T.S. Eliot said April was the cruellest month of all, but from a reader’s point of view that is far from being the case. And that’s no fooling. This month offers plenty of choice, ranging from Jessica Stanley’s delicious rom-com to Steve Vizard’s timely consideration of the mythologising of Gallipoli, Kate Grenville’s investigation of her family’s dealings with First Nations people and their land, and essays by Brooke Boney.
The Sun Was Electric Light
Rachel Morton
UQP, $34.99
Rachel Morton is a poet who entered her first novel, then called Panajachel, into last year’s Victorian unpublished manuscript award, duly won, and was snapped up by a publisher. The influential award launched the careers of the likes of Carrie Tiffany and Jane Harper. Now we’ll see if Morton’s story − in which Ruth returns to a village in Guatemala where she had lived years earlier and fosters complicated friendships with two different women − will do the same for her.
Novelist Kate Grenville has written about her forbears dealing with the Indigenous population.Credit: Leah Jing McIntosh
Unsettled
Kate Grenville
Black Inc., $34.99
History and the voiceless have always played significant roles in Kate Grenville’s books, as has her family, going back to her Booker shortlisted novel, The Secret River. Here she takes the reader back to the places where her family has lived since 1806 and mulls over what happened to the First Nations people who were there before them. She asks: “What do we do with the fact that we’re the beneficiaries of a violent past?” and how do we live on stolen land?
The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz
Anne Sebba
Hachette, $34.99
The cellist Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, now 99, survived the Auschwitz death camp through being a member of its women’s orchestra. Historian Anne Sebba, whose own father was involved in the liberation of Bergen-Belsen camp, tells the story of the orchestra, its leader Alma Rose, who was Mahler’s niece, and how the women had no choice but to play for the Nazis, play marches for prisoners as they were forced off to work in factories, or had to “go to the gas”.
Orpheus Nine
Chris Flynn
Hachette, $32.99
Chris Flynn had been driving on his own round the country, on a tour to promote his wonderful stories in Here Be Leviathans. He got home keen for a rest and one night dreamt the opening scene of his latest novel in which nine-year-old children in a small Australian town freeze on the soccer field, utter some Latin lines, and drop dead. At the same time, every nine-year-old on the planet dies. And then it happens again and again. What on earth is going on?
American writer Meg Wolitzer says the rom-com by Jessica Stanley, pictured, is a ‘smart literary love story’.Credit:
Consider Yourself Kissed
Jessica Stanley
Text, $34.99
One American publisher is dispensing with blurbs from authors for its books. Others still deem them important, and Jessica Stanley’s publisher clearly adheres to this policy. I have never read so many enthusiastic comments about one book as the 24 that welcome this delicious rom-com chronicling 10 years in the life and love − and all that really entails − of Coralie Bower, an Australian making the most of London. “A smart literary love story,” says US novelist Meg Wolitzer in her blurb for the book.
Landfall
James Bradley
Penguin, $34.99
James Bradley and crime? That’s a surprise. But while the genre may be different from his recent books such as Deep Water and Clade, his concerns with the state of the world have certainly not changed. Perhaps Landfall is climate noir − CliNoir? − set as it is in a future when “the Melt” has happened, water laps at the first floor level of apartments, and Sydney is increasingly suffering. A child has vanished, a cyclone is building and detective Sadiya Azad is investigating.
James Bradley’s new novel is climate noir.Credit: Dion Georgopoulos
Out of the Woods
Gretchen Shirm
Transit Lounge, $34.99
Jess is working at the International Criminal Court in 2000 at the trial of a Bosnian Serb indicted on charges of genocide and war crimes for massacres in 1995. It’s confronting work and dealing with it and the end of her marriage back in Australia takes its toll on Jess even as she strikes up a tentative relationship with a Dutch man. In her third novel, Shirm addresses serious questions of bearing witness and ideas of resistance in an absorbing, ambitious book.
Uprising
Stephen Gapps
NewSouth, $36.99
According to award-winning historian Stephen Gapps, when Aboriginal tribes fought back against “overlanders” at Benalla and killed eight white stockmen, it marked “the beginning of arguably the greatest military counteroffensive on Australian soil in Australian history, with tens of thousands of warriors fighting against the occupation of their homelands”. It was recognised as such by contemporary observers, but subsequently written out of history. Not any more.
When the Going Was Good
Graydon Carter
Grove Press, $34.99
Legendary magazine editor Graydon Carter ran Vanity Fair for 25 years and made it into one of those great US publications. His memoir begins with the story that revealed the identity of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s Deep Throat and moves through his own life with other people’s words. There are plenty of stories, including how he revived Swifty Lazar’s Oscars party − now the Vanity Fair bash. Along the way, there are celebrities, super agents, film stars, lunches, politics and journalism.
Brooke Boney’s writing is personal and perceptive.Credit: Hugh Stewart
All of It
Brooke Boney
Allen & Unwin, $34.99
“Trying to ignore the impact of trauma on your life is like trying to put your hands through a rose bush without scratching your wrists,” writes Gamilaroi woman Brooke Boney in an essay about her Nanny Nola and the tragedy in her life. This collection of writings by the journalist on sport, body image, fame, Indigeneity, fertility and, throughout, Australia, is perceptive, personal and written with a clarity of language that has impact.
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Human/Nature
Jane Rawson
NewSouth, $34.99
Jane Rawson is a novelist, essayist and now memoirist. She’s nervous about living away from a big city but that didn’t stop her moving to the Huon Valley. “I don’t love being in nature,” she writes early on, “but I do love thinking about nature. I write about it almost exclusively.” She writes tenderly and sadly about her relatively new life and how “humans are changing the earth and many (most?) of those changes are devastating for the creatures we share the planet with.”
I Am Nannertgarrook
Tasma Walton
Bundyi, $24.99
April 2
Tasma Walton’s heart-rending historical saga was the first fiction acquisition by Anita Heiss for the Bundyi imprint, which will publish work by Indigenous writers. Walton tells the dramatic story of the stealing of her ancestor Nannertgarrook and other women by sealers from her Biik (country) and her struggles to reunite with her family and whale totem. Full of Boonwurrung language, it is a paean to the resilience of Indigenous women and the strength of kinship.
Demonstrators call on the British government to extradite former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1999.Credit: AP
38 Londres Street
Philippe Sands
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, $34.99
April 8
In 1998, former Chilean ruler Augusto Pinochet was arrested in London; he was wanted for torture and murder that went on in Santiago’s Londres Street, and elsewhere, during his dictatorship. Philippe Sands is an international human rights lawyer, author and expert on genocide and relates that story along with Pinochet’s connection to Walther Rauff, a Nazi war criminal who fetched up in Chile and helped Pinochet’s murderous secret police. Detailed, disturbing and fascinating.
Nation, Memory, Myth
Steve Vizard
MUP, $39.99
April 16
Every country indulges in national mythologising. For Australia, the disaster of Gallipoli and the heroism of its soldiers have served that purpose. As Steve Vizard points out in this analysis of foundation myths and their creation, “the modern nation is not only a legal, political, economic and administrative system but an emotional system” and that’s where Gallipoli comes in. Its “ambiguity of identity”, he says, is because it is “of Empire” and “other than Empire”.
W.G. Sebald’s essays on Austrian writers have been translated into English at last.Credit: Gina Ferazzi
Silent Catastrophes
W.G. Sebald
Hamish Hamilton, $55
April 23
Here’s a surprise, a new offering from the influential German writer and academic best known for his “prose fiction”, who died tragically in 2001. These essays are about the Austrian writers who influenced his own work and were first published in that country in 1985 and 1991, but have only now been translated. Among the significant authors whose works he examines are Schnitzler, Kafka, Hofmannsthal, Handke, Broch, Roth (Joseph and Gerhard), and Bernhard.
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