By Jason Steger
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Winter can be a quiet time for publishers and bookshops, but this last month of the season has plenty of enticing offerings – biographies, novels, appreciations, memoirs and more. So if you want to snuggle up with a good book, there are lots from which to choose. And roll on spring.
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But The Girl by Jessica Zhan Mei Yu (Hamish Hamilton, $32.99)
This much-anticipated debut novel was shortlisted for the 2021 Victorian Premier’s Unpublished Manuscript Award, which has a significant track record for spotting high-quality work. In Zhan Mei Yu’s book, the Malaysian protagonist has left Australia for a writer’s retreat in Scotland. But writing her novel and working on her PhD are not as smooth a prospect as they might have seemed when she set out and, being far from home and family, the experience shakes the way she thinks about writing and her life.
The Things That Matter Most by Gabbie Stroud (Allen & Unwin, $32.99)
It was a safe bet that Gabbie Stroud’s first novel would be set in a school. After all, she is the author of the memoir Teacher, which chronicled problems in her professional and personal life and then the non-fiction Dear Parents, in which she reminded parents that they were the most important teachers of their children. In her novel, there’s one child who is possibly in serious strife, but what can the teachers do if they recognise the danger? Stroud has described the book as a love letter to teachers and her farewell to the profession.
God Forgets About the Poor by Peter Polites (Ultimo, $34.99)
Peter Polites emerged from Sweatshop, the Western Sydney University writing centre that has produced numerous published writers. He is known for his novels Down the Hume and The Pillars, about gay Greeks and migrants negotiating difficult lives. His third is different. Here, he tells the story of his mother, one of five sisters growing up on a Greek island. “You’re supposed to be a writer,” she tells his narrator figure, “try and write something good this time.” Polites does.
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Donald Horne by Ryan Cropp (La Trobe University Press, $37.99)
Everybody knows the description of Australia as “the lucky country”. Donald Horne, who coined the phrase, was one of the master image makers of post-war Australia, according to Ryan Cropp. In his biography of Horne, Cropp describes a formidable and unorthodox public intellectual and defines him as “a kind of public explainer, a crystalliser and a clarifier, a taker of the cultural and political temperature”.
The Vitals by Tracy Sorensen (Picador, $34.99)
To say Sorensen’s sort-of memoir about peritoneal cancer is imaginative is an understatement. It’s narrated by her internal organs, for a start. Her cast of characters includes Liv (liver), Baby and Bunny (two tumours) and Somatum (a CT scanner). The narrative chronicles her struggle to survive the cancer that, as a carrier of the BRCA1 gene, she had tried to prevent by undergoing a double mastectomy and ovariectomy. Sorensen saw off the cancer in 2014 but just this week, news emerged that it has returned.
Girls [Don’t] Play Sport by Chloe Dalton (Allen & Unwin, $34.99)
This is a passionate book of advocacy written by the woman who has won Olympic gold in the rugby sevens for Australia and founded The [Female] Athlete Project. As Dalton, who has also played AFLW for Carlton and the GWS Giants, puts it, “it’s time for women in sport to receive equal opportunity, pay, representation and respect”. She argues many cases through stories, statistics and personal histories from athletes such as Paralympian Ellie Cole, Wallaroo Emily “Grom” Robinson, and netballer Gretel Bueta.
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Carnage by Mark Dapin (Scribner, $34.99)
Does the line “this is democracy manifest” ring a bell? It’s from a famous video of a burly man with a booming voice and rounded vowels being arrested after a “succulent Chinese meal”. The man was Jack Karlson and this is his story of knocking around on the fringes of the underworld in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, his time in Pentridge, the murderous people he encountered there and – astonishingly – his performances on stage in a play by Ray Mooney. Mark Dapin loves a story that surprises both writer and reader; this is one.
Young Rupert by Walter Marsh (Scribe, $35)
It’s hard to believe Rupert Murdoch was once young. But Walter Marsh tells the story of the early days of the dashing scion of the proprietor of Adelaide’s afternoon paper, The News, after he had returned from Oxford to run it. Then, he was some sort of socialist and – equally hard to believe – not interested in any sort of empire. Marsh’s account benefits from the archives of Rohan Rivett, the then editor-in-chief of The News, whom Murdoch eventually sacked – the first such move but certainly not the last.
Back Up by Liam Mannix (NewSouth, $34.99)
The chances are that everyone has had it, haven’t they? Back pain, that is. But Liam Mannix, the science reporter for this masthead, reckons the world has got the treatment of bad backs and the way we think about them all wrong. He’s not alone, of course. Many scientists “believe back pain is one of the greatest problems in world health today. And it is one almost entirely of our own creation.” Here, Mannix exposes the old ways of treatment and looks at new ideas about pain and the crucial connection between the brain and the back.
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The Humming Bird Effect by Kate Mildenhall (Scribner, $32.99)
Kate Mildenhall’s first novel, Skylarking, was set in the 1880s; in her second, The Mother Fault, she took the reader into a dystopian near future. In her third, she combines historical and speculative fiction in a narrative that relishes its setting, the Melbourne suburb of Footscray, and follows four different women – Peggy, Hilda, La, and Maz – in four different time frames: 1933, 2020, 2031 and 2181. They are all linked by the river of time “upstream, downstream, timestream of always”.
Tom Lake by Ann Patchett (Bloomsbury, $32.99)
The American writer’s ninth novel is about the life a mother had back in the days when she was an actor, her romance with one who went on to become a star, and the man she eventually married, with whom she had three daughters. Two settings, 40 years apart, related in parallel and told in Patchett’s scrupulous prose. As our review will explain, “Tom Lake is a reassuring portrait of our plague-time, an antidote to dystopian hysteria, the Patchett novel we need now.”
Murnane by Emmett Stinson (Miegunyah Press, $30)
Gerald Murnane’s works have been getting a lot of attention over the past decade or so. He has at last won deserved literary prizes and been profiled by the likes of The New Yorker. The substantial imaginary life of his protagonists – personages, as he likes to call them – are the heart of his work, in conflict, as Emmett Stinson puts it, with “the external world of experience”. This is a critical and informative appreciation of the writer often tipped as the next Australian to win the Nobel Prize.
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