Looking for something to read? Here are 10 new books

This week’s book reviews range from a fictionalised account of a cult leader and cosy crime, to Tasmania’s Indigenous past and a history (and possible future) of artificial intelligence. Happy reading!

FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK

This Is Not a Game
Kelly Mullen
Century, $34.99

You already know a book called This Is Not a Game will totally be a game, right? If you’re not sleuth enough to work that out, sight unseen, Kelly Mullen’s clever murder mystery might not be for you. It’s a blackly funny take on the locked-room subgenre – the locked room in this case being a palatial abode on an island on Lake Huron (complete with drawbridge and moat), the guests trapped there in the middle of an epic snowstorm. Lusty, super-rich widow Jane Ireland has invited a diverse company for a charity auction, and she’s stabbed to death before the night is out. Two of the guests – crotchety grandmother Mimi, and her granddaughter Addie – transform into an unlikely detective duo, unravelling a sordid web of taboo sex, intrigue and blackmail, sifting through an overabundance of suspects as clues and corpses mount. Mullen has created a ludic play on classic Agatha Christie-style crime fiction, more fun for being gossipy and backbiting and full of witty one-liners.

The Bearcat
Georgia Rose Phillips
Picador, $34.99

The Bearcat delves into the formative years of notorious cult leader Anne Hamilton-Byrne, who led the Family, a cabal that followed a hodge-podge of Eastern religion and Christianity and believed Anne’s claim to be the reincarnation of Jesus. Nonfiction accounts and documentaries have laid bare lurid details of child abuse – Anne illegally adopted children through the 1960s and ’70s, dyed their hair peroxide blonde like hers and some were administered LSD as part of their indoctrination. Georgia Rose Phillips focuses on Anne – born Evelyn – as a girl and young woman, her own childhood in the 1920s and the traumatic experiences that drew her to harm others later in life. Phillips does have a gift for striking phrases and imagery, but there are gaps and inconsistencies in this reimagining that jar with what we know of the history. As a result, The Bearcat isn’t entirely persuasive either as historical fiction or as a psychological portrait, though its subject is a fascinating and deeply disturbing figure.

Everything Lost, Everything Found
Matthew Hooton
4th Estate, $34.99

Memory rises and ebbs in this poignant novel spanning almost a century. Everything Lost, Everything Found follows Jack through an unusual childhood and seven decades later in old age. As a youth, he’s drawn into the Brazilian Amazon during the rubber boom, following his parents to Henry Ford’s rubber-tree plantation, where his mother dies in a tragic accident and Jack is forced to find his father in the jungle. Recollections of that time resurface unbidden when he’s elderly and living in the rust belt in Michigan, Jack swimming in a surfeit of memories as his wife succumbs to dementia. Hooton’s novel is an emotive and richly told tale of grief and loss, of family and the haunted halls of memory. I’ve spent time in the Brazilian Amazon myself, and the evocation of its wild beauty and perils, and the dark industrial history now half-swallowed by nature, is vivid and accurate, adding an exotic layer to this free-flowing and immersive book.

The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran
Shida Bazyar (trans. Ruth Martin)
Scribe, $29.99

Set over four decades – with sections in 1979, the year of the Iranian Revolution, and every 10 years until the Green Movement protests in 2009 – this novel portrays an Iranian family forced to leave their homeland, capturing a spirit of political resistance as much as the struggle to adapt to life as refugees. It begins with Behsad, an idealistic young communist revolutionary who wants the Shah deposed as much as anyone. He fights for his beliefs and falls in love with the intelligent, equally brave Nahid. Ten years later, Nahid takes up the story from West Germany, having fled when the mullahs seized power. A return to Tehran in 1999 focuses on Nahid’s daughter Laleh, her reconnection with a birthplace she misremembers and a family history full of secrets, and finally, there’s Laleh’s brother, Mo, energised by witnessing the wave of Iranian protests a decade later. Shida Bazyar captures the contradictions of her characters and their predicament with clarity and poise, giving complex and emotionally layered perspectives on exile and return.

A Shipwreck in Fiji
Nilima Rao
Echo, $32.99

A Shipwreck in Fiji is the second in Nilima Rao’s series of historical mystery novels set in Fiji in the early 20th century. It follows Sergeant Akal Singh, an unwilling Indian transplant, on his latest adventure. He’s been dragooned into investigating reports of Germans – a very long way from the battlefields of World War I – on the island of Ovalau, accompanied by Constable Taviti Tukana, who’ll be visiting his uncle, a powerful tribal chief. They’re to act as chaperone to two venturesome European sightseers, Mary and Katherine, while checking in on Ovalau’s only cop – a teenage recruit with a dramatic temperament. Nothing goes according to plan, and Akal is soon drawn into the apparent murder of a deeply unpopular merchant, and the problem of a group of European sailors held captive by Taviti’s uncle. Amid all that clamour, one of the ladies accompanying them has her own agenda to pursue. Rao’s novel is a retro delight, with an endearing detective (and sidekick) navigating a web of cultures and trying to resolve island trouble.

NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK

Fearless Beatrice Faust: Sex, Feminism & Body Politics
Judith Brett
Text, $36.99

She was a motherless child with a “visceral hunger for love” who grew up to be a political advocate for the body’s appetites and pleasures. A woman dogged by physical ailments who struggled with feelings of worthlessness while projecting a public persona of sexual assurance and intellectual independence. As a “sceptical feminist” who enjoyed feminine glamour, she found herself at odds with the women’s liberation movement even as she campaigned for abortion rights and founded the Women’s Electoral Lobby in 1972. This nuanced and, at times, poignant biography of Beatrice Faust captures its subject in all her contradictions, illuminating how some of Faust’s more perplexing views – on pornography and paedophilia in particular – were shaped by childhood experiences and her supreme sexual confidence. “She had no trouble saying no, and she didn’t always see why other women might.” While clear-sighted about Faust’s blind spots and idiosyncrasies, Judith Brett pays tender tribute to the bravery of “this frail, super-smart woman”.

Trouwerner: A Tasmanian Elder’s Story of Ancient Wisdom and Hope
Aunty Patsy Cameron & Martin Flanagan
Magabala Books, $34.99

“Walking through the bush with Patsy is like entering a crowded room when you’re a stranger and your companion seems to know everyone.” This classically Flanaganesque observation distils perfectly the spirit of this singular book. Journalist and author Martin Flanagan, a Tasmanian of convict Irish descent, grew up on the myth that Tasmanian Aboriginal people were extinct. In a searching tale that wends its way through the rugged landscape of Tasmania’s past, Indigenous elder and historian Patsy Cameron is his guide. Woven into their conversation is previous Tasmanian governor Kate Warner and the story of her journey into a fuller understanding of Tasmania’s Indigenous heritage. At the centre of this quest is the story of Mannalargenna, the warrior leader of Cameron’s clan, and his fraught negotiations with George Robinson, the preacher whose mission forced Aboriginal Tasmanians into exile. After contemplating a portrait of Mannalargenna, Flanagan asks, “He knows who he is. Who are we?”

The Shortest History of AI
Toby Walsh
Black Inc, $27.99

If your brain tends to seize up with fear or incomprehension at the mention of AI, this concise and entertaining history is for you. Right from the playful opening lines, “Artificial Intelligence began on 18 June 1956. It was a Monday” you know you are in the hands of an assured storyteller. Toby Walsh, an Australian professor of AI and world-leading researcher, is also a sci-fi nerd who’s not afraid to judiciously insert himself into the narrative to add personal commentary and underscore just how recent this history is. He acknowledges Alan Turing as the father of modern computing and AI but also pays due to the 19th-century mathematical whizz Ada Lovelace, who was the world’s first computer programmer. This history is delivered through the six key ideas that encapsulate how AI has evolved and where it might be heading. The thinking behind these ideas is made accessible through easy-to-follow examples and some amusing “conversations” with ChatGPT that highlight both its astonishing range and its capacity for bullshit.

Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know
Mark Lilla
Hurst & Company, $44.99

For Socrates, the unexamined life was not worth living. Freud insisted that we will always be strangers to ourselves. We are, says historian Mark Lilla, in a constant state of hide and seek, torn between the desire to know and the fear of what we might find. Religious injunctions against rule-breaking and curiosity – Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden, for example – enact this inner conflict. “Like all successful bureaucrats, we have learnt to kick the hard problem upstairs,” says Lilla, whose punchy way with words is integral to the pleasure of this work. While he describes his narrative as a ramble rather than a journey with a fixed destination, he has clear polemical targets, as evident in his caricature of mysticism. Even so, his overall contention that “the harder the truth, the greater the temptation to escape it” rings powerfully true. By exposing the machinery of this inner tug-of-war, Lilla challenges us to confront these impulses in ourselves.

Diet, Drugs, and Dopamine: The New Science of Achieving a Healthy Weight
David A. Kessler
Text, $36.99

David Kessler has struggled with his weight all his life and is now benefiting from the new anti-obesity drugs. But as a medical practitioner and former US Food and Drug Administration commissioner, he is at pains to stress that these medications are not a silver bullet. They come with side effects, are helpful for only as long as they are being used and do not address underlying causes. Obesity and its attendant health issues, Kessler says, are on the rise because of highly processed foods that have “quietly commandeered the reward centres of our brains” and encouraged a form of addiction. In this thorough and educative work, he sets out why it is vital for those in the grip of this addiction to employ a range of methods such as a balanced diet, behavioural therapies and physical activity, as well as weight-loss drugs. He also addresses the potentially harmful messaging of the body-positivity movement, which questions the health benefits of weight reduction. Diet, Drugs, and Dopamine is a sensible and sober guide to lasting change.

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