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We’ve entered peak publishing season and picking stand-out titles is more difficult than ever – there are so many hitting the bookshops. Here are 17 of them – published today or in the next week or two – but there are loads more crackers on the way to tempt you.
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
Kiran Desai
Hamish Hamilton, $34.99
Kiran Desai won the Booker Prize for her second novel, The Inheritance of Loss, in 2006, and has published nothing since. Now comes this immense love story − not as large as Vikram Seth’s monster, A Suitable Boy − that spans years, continents, classes and families. Desai told The New York Times the book had swallowed her life, and she feared she would never finish it. But when she despaired, she was nurtured by her mother, the novelist Anita Desai, who has also been a Booker contender. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny was last week shortlisted for this year’s Booker.
Kiran Desai’s novel, her first since 2006, has been shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize.Credit: M. Sharkey
Destination Moon
Kate Reid
Simon & Schuster, $49.99
Pursuing a career in F1 engineering in Britain brought Kate Reid stress, depression and panic attacks. And eventually anorexia nervosa, even as she had started experimenting with baking, “finding it more like science and engineering than cooking”. She returned to Australia in the nick of time and got help, but “it was French pastry that stopped me dead in my tracks”. Paris called and later, back in Australia, she established her own, now world-famous croissanterie, Lune. Reid tells her story with candour. She aimed for the moon − and got there.
Pictures of You
Tony Birch
UQP, $45
This lovely hardback is a perfect way to encounter the genius of Tony Birch’s short stories if you don’t have his collections already. There are three examples from his first, Shadowboxing, which was published almost 20 years ago, and several from more recent collections such as The Promise, Common People and Dark As Last Night. But what’s particularly good is the inclusion of stories that appeared in literary journals such as Heat, Overland and The Monthly. Birch writes brilliantly, from the heart, about tough times and people.
Tony Birch is a master of the short story.Credit: Chris Hopkins
A Woman’s Eye, Her Art
Drusilla Modjeska
Penguin, $55
At the heart of Drusilla Modjeska’s examination of the work of women modernist artists is the question she poses early on: “Women as subject, women as object. Whose subject, whose object?” Nearly 30 years after Stravinsky’s Lunch, her very personal reassessment of Australian painters Grace Cossington Smith and Stella Bowen, Modjeska turns her gaze on the life and work of Paula Modersohn-Becker, Claude Cahun, Lee Miller, Dora Maar and others of “the radical generation of artist-women” who emerged in the early 20th century. Of course, it’s beautifully illustrated.
Defiance
Bob Brown
Black Inc., $36.99
The title veteran environmentalist Bob Brown chose for his memoir of a life of activism is apposite as it means, he says, “defying the laws that serve those who are exploiting the planet and its people, while upholding the laws of nature … ” His activism began in 1974 − in Chicago of all places − and he hasn’t looked back since. While this book revisits some of his campaigning, it’s more about inspiring people now, using examples from history and around the world to encourage people in their own acts of defiance.
Runt and the Diabolical Dognapping
Craig Silvey
Allen & Unwin, $26.99
It’s a cliche, isn’t it, when you’re told a book is for readers from age eight to 80. But if you read Craig Silvey’s first book about Runt, Annie Shearer’s scruffy little mutt with the extraordinary hidden talents, you’ll know that in this case it’s true. Three years on, and after Runt made it to the big screen, he’s back. Or actually he isn’t ... because someone has stolen him. Annie is bereft, the town of Upson Downs is in turmoil and with a canine Tournament of Champions approaching, time is running out. Runt and the Diabolical Dognapping is guaranteed to warm your heart.
Squid as Runt with Lily LaTorre as Annie Shearer in the film version of Craig Silvey’s first Runt novel.Credit: Court McAllister
Seed
Bri Lee
Summit, $34.99
The second novel − very different from The Work − from the author of the memoir Eggshell Skull, is a literary thriller set in the cold of Antarctica, where antinatalist Mitchell and his colleague Frances are working on a project to preserve seeds deep in the ice, as a buttress against the ravages of climate change. But as the world heats up, so do the scientists’ circumstances. They find themselves stranded, without external communication, and past events begin to have potentially disastrous consequences for them.
Will There Ever Be Another You
Patricia Lockwood
Bloomsbury, $32.99
In a profile last month, The New Yorker said poet, novelist and memoirist Patricia Lockwood’s “calling card is her unmistakable voice, which sasses and seduces with quick wit and cheerful perversity, pressing the reader close to her comic, confiding ‘I’“. After the success of her first, social-media-influenced novel, No One Is Talking About This, Lockwood returns with a sort of idiosyncratic work of autofiction that has the pandemic and illness − her own and her husband’s − at its heart. As she calls one section of the book, “The Artist is Present”.
Patricia Lockwood’s newest release is titled Will There Ever Be Another You.
A Great Act of Love
Heather Rose
Allen & Unwin, $34.99
By the time Stella Prize-winning writer Heather Rose’s astonishing memoir, Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here, came out three years ago, she was already working on a historical novel using stories of how her family arrived in Tasmania six generations earlier and what happened in Europe beforehand. “And what I’ve loved about them is that most of them are completely untrue,” she said. Her heroine, Caroline Douglas, a “woman who must summon a new story every day in order to live”, arrives in Hobart in 1839 and begins her life again. She’s quite a character.
The Seeker and the Sage
Brigid Delaney
Allen & Unwin, $32.99
The Stoics − Seneca, Marcus Aurelius et al − have been having some sort of moment for quite some time. There are books about their philosophy everywhere. Brigid Delaney has form with their thinking − she wrote Reasons Not to Worry: How to be Stoic in Chaotic Times three years ago − and now eases the reader into a series of dialogues through the tale of a journalist who survives a workplace massacre and is then tasked with interviewing the mayor of the happiest town on Earth. Delaney deftly makes the Stoic philosophy approachable and accessible.
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Gravity Let Me Go
Trent Dalton
Fourth Estate, $45
The bestselling author of Boy Swallows Universe says his latest novel is his most personal, which is pretty good going when you consider the story that Boy … has already told. The main character here is journalist Noah Cork and he’s got a cracking true-crime yarn to tell, but how is his determination to tell it going to impact his marriage and his two daughters? If you loved that hugely successful first novel, then chances are you’re going to lap up this one. Watch for the irrepressible Trent Dalton rocketing to the top of the bestseller list.
Calendar
Vanessa Berry
Upswell, $34.99, October 1
This gem is the sort of imaginative book that will have you looking at things you encounter in your day-to-day life in a different way. Vanessa Berry, essayist and artist, was inspired by the French Revolutionary calendar, which determined that days should be dedicated to an object relating to rural life. Hers is not so prescribed, but the words are inspired by objects she encounters, beginning with a champagne wire, before moving on to such things as an artificial lettuce leaf, a coat hanger, a silver peanut necklace − some are more personal than others − and relating the story of 12 months that brought health scares, change and travel.
Elizabeth Harrower
Susan Wyndham
NewSouth, $39.99, October 1
Only a couple of months ago, we had the first biography of the brilliant and, for a long time, forgotten author of The Watch Tower. Now Susan Wyndham, a former literary editor of the Herald and co-editor of last year’s Hazzard and Harrower: The Letters, brings considerable experience of the Australian literary scene to this scrupulous and fair-minded investigation of Harrower’s work and life − her insecurities, misstarts, deep friendships, “toxic relationships” and eventual comeback after self-imposed literary exile. She really does Harrower justice.
Elizabeth Harrower is the subject of a new book by Susan Wyndham.Credit: Lidia Nikonova
Unfinished Revolution
Virginia Haussegger
NewSouth, $36.99, October 1
Virginia Haussegger makes no bones about her subjectivity in this assessment of the past 50 years of the fight for women’s rights in Australia: “My feminist anger and angst, along with my willingness for a fight, are all personal responses.” Her “incomplete” story begins with the March4Justice in 2021 and goes back to 1975, International Women’s Year. Now, however, Haussegger identifies an overt “global pushback against women’s rights” and − along with others − believes that women must respond with collective effort.
Shadow Ticket
Thomas Pynchon
Jonathan Cape, $34.99, October 7
Double delight for fans of the guarded American novelist − his first novel for 12 years coincides with the release of director Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, his adaptation of Pynchon’s novel, Vineland. Shadow Ticket is a wild ride. PI Hicks McTaggart is charged with finding Daphne, the daughter of hugely wealthy cheese manufacturer Bruno Airmont, who has skedaddled from 1932 Milwaukee with a clarinet player. Daphne is an old flame of McTaggart’s and he’s not averse to a swing band, but this case gets mighty involved. It’s a blast.
Jane Harper’s latest novel is a standalone mystery.Credit: Hugh Stewart
Last One Out
Jane Harper
Macmillan, $34.99, October 14
Jane Harper said goodbye to Aaron Falk (from The Dry) three years ago in Exiles – and now she’s back with a standalone mystery. Last One Out is set five years after the disappearance of Sam Crowley from Carralon Ridge, on the day of his 21st birthday. His town and its community are literally crumbling − Sam was writing a thesis on its demographic structure − and his parents have split up, still tortured by their son’s absence. And what have the earlier death of his cousin Warren and the adjacent Lentzer mine got to do with it all?
Turbulence
Clinton Fernandes
MUP, $29.99, October 14
This is a timely publication after a month in which Australia recognised a Palestinian state, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese managed to inveigle a promised face-to-face encounter with US President Trump, and the AUKUS agreement, which seeks “to demonstrate Australia’s relevance” to the US, appeared to have an uncertain future. There is a contrast, Clinton Fernandes maintains, between Australia’s real – rather than its declared – goals in foreign policy, which therefore should be “questions for democratic debate”.
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