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As we head into an “uncertain spring”, it’s the start of a big season for publishers. In the next two or three months, the big books aimed at the crucial Christmas market will appear. Here are 16 out now or imminently that might tickle your fancy.
The Eye of the Dragonfly
Tracey Lee Holmes
Simon & Schuster, $36.99
In her memoir about her personal, professional and intellectual life, Tracey Lee Holmes writes: “I am a journalist. When so many run from an emergency in fear, we want to run towards it. We are witnesses to history.” Her journalism is about sport − she seems to have covered everything and been everywhere − but here she writes about how she experiences the world through that prism, and what she has learnt about racism, misogyny and power. “Sport,” she writes, “has never been far from the most dramatic events in our history.”
Author Toni Jordan.Credit: Jason South
Tenderfoot
Toni Jordan
Hachette, $32.99
Toni Jordan’s dad trained a couple of dishlickers, so she knows about what she writes in this story of a seminal year in the life of 12-year-old Andie, whose adored greyhound-training father Eddie disappears, taking three of the family’s four dogs with him. Narrated by an older Andie, she notes that “when you’re small, the world comes into focus like a Polaroid: smudged and indistinct, taking years to resolve to clarity”. There’s plenty of Jordan’s trademark wit and warmth in Andie’s getting of clarity.
Borneo
Michael Veitch
Hachette, $34.99
World War II ended 80 years ago last month, but Australia’s amphibious invasion of Borneo between May and July 1945 was the war’s “last great campaign”. In this revealing account, Michael Veitch says of the action, which involved 80,000 personnel and resulted in 2000 casualties, “highly placed members in both the government and the army considered the whole thing unnecessary”. Nevertheless, Veitch says it remains Australia’s largest, most complex and, and arguably most successful military campaign.
Katabasis
R.F. Kuang
HarperVoyager, $34.99
Don’t expect more of the same from the author of the bestselling satire on publishing, Yellowface. She changes genres and styles almost every time she writes. If there’s any similarity in Katabasis it’s to an earlier novel, Babel, her historical fantasy set in 19th-century Oxford. This time we’re in Cambridge, from where PhD students Alice Law and Peter Murdoch have to descend into the Eight Courts of Hell to rescue Professor Jacob Grimes. A dark satire on university life, historical fantasy, tartarology, and a sort of love story to boot.
R.F. Kuang’s new book is nothing like her bestseller, Yellowface.Credit: Julian Baumann
No Dancing in the Lift
Mandy Sayer
Transit Lounge, $32.99
“The biggest myth about the death of someone deeply loved is that the relationship ends once the final breath is drawn,” writes award-winning novelist and biographer Mandy Sayer. Her fourth memoir begins after the death of her jazz drummer father Gerry − central to her first, Dreamtime Alice − but goes back to chronicle her care of him as cancer develops. She was also concurrently editing an anthology about Kings Cross with playwright Louis Nowra and as Gerry’s health deteriorates, her relationship with Nowra blossoms. Reader, she married him.
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Walking Sydney
Belinda Castles
NewSouth, $34.99
The subtitle of this lovely volume is “Fifteen Walks with a City’s Writers” and Belinda Castles says the writers open “the fabric of the contemporary city … that make the dreamlife − the real life − of this city”. As they walk, writers such as Jazz Money, Michelle de Kretser, Larissa Behrendt, Malcolm Knox, Gail Jones, Michael Mohammed Ahmad and others discuss the places they are wandering through, what they mean to them and how their writing intersects with them. Psychogeography with a literary bent?
Discipline
Randa Abdel-Fattah
UQP, $34.99
September 2
This novel by Randa Abdel-Fattah, originally to be called The Occupation, was the subject of objections by some Jewish leaders in Queensland, who accused the author of “spreading misinformation and hate”, but UQP stuck by its author. Abdel-Fattah’s first novel for adults is about how Ashraf, an academic, and Hannah, a young journalist, respond to the furore when 18-year-old Nabil Mostafa is arrested at a demonstration against an Israeli company and delves into the interface of academia, the media and the need not to be silenced.
Buckeye
Patrick Ryan
Bloomsbury, $32.99
September 2
The American writer has published short-story collections and YA novels but now, after eight years in the writing, comes his first novel, a story of two families and their interactions from World War II to the divisions over Vietnam. As news comes of the former’s end, Cal Jenkins and Margaret Anderson spontaneously kiss in his hardware shop in Bonhomie, Ohio. That is the beginning of an affair that sparks the events of this engaging story. This large character-driven novel allows you to immerse yourself in it as secrets are gradually revealed.
Rebecca Solnit advocates drawn-out paths of influence in her essays.Credit:
No Straight Road Takes You There
Rebecca Solnit
Granta, $36.99
September 2
In the introduction to this collection of essays, the American author and activist says that in the past few decades the aim of her writing has been to “offer not just my views but … equipment for anyone considering history, power, change, and possibility”. Her title reflects her belief in “the drawn-out paths of influence”. Among the diverse essays is one on Kronos Quartet founder David Harrington’s 300-year-old violin, and another on life in San Francisco and the impact of Silicon Valley tech companies. Finally comes a brief “credo”, in which she points out “there is no alternative to persevering”.
Desolation
Hossein Asgari
Ultimo, $34.99
September 2
Hossein Asgari’s first novel, Only Sound Remains, was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin last year. His second is set mostly in the aftermath of Iran’s Islamic Revolution and begins with a writer in a cafe approached by an Iranian man, whom he calls Amin, with a story to tell. There is young Amin’s developing, but hard-to-negotiate relationship with his neighbour, would-be writer Parvaneh, the tragedy of his adored elder brother Hamid dying when Iran Air Flight 655 was shot down and then his military service. At the heart of this novel, though, lies the power of story.
Why Do Birds Sing?
Grainne Cleary
Allen & Unwin, $34.99
September 2
As we move into spring, are you being woken by the dawn chorus? What are all those songbirds doing and what do they get out of it? Following her book Why Do Birds Do That?, Grainne Cleary answers every question you could possibly want to know about that wonderful racket outside. The book is a sort of extended explainer written in short informative chapters, packed full of insight and backed by considerable research. And Cleary was amazed to discover “the parallels between birdsong and how we learn our own language”.
The Secret of Secrets
Dan Brown
Bantam, $55
September 9
It’s been a long time between drinks for fans of Dan Brown’s Robert Langdon series − and let’s face it, there have been millions of fans. In his seventh adventure, Brown’s Harvard symbologist is accompanying his partner, Noetic scientist Katherine Solomon, to an academic conference in Prague where she promptly vanishes. Setting his novel in a city such as Prague gives Brown scope to indulge himself in all sorts of mysterious skulduggery. If this is the sort of thing you like, then you’ll like this sort of thing. And why not?
Gary Oldman plays Jackson Lamb in the TV adaptation of Mick Herron’s Slow Horses novels. The ninth book in the series appears later this month.Credit:
Clown Town
Mick Herron
Baskerville, $32.99
September 9
Here we are back for the ninth time with the denizens of Slough House, those exiled MI5 agents who have made catastrophe their boon companion − “losers and boozers”, as Mick Jagger characterises them in his theme song for the TV adaptation of Mick Herron’s Slow Horses novels. Under the guidance of fat, filthy and flatulent Jackson Lamb, they face dangers stemming belatedly from the Troubles in Northern Ireland, while egregious pollie Peter Judd and MI5 chief Diana Taverner are up to mischief again.
Writer and activist Arundhati Roy.Credit: AP
Mother Mary Comes to Me
Arundhati Roy
Hamish Hamilton, $36.99
September 9
Arundhati Roy’s brother said their mother treated nobody as badly as she did the Booker prize-winning novelist, author of The God of Small Things. But Roy was distraught when Mrs Roy, as she calls her throughout this candid and surprisingly witty memoir, died suddenly at the age of 89 − “we had 60 years to discuss her imminent death”. But this is not only a family memoir. Here is her determination to be a writer − “as a child, it’s all I ever thought I’d be” − her love life, her acting experience and her gradual transition from writer to writer-activist.
All the Way to the River
Elizabeth Gilbert
Bloomsbury, $34.99
September 9
Elizabeth Gilbert stormed the bestseller lists with Eat Pray Love, Big Magic and her novels, The Signature of All Things and City of Girls. She was married, divorced and then fell in love with her best friend, Rayya Elias − only for Rayya’s pancreatic cancer diagnosis to take her 18 months later. Both were addicts − Gilbert to sex and love, Rayya to drugs, which made her final few months “a living hell for everyone involved”. As Gilbert writes: “We addicts can be some of the best people out there, and we can also totally be the worst.” This book tells it all and more.
Ian McEwan is as engaging as ever in his latest novel.Credit: Getty Images
What We Can Know
Ian McEwan
Jonathan Cape, $34.99
September 15
Post-climate catastrophe in 2119, when “the sea stood off at a respectful distance”, academic Tom Metcalfe is continuing his obsessive research into a mysterious poem by Frances Blundy that was read at a dinner in October 2014 to celebrate Blundy’s wife’s 54th birthday. But the one copy of the mythical A Corona for Vivien, which he inscribed on vellum, vanished. Metcalfe is pulled between past and present searching for knowledge and gradually Ian McEwan, as engaging as ever, reveals the truths behind the disappearance. What can you truly know of the past?
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