From Aussie crime to a literary giant’s last novel, here are 11 books to read this month

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Summer’s here and the time is right for … reading by the beach, as Martha and the Vandellas didn’t sing. Here are 11 books published this month to help you shake off Christmas sloth, keep you entertained and help you think about the world in fresh ways as we enter a new year.

Eleven books we are keen to read this month.

The Casino
Iain Ryan
Ultimo, $34.99

Iain Ryan has a thing about corruption in Queensland in the 1980s; witness his noir series about the Gold Coast − sunshine noir in the Sunshine State? − The Strip and The Dream. Now comes The Casino, in which private investigator Ewan Hayes gets a job to extract a journalist’s daughter from a dubious party in Melbourne and as a result gets on the wrong side of bikie boss Leo Norton. Ewan hightails it north, babysitting the 19-year-old, and they hunker down at the Saturn, a new casino. Norton demands a favour: find his mate Herb Fleming, but he’s not the only one looking for him. Meanwhile, local detective Lana Cohen is intrigued by a severed hand found on the beach … There’s a lot going on and most of it is highly dodgy.

Dreamwives
Claire Novak
HarperCollins, $34.99

The prolific Catherine “Claire” Jinks − she’s published more than 50 books, including thrillers, YA novels, children’s books and biography − has teamed up with screenwriter and children’s author Alexa “Novak” Moses for this witty and warm story of two disillusioned women who are sick and tired of domestic drudgery and how men categorise what they do. As Katrina’s husband tells her: “What you do isn’t work, it’s bullshit.” With old friend Michelle, the two decide to create their own business to get proper reward and revenge. The publishers, bless them, describe this novel as “momcom”.

Cape Fever
Nadia Davids
Scribner, $29.99

South African playwright and novelist Nadia Davids creates a genuinely disturbing atmosphere in this slow-burn, post-colonial gothic chiller set in 1920s Cape Town (we assume). Soraya, a woman from the Muslim quarter, goes to keep house for the seemingly well-heeled, but increasingly unsettling Mrs Hattingh. The latter is pining for the return of Timothy, her soldier son who has been in London since the end of World War I, while the former yearns for her family and her fiance, Nour. The spirit of the previous maid, Fatima, is hovering, and a disturbing painting seems to be able to speak. Davids ratchets up the tension when Mrs Hattingh starts writing to Nour on Soraya’s behalf.

Letters to Kafka
Christine Estima
House of Anansi, $34.99

No one knows the truth about the relationship between Franz Kafka and Milena Jesenska, journalist and the first translator of his work from German into another language, in her case, Czech. In 1920, they began intense correspondence and, briefly, an intense relationship that Kafka abruptly broke off after encounters in Vienna, although he gave her his diaries not long before his death. His letters to her have been published in Letters to Milena; he destroyed hers. Short-story writer Christine Estima’s historical novel speculates about their relationship and then looks at Jesenska’s life in the Czech resistance and her eventual death in Ravensbruck.

The Poems of Seamus Heaney
Eds.,Rosie Lavan & Bernard O’Donoghue, with Matthew Hollis
Faber & Faber, $89.99

In Digging, from his first collection, Death of a Naturalist (1966), the great Irish poet wrote: “Between my finger and my thumb/ The squat pen rests,/ I’ll dig with it.” Heaney did a power of poetic digging and this vast collection – nearly 1300 pages – is the result and the definitive edition of his work. Heaney won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995 and in his lecture, delivered in Stockholm that year, he said credit was due to poetry, “in our time and in all time for its truth to life, in every sense of that phrase”.

The First Law of the Bush
Geoff Parkes
Penguin, $34.99

Geoff Parkes has two strings to his bow – acclaimed non-fiction about rugby union, and gripping murder mysteries set in Nashville, a fictional town in New Zealand’s King Country. Nashville is where Ryan Bradley, the protagonist of his first crime novel, When the Deep Dark Bush Swallows You Whole, grew up and has returned to practise law. It’s been a year since Bill Dickerson’s unexplained fall to his death from a railway viaduct he was working on. His widow, Carol, is being refused compensation and wants Ryan to appeal ahainst the ruling. Remembering his late mother’s words to him – “Be a good lawyer. Help people who need helping” − Ryan starts digging and the secrets of a small community gradually come to the fore.

The Ten Year Affair
Erin Somers
Canongate, $34.99

There’s something electric in the air when Cora meets Sam at a baby group. They both take against a mother trying to feed her 10-month-old broccoli and they both take to each other. Or rather, they’d like to, but in Erin Somers’ second novel they decide − in a sort of very updated and much more sexualised Brief Encounter − to stay as friends. But Somers gives us an alternative, imaginative scenario from Cora’s point of view in which a full-blown affair develops. Gradually, the scenarios encroach on each other and … no spoilers here, but you can bank on a few surprises. The Ten Year Affair (pedants take note: no hyphen in the title) has some sharp wit and neat social observations.

Dark Desert Road
Tim Ayliffe
Echo, $34.99

After five novels featuring his reporter hero John Bailey, former ABC TV journalist Tim Ayliffe turns his back on his series for a standalone thriller in which Senior Constable Kit McCarthy, still copping old-school misogyny in the force, is feeling the effects of working in the child abuse squad. But Kit’s life is about to get a whole lot trickier when her dodgy estranged sister Billie, married to an even dodgier husband, American survivalist Danny-Lee, gets into a dangerous pickle and asks for her help. What with survivalists, white supremacists, bikies, and a murderous war criminal father, Kit has a lot to deal with if she’s to survive and help her sister.

A Time for Bravery
Eds., Anna Chang & Alice Grundy
Australia Institute Press, $35.99
January 12

The editors of this collection of essays reckon we are living in a time of poly-crisis and Australia needs “considered, determined and courageous action … to tackle the most critical crises of our age”. Yes, at Bondi Beach we recently saw magnificent individual acts of bravery, but the thinkers here − people such as Fatima Payman, Ben Quilty, Michelle O’Neil, Mike Rann, Georgina Long, Tim Costello, Frank Brennan and others − are addressing myriad problems stemming from issues such as racism, climate change, democracy, inadequate housing and more, and how our actions can help find solutions.

A Complete Fiction
R.L. Maizes
Text, $34.99
January 13

There have been several recent novels about the tangled nature of fiction writing and the intricacies of publishing. R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface and, closer to home, Dominic Amerena’s I Want Everything are two that spring to mind. Now comes R.L. Maizes’ story of a writer whose novel about sexual assault has been rejected umpteen times but who believes an editor at a large publishing house has plagiarised it for his own novel that has earned him a million-dollar deal. What does she do? Fires up the socials and accuses him of plagiarism. But then things start to get complicated for them both in this story of cancel culture, literary ethics and the damage caused by social media.

Julian Barnes says this will be his last novel.

Departure(s)
Julian Barnes
Jonathan Cape, $34.99
January 20

The great English writer turns 80 the day before publication of this novel, which he said will be his final one. He didn’t want it to be posthumously published. As he said in an interview with Publishers Weekly: “Having my last book published in my lifetime is more fun. I’ll be able to read my literary obituaries.” There’s a distinct autofiction element in this story of a widowed writer, Julian, who relates the tangled love story of Stephen and Jean and their marriage and his role in it. There’s plenty about ageing − not surprisingly − and mortality and watch out for the ageing Jimmy, a Jack Russell who almost steals the book.

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