3 weeks ago
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This week’s fiction ranges from reimagined Greek myths to the challenges of middle-age, and in non-fiction there’s Joanna Lumley, a history of female aviators and an examination of Silicon Valley’s tech oligarchs.
FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Eros: Queer Myths for Lovers
Zoe Terakes
Hachette, $29.99
Trans actor and writer Zoe Terakes retells five ancient Greek myths through a queer lens in these sculpted and intensely charged short fictions. It begins with the legend of Iphis and Ianthe – a trans love story even in ancient sources such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses – and allows the trans character to narrate. In the original, the goddess Isis transforms Iphis (assigned female at birth, raised as a boy to avoid a lethal form of patriarchy) into a man before marriage to Ianthe. In this version, Iphis seizes the chance to tell “the story of how I got my dick”, noting it’s also the story of “the million ways people tried to protect us and did the very opposite”. The re-centring of this narrative about growing up trans is moving, emphatic that the skewed factors are misogyny and a rigid gender binary, not queer love. Terakes reworks tales of Icarus, Eurydice, Kallisto and Hermaphroditus – the last a walk on the wild side in King’s Cross that should become a touchstone of queer Ozlit – alongside works by authors such as Frank Moorhouse or Dorothy Porter or David Malouf. Eros: Queer Myths for Lovers is a potent mix of ancient and modern, undeniably touched by the Muse.
Benbecula
Graeme Macrae Burnet
Text, $32.99
True-crime fans will be drawn to this fictionalised retelling of a historical triple murder. The case is grisly, the setting remote. It focuses on killings committed by a 25-year-old labourer, Angus MacPhee, on the island of Benbecula in the Outer Hebrides. Angus killed both parents and his aunt, smashing their heads in with a rock, in July 1857. Graeme Macrae Burnett reimagines events through the eyes of Malcolm, Angus’s brother – a witness and secondary victim in the case, whose life is blighted by his brother’s crimes and the ostracism he subsequently faces in a small community where the stain of such horror shadows his every step. The author has crafted a slender, compelling Victorian gothic from real-life events, and the sheer bleakness of the tale – the hostility and wildness of the environment, and the violent madness that will annihilate the MacPhee family – holds a dark mirror to nature (and nurture), while preserving the savage gallows humour, and sly taste for absurdity, that leavens Macrae Burnett’s other works.
Wreck
Catherine Newman
Doubleday $34.99
Wreck takes us into the life and mind of Rocky – wife to the reliable Nick, mother to adult children, and terrible insomniac – as she navigates the challenges of middle age. Rocky’s daughter Willa would accuse her of having no filter, and honestly, that’s part of the charm of this neurotic, ultimately philosophical, domestic comedy. Our narrator is a hopeful worrier, but her anxiety spirals after a friend of her kids dies suddenly in a train accident. Death and disaster are preoccupations for Rocky and she seems to have worried herself into an unsightly rash that won’t resolve on its own. Newman gives us characters developed in previous novels, though Wreck reads perfectly well as a standalone: Rocky’s restless, often amusing internal dialogue and the way she relates to her immediate family will draw the reader in from the get-go and the domestic dynamics are observed with unfiltered wit. It’s a novel that dwells on the question of how we respond to chaos, death, and events beyond our control, but with a lightness of touch, and a sharp sense of the incongruity between exterior and interior lives.
A Long Winter
Colm Toibin
Picador Australia, $29.99
A standout from his story collection Mothers and Sons (2005), Colm Toibin’s A Long Winter has now been republished by itself. The tale takes us into a small village in the Pyrenees. One snowbound morning, after a heated argument with her husband, Miquel’s mother abandons her family, destination unknown. Miquel’s brother Jordi leaves too, for military service far away from home. With only his father remaining – an embittered man now spurned by the village – Miquel must survive the harsh winter, and his simmering resentment at the way his father treats him, while searching for his mother. When a servant from a neighbouring village, the orphaned Manolo, arrives to help about the house, his furtive longing seems to offer new possibilities of love, and family, amid the ashes of betrayal and abandonment. Toibin uncovers nuanced corners of a young man’s emotional life in a vivid setting. It’s a finely wrought queer story from a justly celebrated Irish writer, and worth picking up as a taster if you haven’t read the book in which it first appeared.
A Catalogue of Love
Erin Hortle
Summit Books, $34.99
Tasmania’s belated response to its grim history of homophobia (sodomy was only decriminalised in the 1990s) has led to it becoming one the more socially progressive states for rainbow families today. Erin Hortle’s A Catalogue of Love focuses on Neika, a young woman raised by her father and stepfather on Bruny Island. Her mother died when she was a toddler. Neika depicts the deep love shared by her male parents and the touching bond she has with her stepfather who, like Neika, is a surfing enthusiast and at home in the wildness of nature. Yet, she comes to question, too, the effect of maternal absence and its influence on her life. Gender has had an impact on Neika’s development – including the trauma of violence against women – and as she matured Neika longed for and sought out the female companionship she lacked as a child. Hortle can be a sentimental writer when it comes to love and the natural world, something that sits in tension with her remorselessly clear-eyed take on the injustice of gender inequality.
NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
What Have I Done?
Ben Elton
Macmillan, $36.99
Among Ben Elton’s many credits is the brilliant Blackadder, one of the all-time classics of British comedy – which he co-wrote with Richard Curtis. His autobiography, not just a memoir but also a portrait of the artist as young man and into his mature years, documents the work and dedication required to come up with scripts like that – Elton, in his early years, often completing short plays in a white heat over a single day or night. In writing that flows effortlessly, he takes us back to his childhood – his father (a physics professor) and his uncle (historian GR Elton, whom I studied at uni), having left Europe in the 1939 because they were Jewish. Elton, who makes it clear that he doesn’t identify as Jewish, left home at 16 to pursue the writing life and wound up in Manchester where he met most of the co-creators of the legendary TV sitcom The Young Ones. He was 21, and officially a writer! One thing led to his mother, as they say, and before long he was re-forging and writing Blackadder and Blackadder Goes Forth (informed by his early reading of A.J.P Taylor). It’s a fascinating tale of coincidences, the right people turning up at just the right time, and cunning plans.
Atlantic Furies
Midge Gillies
Scribe, $37.99
In June 1928, the sleepy Newfoundland fishing town of Trepassey was roused from its slumbers by the outside world – Amelia Earhart with her crew onboard Fokker F.VII named Friendship. In Harbour Grace, another fishing town 100 miles away, was her competitor Mabel Boll with her co-pilots on the Columbia. Both were stuck in spitting distance of each other at the same time, waiting for the weather to lift so they could live their dreams of being the first woman to cross the Atlantic by plane. They are a key part of Midge Gillies’ informed study of seven female aviators, all what you might call characters – Earhart shocking the locals of Trepassey by getting about in trousers; Boll a former cabaret artist who married into serious money and became known as the “Queen of Diamonds”. Another, Lady Anne Savile, was in her 60s when she took to the air. But make no mistake, these were determined, resolute figures. And though Earhart may be the most famous, this is a highly engaging group portrait that incorporates those lesser-known pioneers.
My Book of Treasures
Joanna Lumley
Hodder & Stoughton, $36.99
Joanna Lumley is a self-confessed hoarder and this collection of her favourite writing – randomly gathered over the years – is the result of that Jackdaw impulse. It’s an idiosyncratic selection ranging from David Hockney’s amusingly spirited defence of his 40 cigarettes a day, Rossini’s advice to a fellow composer on the creative benefits of leaving everything until the 11th hour, a beautifully reflective poem by Philip Larkin on old racehorses, and an amazingly mature poem written by a 13-year-old Wimbledon girl. Thrown into the mix is a hilarious transcript from a court case in Boston in which an attorney asks a pathologist if a body (whose brain was in a jar) could, nonetheless, still be alive. To which the pathologist replies, ‘And probably practising law in Massachusetts.’ Some of Lumley’s “treasures”are a bit ho-hum, but overall it’s just the thing to dip into on a lazy afternoon.
Full Corset and Stockings
Craig Horne
Melbourne Books, $39.99
On a hot summer’s day at his Northcote home in 1960, Craig Horne discovered his mother’s secret past. She had been a cricketer, playing at the top level for Victoria and Australia. Why were her trophies and newspaper articles stuffed away in a cupboard out of public view? It’s a question that runs through his history of women’s cricket, from its beginnings in England, its emergence in Australia in the 19th century and the blossoming of women’s cricket in the 1930s. The result is cultural history, infused with the immediacy of the personal, that takes in some of the great names of the game, such as Peggy Antonio (his mother’s Victorian captain) who was known as the “Grimmett girl” because of her prowess as a spin bowler. There was a distinctive independence and daring about these women that challenged society’s expectations, but which was dampened by the conservative post-war years – and which is key to why his mother’s trophies wound up in a cupboard. Entertaining, often intriguing social history that contextualises today’s exponents of the game.
Gilded Rage
Jacob Silverman
Bloomsbury, $34.99
When US author Jacob Silverman joined a Manhattan start-up in 2019 as director of special media projects), he got first-hand experience of the crazy-brave new world of venture capitalism and its pivotal role in what he calls America’s “slide into authoritarianism” – especially the role of Silicon Valley. Elon Musk may be the focus, but he takes in a gallery of oligarchs whose ambition is the alt-right radicalisation of the US and the elevation of a ruthless capitalism that makes the likes of J.P. Morgan look like a philanthropic business. Once grey eminence figures stayed in the background; not the crass new wave that includes his ex-start-up chief executive who ran for president in 2024. They not only want obscene wealth, but also the power to institute their authoritarian agenda. And, presently, they appear to be winning. Hair-raising.
