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If you thought the publishing cycle might slow down over summer, think again. February arrives this weekend with a host of cracking new books, and it looks like there’s something for everyone.
The Afterlife of Harry Playford
Steven Carroll
Fourth Estate, $34.99
We first met DS Stephen Minter in Miles Franklin-winning novelist Steven Carroll’s first, impressive foray into literary crime, Death of a Foreign Gentleman, which was set in Cambridge, after World War II. Now Minter and his partner, Brigid Delaney, who’s involved in the early days of ASIO, are £10 Poms based in the Victorian seaside town of Queenscliff. It’s the early ’50s, Cold War years, and a politician, Harry Playford, has gone for a swim and vanished. There’s more to the trouble with Harry than meets the eye, in this novel of surprising connections.
How to Kill a Guy in Ten Dates
Shailee Thompson
Atria, $34.99
The premise of this debut fiction is glorious: while a serial killer is running amok in New York City, Jamie is writing a PhD titled All’s Fair in Love and Gore, which is an imaginative take on the intersection of romcom and slasher films. And guess what happens to poor Jamie? You got it in one. She’s plunged into that very scenario when she goes on a locked-in speed dating night at a New York club called Serendipity. There’s a sort of running commentary on both genres, and if they’re your cup of tea then this novel is made for you.
Duty to Warn
Charlotte Grieve
Hachette, $34.99
Little did Age and SMH investigative journalist Charlotte Grieve know when she started digging into the previously much-admired surgeon Munjed Al Muderis’ titanium implant procedures for amputees that it would lead to a massive defamation trial and that she would wind up on the witness stand for six days. The judge found in her favour on the basis of “contextual truth and public interest”, although Al Muderis is appealing. This is no dry courtroom drama. How Grieve came to the story through the experiences of her father brings a personal touch to an important story.
Run For Your Life
Konrad Marshall
Hardie Grant, $36.99
There’s a genre label for this sort of book − stunt memoir. An author, in this case Good Weekend writer Konrad Marshall, sets himself a challenge − in this the gruelling prospect of going for a run every day for a year, which is no easy task when you’re pretty unfit and somewhat overweight, or “(technically) obese”. But Marshall leavens his own grunts and groans by delving into the “beautiful complexity” of running with the input of various committed runners such as Steve Moneghetti, musician Husky Gawenda, Jessica Hull, Grace Tame and sprint star Gout Gout. If you like pounding the pavement, this inspirational book is for you.
Bugger
Michael Mohammed Ahmad
Hachette, $34.99
Hamoodi is 10 years old and immersed in the world he loves − Power Rangers. He lives with his mother and sister in a small run-down apartment and is bullied at school. His father, Ali, has returned to the “mother-land” and the rest of the family are all in Sydney. Hamoodi’s cousin, Alooshi, comes to his rescue against the bullies, but there are dangers for Hamoodi closer to home. Gradually he will realise, in this confronting and uncompromising novel, that in this world “there are only boys and beasts”.
The First Albanese Government: Governing in an Age of Disruption and Diction, 2022-2025
Eds., Michelle Grattan, John Halligan & John Hawkins
UNSW Press, $49.99
This is one for the political wonks. Veteran journalist-turned-academic Michelle Grattan and colleagues at the University of Canberra have assembled a comprehensive series of essays examining everything from the NDIS to housing, energy and environment policies with a few topics in between. In his first term, Grattan concludes, Albanese was a “cautious brand of leader, mostly unwilling to exceed what he saw as his mandate. He also had a thin majority.” Let’s see what the second Albanese government can do.
In a Common Hour
Sita Walker
Ultimo, $34.99
Little does committed teacher Paul Bush know the problems heading his way as the lunch bell rings for a year-12 class to whom he bravely read Pablo Neruda’s love poem, Every Day You Play. The students are a diverse lot and face many of the issues that confront young people today. But one, Cameron Ashby, has something on Bush. Award-winning memoirist Sita Walker’s eventful first novel mostly takes place in the hour-long lunch break, with some crucial flashbacks. Walker is a teacher herself and this novel rings heartbreakingly true.
Vigil
George Saunders
Bloomsbury, $32.99
In his second novel, the Booker-winning author is back on the familiar territory between life and death, but this time his focus is not so much on limbo but on how and in what state of self-awareness the wealthy and generally appalling K.J. Boone makes his “transition … leaving the husk of himself behind”. Jill Blaine returns from her mysterious realm for the “challenging task” of ensuring he confronts the consequences of his actions and to tell her own story. “Comfort, for all else is futility,” writes the Buddhist Saunders.
How to Dress for Old Age
David Carlin & Peta Murray
Upswell, $32.99
Playwrights David Carlin and Peta Murray are both “in the gap between being extant and not being extant” − a certain time of life when parents have gone or are going, leaving no one ahead of them. This sort-of memoir is a book of great tenderness, self-scrutiny and consideration of how you care for ageing and dying parents and how you negotiate your own life when you too are beginning to age. As Carlin puts it, “how frustrating it is to be old and still at the beginning, or how quietly thrilling”. It’s a wise book, dealing with issues everyone will face in an original way.
Two Islands
Ian Kemish
UQP, $34.99
In his memoir, The Consul, Ian Kemish gave us chapter and verse about life as an Australian diplomat. Now he has turned to fiction, mining his experiences of the tragic events that occurred in the Balkans in the 1990s. Niko, who somehow survived an appalling massacre and is a crucial witness for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, has done a bunk − much to the frustration of Australian war crimes investigator Anna. It’s not that Niko doesn’t want to testify, he wants to survive, and has bolted to a remote Scottish island. And more danger is heading his way in this convincing post-Cold War thriller.
Bird Deity
John Morrissey
Text, $34.99
David works as a scout in an alien world in a distant future. His job is to wander “the plateau” to steal the strangely powerful artefacts from the “parasapes”, placid survivors of an ancient civilisation, for the colonial power. He’s due to finish his term, but things are complicated by his relationship with Eliza, her baby, and the child’s father, Tom, another scout who has disappeared. When asked to make a freelance trip to the plateau for a visiting anthropologist, David’s life gets more tangled. This is an intriguing, subtle novel from the acclaimed short-story writer.
Soft Serve
George Kemp
UQP, $29.99
Playwright George Kemp’s first novel is, as he says, Chekhovian. It’s filled with a familiar sense of longing, its characters in a sort of state of suspended animation in a fast-food outlet as fire threatens the town of Yinabil. Fern, Ethan and Jacob − three sides of a “jagged scalene love triangle” − have left school, but they’re missing Taz, killed in a hang glider accident days earlier. Pat, his bereft mum, works at the Maccas where they converge, but their stories range far beyond. Beginning with one wake and ending with another, Kemp’s is a moving and tender debut.
My Cursed Vagina
Lally Katz
Allen & Unwin, $34.99
“My writing and my life have always been intertwined,” says playwright and actor Lally Katz in this delicious and somewhat berserk account of professional success and a disaster-prone love life: “Everything that I write, I have to live.” With a penchant for psychics − she spends hundreds on Bella and Cookie in New York − Katz is desperate to get rid of the titular curse and find love. Unsurprisingly, her voice is fully alive on the page as she interrogates her past and ponders her future. Along an eventful way, she is a joy to spend time with.
A Hymn to Life
Gisèle Pelicot
Bodley Head, $36.99
February 17
“For better or worse,” said the man who officiated at the wedding of Gisèle Pelicot and her husband, Dominique. It couldn’t have been much worse: in 2020 Dominique was arrested and charged with drugging his wife and encouraging dozens of men to rape her over the course of many years. This courageous French woman waived anonymity and gave extensive evidence “attending the autopsy of our relationship”. In this candid memoir of the splintering of her life, Gisèle Pelicot says, “I will never be reduced to my tortured body; that is not where my soul is”.
The Shortest History of Innovation
Andrew Leigh
Black Inc., $27.99
February 17
There are plenty of stories about innovation that focus on the “Eureka” moment. But most innovations emerge from much more than a singular revelation. Andrew Leigh reckons most breakthroughs arise from “hard work, frustration, necessity”. He’s not the first to distinguish between “sustaining innovations” and “disruptive innovations”, but the latest in the terrific “Short History” series is bang up to date with discussion of AI and how geopolitical tension could blunt future collaborative innovation.
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