Source : the age
September marks the start of the bumper Christmas season, when publishers release a huge crop of books from big names and small. Here are 18 of the many new titles out this month, with loads more to look forward to in October.
The Phantom Surrealist
Geoffrey Gates
Transit Lounge, $34.99, September 1
Christopher Tiffen is recovering after delivering a disastrous paper at a conference on surrealism when he comes across a painting by an Australian surrealist by the name of Robert J. Wake in a Sydney gallery, and meets Agnes from Barcelona, becoming smitten with both. Reminiscent, perhaps, of William Boyd’s Nat Tate, this Zelig-like biography of a fictional artist asks the question: who outlives their own life, except in story?
A Suitable Man
Jock Serong
HarperCollins, $36.99, September 1
What a wonderful story novelist Jock Serong tells in his biography of David Fletcher Jones, founder and owner of the eponymous and iconic clothing business. As Serong says, he is trying to understand “the man and to set him in his context, a 20th-century Australian who excelled, who was genuinely eccentric and who seems to have left goodwill everywhere he went”. Jones was a real original whose approach to his staff, philanthropy and character endeared him widely.
Cul-de-Sac
Eleanor Limprecht
Ultimo Press, $34.99, September 1
Jacquie meets charming American Brandon in a Bondi cafe and is whisked off her feet. She moves to the US with him and they have two children, but Brandon, it turns out, is not the man she thought he was. Post-COVID, Jacquie returns to Australia for a holiday with the two children in tow − and doesn’t go back. Eleanor Limprecht is investigating what she calls “the complexities” of the legislation around international child abduction and does so in a novel that ratchets up the sense of emotional and physical risk.
Wild Hope
Claire Scobie
NewSouth, $36.99, September 1
Claire Scobie had a Road to Damascus moment on reading about the extinction of an Australian rodent. It affected her deeply and effected a shift in her life. She realised she had “to get out of my comfort zone and seek out people who were tackling the future with an expansive mindset”. Told in sections − Story, Place, Heart, Lead, Whole and Future − her book is an insight into what the world could be and asks readers to “walk with me, so you can get there faster than I did”.
God AI
Toby Walsh
La Trobe University Press, $36.99, September 1
Toby Walsh, professor of AI at UNSW, is a worried man. In this timely book, he asks a series of questions that lead to the big one: Could AI “perhaps become so intelligent that it is game over for humanity?” Walsh tells a cautionary tale, pointing out that “if artificial intelligence causes harm, it will always be due to our negligence”. Careful what you wish for.
The Second Child
Malcolm Knox
Allen & Unwin, $34.99, September 1
We’re back in the USSR and if you read Malcolm Knox’s brilliant The First Friend, you’ll know how lucky we are. Knox’s latest novel is a sequel to that satire of Soviet life in the ’30s which put a dark spotlight on the machinations of Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s egregious henchman, through the lens of Beria’s fictional childhood friend, Vasil Murtov. Now we’re in 1945 and Murtov’s youngest daughter is back in Moscow, looking for the truth behind her parents’ deaths.
Grand Ambition
James Curran
Scribner, $49.99, September 1
James Curran has been studying Paul Keating for 30 years and has written extensively about Australia’s international relations. The aim here is to see “how Keating changed Australia’s place on the global stage”, as Curran puts it. “No leader since has reconceived Australian identity so radically.” Written on the back of extensive interviews with Keating and others, Curran concludes that since he lost power, Keating’s “vision for the country … has been largely abandoned”.
Life of M
Rachel Cusk
Faber & Faber, $32.99, September 1
There’s been a kerfuffle about this fictional biography of a famous American actor, M, who lives in Paris. Is it really about Natalie Portman? Has Cusk taken terrible liberties? The writer is renowned for her autofiction and her creative breaching of narrative conventions. The book opens: “A little while ago, I told the actor M that I was thinking of writing her autobiography. She liked the idea. She’s a good sport. Would you just make it up? She said.” You can judge for yourself.
Eleven: We Burn Them in the Sun
Christian Ryan
Allen & Unwin, $34.99, September 1
Cricketer Shirvan Pragg was “stardom-bound” when he died at 20 in a car crash in Trinidad in 1982. But this book is far from solely about the left-arm slow bowler who’d been destined for the West Indies team. Although Pragg’s life, friends and death run through it, it’s actually about 11 people − Australian, West Indian, Pakistani − orbiting the game, some closer than others. You won’t have read a cricket book like it; Christian Ryan’s prose is clipped, rhythmic and absorbing.
Foreign Return
Neha Kale
NewSouth, $34.99, September 1
Writer and critic Neha Kale’s Foreign Return asks many questions about how a person comes to feel like they belong in a place they were never destined for. She tells her own story of immigration from India to Australia in the 1990s but also uses her reflections on art, culture, imagination and memory to craft an intriguing examination of the ways of new lives and a realisation that former homes, places and friends “could only be reconstructed with words and stories, impressions and emotions”.
The World Beneath Her Feet
Holly Ringland
HarperCollins, $34.99, September 1
In Holly Ringland’s third novel, Maggie is an educational palaeontologist, uncertain about her life in London with Joe when she learns of the death of her uncle, who has left her the family land and home in Queensland, where she was raised. But returning brings back the angst of love at 16 and the events that prompted her flight north. Can Maggie stave off an anonymous buyer and deal with her pain? As Ringland writes, there’s a thread “between one sorrow and the next joy”.
Performance Politics
Joshua Black
NewSouth, $39.99, September 1
How often have we heard Prime Minister Anthony Albanese trot out the story of his upbringing? As historian Joshua Black asks, “how did our politics become so personal, autobiographical and focused on storytelling?” This is his attempt to get to the bottom of our “story-driven political culture”, so prevalent in print and on screen, and to see if we are over the worst of the trend. Those stories, nonetheless, have proved influential in “shaping public perceptions of the political process”.
The Disappearers
Marlon James
Hamish Hamilton, $34.99, September 1
Marlon James returns to the setting of his Booker-winning A Brief History of Seven Killings. He’s writing about the extreme homophobia in Jamaica where he grew up and, as a gay man, knows personally. The Disappearers opens with the journal of Eddy Porteous, as he and seven other men rehearse a play by John Herbert. Their space is invaded by The Blackjacks, who proceed to unleash death and destruction on the men. What are the lingering consequences of this violence?
Bryan Derballa
The Newer World
Sebastian Barry
Faber & Faber, $34.99, September 8
I spoke to Sebastian Barry in 2020, when A Thousand Moons appeared. Set in the aftermath of the American Civil War and featuring his characters from Days Without End, it also introduced us to Tennyson Bouguereau and his sister Rosalie, freed slaves. The Irish writer said he would love to follow Tennyson again. Lo and behold, he has. And what a treat to read of Tennyson’s dramatic voyage through life and his perspectives on that earlier novel, all in Barry’s beautiful prose.
The Boy Who Loved Dolls
John A. Scott
Puncher & Wattmann, $34.95, September 8
The start of poet John A. Scott’s first novel since 2014’s N seems straightforward enough. Anna Baille, actor-wife of Jean-Jacques Baille, is kidnapped on a country road in France. Fast forward a few years and things seem less clear-cut when Susan Vaughan arrives at his Manderley-like mansion to begin a series of interviews about his films and to prepare a documentary. There are secrets to uncover and pleasures to be had in Scott’s characteristically inventive style.
Taipei Story
Rebecca F. Kuang
The Borough Press, $34.99, September 15
It’s only a year since the remarkably productive Rebecca Kuang, author of Yellowface, published her monster fantasy novel Katabasis and here she is, after a minor adjustment to her authorial name, with a coming-of-age story about Chinese-American Lily heading from Boston to Taipei to improve her language skills and get her fill of the culture she feels cut off from. It’s a time of language mishaps, sexual mishaps and dealing with death when her “gonggong” dies in China.
Hawking
Graham Farmelo
John Murray, $36.99, September 22
The dedication in this biography of the renowned theoretical physicist is “for anyone thinking of giving up on life”. Which seems appropriate given that, at the age of 21, Hawking was diagnosed with motor neurone disease and expected to live only a few more years. He survived more than 50. Graham Farmelo tackles all aspects of Hawking’s remarkable life − his elucidation of black holes, his “interrogative way of doing science”, his astonishing fame and his troubled personal life.
Waves of Plenty
Mark Cully
La Trobe University Press, $39.99, September 22
With all the policy chatter in the political sphere about migration numbers, economist Mark Cully’s history, subtitled “Immigration and the Making of Australia”, has arrived at the right time. He’s not arguing for immigration, he is writing about the many migrants who have been changed by coming here and how they have in turn changed Australia. As he writes, you couldn’t tell the history of this country over the past 200 years “without centering it around migration”.
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