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Enjoy some armchair travel with this week’s books, which traverse from South Korea to Lahore and the Hunter Valley in fiction, while in non-fiction, there’s a memoir from the Central African Republic, a tale of life for Ukrainians during the wa and a global investigation into the climate crisis.
FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
The Second Chance Convenience Store
Kim Ho-Yeon
Macmillan, $39.99
This heartwarming tale of second chances was a bestseller in Kim Ho-Yeon’s native South Korea. No doubt it will charm the globe. The slender novel traces a growing bond between the elderly Mrs Yeom – a former history teacher, now a convenience store owner – and a man named Dokgo. A regular face around Seoul train station, Dokgo is penniless and homeless with no memory of his past. None of that stops him intervening to return Mrs Yeom’s missing purse in an act of bravery and kindness that lands him a free meal and, eventually, a job. Their growing reliance on each other irks Mrs Yeom’s troubled son, who wants to sell the business from under his mother and hires a detective to unearth the mysterious past that led Dokgo to be in such dire straits. Kim’s soulful comic novel is an examination of ageing, loneliness and redemption that wears its wisdom lightly. It helps that it’s nested within a short, good-humoured Korean fable, one that resists sentiment while quietly insisting on the dignity of the dispossessed, and on the resilience to be found in communitarian spirit.
To the Moon
Jang Ryujin
Bloomsbury, $26.99
Less heartwarming is another South Korean offering, Jang Ryujin’s To the Moon, which has cold hard crypto at its core. Three women – Eun-sang, Jisong and Dahae – drudge away at a large corporate snack manufacturer. All have money troubles but respond in different ways. Eun-sang is constantly scheming to earn more, even setting up a mini-mart on her desk to bring in extra funds. Jisong spends her meagre wages on experiences, surfing trips and travelling to see her boyfriend. Dahae seeks a happy medium, though she’d be glad to see the end of her run-down studio apartment. When Eun-sang suggests making a cryptocurrency investment together, the volatile forces of the market spin between riches and ruin, testing their priorities, friendship and loyalty to one another. To the Moon is an offbeat slice-of-life novel that welds the low-key eccentricity and camaraderie, frustration and routine of office work to the much more dramatic absurdity and arbitrariness of high-risk speculation. Jang’s relatable tale of workplace friendship transforms into a financial rollercoaster, shining absurd light on how much more money capital makes than workers do.
The Sunbaker
P.A. Thomas
Echo, $32.99
The eponymous sunbaker in P.A. Thomas’ latest crime novel has, alas, been dead for some time. Forensic pathologist Nicola Fox discovers him posed on a banana lounge, Weekend at Bernie’s-style, at her holiday home in Brunswick Heads on the northern NSW coast. She quickly becomes a suspect and enlists her friend Jack Harris, a journalist in nearby Byron Bay, to help. Both Jack and his love interest, the aspiring lawyer Caitlin, are returning characters from the first novel in this beach mystery series (The Beacon). As they work to find the murderer in this one, stakes are raised when the organised crime squad decides to get involved, and Jack begins to suspect police complicity and cover-up. P.A. Thomas has a terse, action-focused prose style, and knows how to construct a mystery and unravel its twists and revelations with impact. The Byron-based crime series also features brisk romantic tension between the main characters, lending a frisson to the investigation as it delves into a web of crime and corruption.
Broke Road
Matthew Spencer
Allen & Unwin, $34.99
Homicide detective Rose Reilly returns in Broke Road, Matthew Spencer’s follow-up to the award-winning crime thriller Black River (2023). Rose has been called this time to the Hunter Valley, where a woman has been found dead in her home in a remote wine-growing town. Media immediately cast suspicion on the victim’s husband, a mining geologist, though Rose is unconvinced and annoyed by the distraction. More distracting still? The case appears to have attracted the interest of true crime writer and journalist Adam Bowman. Adam became famous after writing a book about events that almost killed Rose, so she has complicated feelings, as you can imagine. As investigations proceed, Rose uncovers evidence that the victim’s environmental activism might have provided a motive for the crime. It’s not much to go on, and Rose is no closer to eliminating suspects when another victim, murdered the same way, is found, accelerating the urgency of tracking down the killer as this muscular sequel unfolds.
What Kept You?
Raaza Jamshed
Giramondo, $32.95
An atmosphere of dark fairytale underlies Raaza Jamshed’s debut novel What Kept You? We follow Jahan, growing up as a girl in Lahore under the spell of her Nani’s stories, folktales commingled with lived suffering and strife that came after the British partition of India. As a woman, Jahan will migrate to the rural fringes around Sydney, where she will live with her husband, Ali. There she faces adversity – the destructiveness of bushfire, the pain of miscarriage – throwing her back into memories of her childhood in Pakistan. If the past overshadows the present, somewhat unbalancing the book’s dual narrative structure, Jamshed can write commanding prose. At her best, the author crafts an effortless, sharply rendered kind of fabulism that takes in tragedy but cycles ever onward into reinvention and metamorphosis. These latter qualities are mimicked within the text’s choric inventiveness itself. Jamshed’s storytelling feels unfettered by formal constraint, flowing with poetic economy and assurance, energy and sensitivity, between resonant episodes in the life it examines.
NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Human Nature
Kate Marvel
Scribe, $36.99
Traditionally, scientists have been reluctant to talk about their feelings. Emotions, it is said, cloud one’s judgment. But as Kate Marvel observes in this exquisitely wrought work about what it means to be a climate scientist, “pretending we feel nothing about our changing world doesn’t make us objective. It makes us liars.” Marvel spends her days conjuring the future through computer modelling. The findings are profoundly alarming but she, like all climate scientists, are doomed to be the Cassandras of the present day, to see what is coming and be ignored. Not surprisingly, anger, fear and guilt are among the emotions covered here, but so are wonder, surprise, hope and love. While computer models, “made of only physics and code”, are blind to life’s beauty, they also run on the principle that everything is connected. Honouring this, Marvel puts emotions back into the equations that underlie climate science. The result is a work on the subject unlike anything you will have read before. Rigorous yet lyrical, steely eyed yet deeply felt, it is a hymn to our precious, precarious world.
Field Notes From Death’s Door
Katie Treble
ABC Books, $35.99
Katie Treble was saying her farewells at the hospital in the war-ravaged town of Bria in the Central African Republic where she’d worked as a doctor with Médecins Sans Frontières when one of her patients asked her to make a promise. “We’ve been forgotten by the whole world. You have to talk about what happened.” As a young girl, Treble was acutely aware of the pain of others and driven by an urgent need to fix the ills of the world. Working for MSF, she wryly reflects, was the perfect vocation for “someone with my level of Weltschmerz and personal dysfunction”. It was a baptism by fire in a country devastated by its colonial history, corruption and rebel groups hungry for its buried wealth. Malaria is rife. Death a daily occurrence. Her patients, colleagues and black humour keep her going until she feels herself beginning to break. Treble has more than fulfilled her promise to her patient in this haunting, heartbreaking and urgent memoir bearing witness to suffering that never makes it to the headlines.
A Passion for Passion
Alice Fraser
Unbound, $34.99
Until now, my only exposure to Alice Fraser’s unique brand of comedy was on ABC radio some years ago when I was bowled over by her mix of fierce wit, whimsy and sorrow. I would not have picked her for a romance fiction maven. Romance is, as she points out, maligned among genre fiction because it has traditionally been written “by women for women”. After romping through this hilarious mock survey of the cover blurbs of D’Ancey LaGuarde, mythical romance writer extraordinaire, I couldn’t help wanting to read the non-existent works themselves. But that would take the fun and punch out of the potted, wild plot lines. Among the offerings here, there’s a Victorian heroine who falls for a hot air balloonist in The Heights of Longing, a post-apocalyptic threesome, and a supernatural romance between a half-octopus prince and an orphaned octopus heroine. It’s all a gleeful, tender tribute to her mother’s stash of romance fiction Fraser found in the family junk room as a girl.
The Gift of Not Belonging
Rami Kaminski
Scribe, $32.99
Not a joiner? Wary of group think? Happy with your own company? Untroubled by FOMO? There’s every chance, says psychiatrist Rami Kaminski, that you’re an “otrovert” or “one who is facing a different direction” from those who identify with the hive. Kaminski’s goal is to shed light on the “freedom and fulfilment that come from living life off the communal grid” and the contribution made by such a perspective. Instead of feeling ashamed of not being a team player or a conformist, he wants society and otroverts themselves to accept their disposition as valid. I was pretty sure I met the criteria and the questionnaire at the end confirmed this, although I’m not entirely comfortable with the label. I found some of Kaminski’s claims about otroverts too sweeping and definitive, especially those regarding their individualist ethic. “They would never attend a political rally,” he says. As a putative otrovert, I have to disagree! This said, The Gift of Not Belonging is a rewarding work that broadens our understanding of personality types and ways of being human.
A Bunker in Kyiv
John Lyons with Sylvie Le Clezio
ABC Books, $34.99
On the nightly TV news we see missiles flying, and the devastation left behind: the shattered Ukrainian apartment blocks, the villages decimated. A Bunker in Kyiv provides the bigger picture of how Ukrainians are living life to the fullest while dedicating themselves to supporting the war effort. What is striking about this army of civilians is not just their devotion to their country but the creative ways in which they are working behind the scenes, often on top of their regular jobs. There are university professors delivering lectures online from trenches in the Donbas, a retail worker-turned-sniper putting her marksmanship skills to work, women and children making homemade Molotov cocktails to be thrown into the air vents of Russian tanks, a psychologist helping soldiers with PTSD through animal therapy. Most news reports of war zones elicit our pity. John Lyons’ portraits of ordinary Ukrainians elicit our admiration and awe.
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