady with the Dog
Carrie Tiffany and Noel McKenna
NewSouth, $30, October 1
Carrie Tiffany’s first book since Exploded View (2019) is a little one with a fairly devastating premise. Loosely inspired by the final months of her mother and stepfather’s lives, it follows an elderly woman with Alzheimer’s who finally gets the dog she has always wanted. As familiar things begin slipping away, the dog stays close. With illustrations by Noel McKenna and Chekhov’s famous story hovering in the background, prepare the tissues.
The Lucky Son
Li Cunxin
Penguin, $37, October 6
More than two decades after Mao’s Last Dancer became a publishing phenomenon, Li Cunxin is finally telling us what happened next. After leaving China, he became an international ballet star and settled in Australia. One successful career wasn’t enough: Li became a principal artist, corporate speaker and stockbroker before eventually spending more than a decade running the Queensland Ballet. The Lucky Son also takes him back to the family he left behind. Li’s mother called him her lucky son – here he considers what that luck meant.
Partita
Barbara Kingsolver
Faber, $35, October 6
A piano prodigy and a torrid affair are at the heart of Barbara Kingsolver’s first novel since the Pulitzer Prize-winning Demon Copperhead. After Livia’s older brother takes his own life, she throws herself into music, taking up a scholarship and leaving her small American town. At college, she meets Sigurd, a socialist activist handing out pamphlets, and their relationship follows them long after campus. You’ll be reaching for the classical music playlist as you read this one.
Blockers
Michael Lewis
Allen Lane, $60, October 6
Michael Lewis has a knack for turning topics you might not assume you want to read about into books you can’t put down. After making the financial crisis gripping in The Big Short, he’s turned his attention to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and its arrival in the US government in early 2025. The “blockers” are the public servants who pushed back as DOGE sought sweeping cuts and access across federal agencies. Tax data and government bureaucracy may not immediately scream thriller but then again, neither did subprime mortgages.
Peck & Peck
Bonnie Garmus
Bonnier, $35, October 13
After Lessons in Chemistry sold about 10 million copies (and counting), Bonnie Garmus has faced the mildly unenviable task of trying to do it all again. Her new hero is Batter Gray (an excellent name for a Garmus character). He’s a poetry obsessive who lands a job at prestigious journal Peck & Peck in 1980s New York, where the twin editors-in-chief are at war. It’s delightfully bookish and whimsical, although the battle between money and editorial integrity may feel less escapist to those of us in the words industry.
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