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From a chilling outback thriller and a dark family saga about intergenerational curses to Stoic philosophy and the cultural politics of breasts, here’s our round-up of 10 new fiction and non-fiction releases.
FICTIONThe Midnight Timetable, Bora Chung (trans. Anton Hur), Scribe, $29.99
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Korean speculative fiction got a boost with Bora Chung’s Booker-shortlisted Cursed Bunny (2018). The Midnight Timetable continues an experimental approach to genre: it’s a novel constructed from ghost stories. Our unnamed narrator works at the Institute, a place that houses (and tries to contain) cursed objects left behind by the restless dead to torment the living. Most workers at the Institute are creeped out and make sure to play by the rules. Some don’t listen. One employee turns “ghost hunter” and attempts to livestream a poltergeist to digital fans, only to find themselves hunted without mercy. Down the hall, a cat reveals the atrocious secrets of the family who owned it, while philosophising about its own future. And in Room 302, a handkerchief invested with the spirit of two brothers, forever locked in sibling rivalry, unleashes power without control. These tales are more fable-like and share a more obvious connection than Chung’s previous short works. Social critique can be less complex and indeterminate. However, Chung’s wry humour and eerie imagination never risk devolving into preachiness, and this footsure translation from Anton Hur showcases a distinctive and beguiling literary voice.
Boudicca’s Daughter, Elodie Harper, Bloomsbury, $32.99
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Elodie Harper has a taste for historical fiction, having penned a popular trilogy based on life in ancient Rome, set inside the lupanar (literally “wolf den”, or brothel) at Pompeii. Boudicca’s Daughter takes readers into a different corner of the Empire. Records from Roman Britain are patchy, though the revolt of the warrior queen Boudicca, of the Iceni, remains etched in the annals. And history does record she had two daughters. Harper imagines one of them, Solina, who finds herself on a desperate odyssey to Rome, there to confront an enemy of her people after her mother’s armed rebellion. All the qualities that made the Wolf Den trilogy worthy also animate this standalone. The author has a knack for merging sweeping epic with the travails of ordinary life. Her storytelling is rooted in the grandeur and barbarity of Roman civilisation, but it imagines too, and plausibly, what it might have been like for an individual to live through them. Boudicca’s Daughter is an intensely drawn ordeal, a struggle for identity and control at the margins of empire, imagined from the gaps in which history is silent.
Cursed Daughters, Oyinkan Braithwaite, Atlantic Books, $34.99
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How do you follow up a successful debut titled My Sister, the Serial Killer? Well, Oyinkan Braithwaite continues to explore the darker side of relationships between female family members in Cursed Daughters, but she puts aside the psycho-thriller trappings that brought her to international attention and trades them for the tension between nature and nurture … and the supernatural, of course. A love curse has befallen the Falodun clan. Born from an extramarital affair, and reportedly the product of a jilted wife’s revenge, it passes down through the generations causing romantic mayhem. Bitter jealousies, betrayals, and a tragic death for one of the novel’s three protagonists are all attributed to the persistent malediction. The youngest generation includes Eniiyi, and the stories won’t leave her alone, either. It is whispered the girl may be a reincarnation of her dead aunt, and when Eniiyi, like her forebear, falls in love with a light-skinned boy, it seems like history might be set to repeat itself. The book does draw us into a haunting tale of intergenerational trauma, though it isn’t as character-driven or page-turning as the author’s debut.
Gunpowder Creek, Alex Dook, Echo, $32.99
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Outback crime fiction has emerged as a global publishing phenomenon on par with Scandi noir earlier this century. Alex Dook’s debut lands in a crowded field. The plot elements are familiar enough – this is a road trip narrative with a baddie pulling the strings; the protagonist coerced into playing a sadistic game of cat-and-mouse – though it distinguishes itself by interleaving three perspectives to ratchet up the tension. For Emily Barnes, the nightmare begins with a panicked phone call from son Zach. He’s been kidnapped and is being held at gunpoint. He’s dead … unless Emily drives a stolen car with unknown cargo deep into the West Australian outback within three days. But what awaits her at Gunpowder Creek? Who are Zach’s captors, and why are they torturing Emily and her son? It’s often said the landscape becomes a character in genres such as Oz gothic, and Dook certainly imbues the aridity, isolation and intense heat of the book’s setting with a hallucinatory quality. Part twisted psychological horror, part febrile action survival thriller, Gunpowder Creek is a propulsive addition to an internationally popular genre.
When We Were Monsters, Jennifer Niven, Penguin, $19.99
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Author of bestsellers All the Bright Places and Holding Up the Universe, Jennifer Niven turns the cloistered world of a creative writing retreat into a springboard for a YA thriller. Eight students sign up to be mentored by Meredith Graffam, a celebrity writer, director and actress whose unorthodox methods soon create conflict. For Effy and Arlo, the battle lines are already drawn – Arlo ghosted her three years ago, breaking Effy’s heart, and now he seeks rapprochement. Effy, meanwhile, has a plan for a story based on a tragedy that hit her close to home. Writing ideas come thick and fast, as do flurries of academic vanity and point-scoring. But the tactics Meredith uses to inspire creativity in her charges become increasingly weird and voyeuristic, and the teacher has secrets of her own. Will one of her students make her take them to the grave, sooner rather than later? Niven blends YA romance and literary whodunit, in a mystery that should intrigue more bookish teens and young adults.
NON-FICTIONThe Seeker and the Sage, Brigid Delaney, Allen & Unwin, $32.99
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It’s one thing to introduce readers to Stoicism as Brigid Delaney did in her previous book Reasons Not to Worry. It’s another to show how one might live by these principles. Delaney’s solution is to give the Socratic dialogue a modern twist through the story of a journalist who treks to a remote town high in the mountains to find the secrets to happiness. Here, the journalist converses with the town’s mayor about how its inhabitants put the precepts of this ancient Greek philosophy into action. What could have been a mechanical question and answer exercise is given urgency and drama through the framing device of a mass shooting in the newspaper office where the journalist works, which launches her on her quest. She brings with her all the baggage of contemporary life – particularly the assumption that we can control our fate – only to have it challenged and dismantled. Delaney fleshes out the main characters sufficiently for us to be drawn into their world and to feel for them as they strive for equanimity in the face of the ultimate deadline.
The Secret Life of a Cemetery, Benoit Gallot, Greystone Books, $34.99
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Tourists flock to Pere-Lachaise to seek out the graves of celebrated figures such as Marcel Proust, Colette, Jim Morrison and Maria Callas. I once saw a shiny pink granite tombstone there for a man who had not yet died. Yet there is so much more to this famous Parisian cemetery than its monumental public face. As the curator of the cemetery who lives with his family on the grounds, Benoit Gallot is privy to another side of the cemetery, which is as much about life as it is about death. Since 2011, when the Paris City Council forbade the use of pesticides, wild plants and animals have returned, creating havens of biodiversity. Gallot writes eloquently of how these environments have become refuges for all sorts of creatures – foxes, hedgehogs, owls, insects – not to mention that diverse array of humans that frequent the place. The “Perelachaisians” or retired enthusiasts, the flaneurs, the epitaph aficionados, the cat ladies, the lovers, the artists and the exhibitionists. A delightful and strangely uplifting work.
No Straight Road Takes You There, Rebecca Solnit, Granta, $36.99
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We will always be in the thick of things but there are, Rebecca Solnit reminds us, ways of getting perspective on the overwhelming events of the immediate moment, particularly through the long view afforded by history. While she is too nuanced a writer to peddle simple strategies, these essays are about how to maintain hope in the face of climate change, war and despotism. “The present looks incomprehensible only to those who ignore the past.” By remembering how social change – the abolition of slavery, women’s rights, Indigenous rights – came about in increments in the face of powerful opposition, we give ourselves space to be with uncertainty without despairing. This perspective can also be found in the stories we have told ourselves over the millennia, such as fairytales. The main characters are “given tasks that are often unfair verging on impossible” and yet they prevail through alliances, persistence, resistance and innovation. Solnit’s well-turned aphorisms provide a much-needed antidote to fatalism and paralysis.
This is for Everyone, Tim Berners-Lee, Macmillan, $36.99
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It was the 1980s and the internet had just begun. Tim Berners-Lee was working as a computer coder when it struck him that information was meaningless in isolation. Traditionally, hierarchical structures quarantined knowledge. To liberate the potential of the internet, he realised, you needed to allow new and unexpected relationships between pieces of information to flourish. “To do that, you had to let the users make those connections.” Out of this lightbulb moment came the World Wide Web. Unlike his contemporaries Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, Berners-Lee did not seek to capitalise on this invention. He wanted it to be for everyone. By 1990, he had it up and running but he was the only one using it. Two years later, it was getting a million hits a day. Berners-Lee’s practical idealism is such a refreshing change from the usual self-celebratory bunk often found in memoirs of this kind.
Boobs, Lisa Portolan & Amanda Goff, Echo, $32.99
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Amanda Goff had never given her breasts much thought until a boorish drunk guy in a pub told her she was ugly and that she should “Grow some f…ing tits.” The sledge took root and in the years that followed she went under the knife six times until her breasts were “bloody ginormous”. Then it finally hit her that she had “made my boobs define me”. This book about breasts aims to reclaim breasts, “not as symbols imposed by others but as aspects of identity that we define for ourselves”. But as Goff’s story reveals, disentangling what you think you really want from what society tells you should aspire to isn’t that straightforward. On the one hand, the authors offer a strong critique of the way porn fetishises fake breasts and reduces women to mere objects of desire. On the other, they insist on the freedom to embrace this objectification if a woman so chooses. Which would seem to be a capitulation to the social pressures the authors want to critique. A lot of mixed messages here.