13 new books to read this month

It may be cold out there, but the books are hotting up. As winter extends its grip on Australia, publishers have got a truckload of books hitting the shops. Here is a selection of only 13 of the many books due out this month. Dry July? Not in the book business.

Eden
Mark Brandi
Hachette, $32.99
Out now

Mark Brandi novels are far from conventional crime novels. Indeed, he has an unerring eye for the social context of any skulduggery committed in his pages. If you read his first book, the award-winning Wimmera, you’ll recognise a clue on the third page of Eden to the real identity of the main character who has just emerged from jail and has got a job − and a place to sleep − in the cemetery. But there’s more than burying the dead going on, and a nosey journalist is on his trail.

The main character in Mark Brandi’s new novel makes the most of his job at the cemetery.Credit: Elke Meitzel

Deep History: Country and Sovereignty
Eds., Ann McGrath & Jackie Huggins
UNSW Press, $49.99
July 1

Professors Ann McGrath and Jackie Huggins have collected a group of essays by historians, anthropologists, artists and archaeologists that consider “how temporality plays out in relation to sovereignty” across Australia, the Pacific Islands, New Guinea and New Zealand. After all, Indigenous people have been making histories and caring for Country “significantly longer than colonial intruders”. The writers examine place, song, histories, landscape, rock art and more.

Your Friend and Mine
Jessica Dettmann
Atlantic Books, $32.99
July 1

The premise of Jessica Dettmann’s fourth novel is delicious: 20 years after the death of her best friend Tess, Margot gets a letter from her via a solicitor inviting her on an all-expenses-paid trip to London. The pair had long ago planned to visit Tess’ home, but life and death got in the way. This trip, however, is no sightseeing tour − Tess had a number of tasks in mind for Margot to undertake. There’s the question of Tess’ ashes, revenge to be gained on cruel lovers, and more. This at-times wistful and tender romp is a hoot.

The Haunting of Mr and Mrs Stevenson
Belinda Lyons-Lee
Transit Lounge, $34.99
July 1

Belinda Lyons-Lee’s second historical novel − her first was about that wizard of waxworks, Marie Tussaud − delves into how Robert Louis Stevenson came to write his classic of duality, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Narrated by Stevenson’s wife, it begins with a bizarre seance, reimagines Stevenson’s relationship with the murderer Eugene Chantrelle and investigates the morbid influence of the work of 18th-century bodysnatcher Declan Brodie. The author says she wants her work to be “illuminating, entertaining and transporting”. It is.

John Singer Sargent’s painting, Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife, 1885. Oil on canvas, 51cm x 62cm. Credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Cure
Katherine Brabon
Ultimo Press, $34.99
July 1

In Vogel-winning author Katherine Brabon’s fourth novel, Vera and her daughter Thea both have unreliable bodies: chronic pain, arthritis, swellings and more struck them in their teens. Is it inherited illness, as Thea’s father, Anton, posits, or something more troubling? Both write − Vera on the internet, Thea in her journal − and create private characters and identities for themselves. They are in Italy to visit Vera’s father and there is talk of a healer, but Thea does not want to repeat her mother’s narrative; she needs to find her own story.

Katherine Brabon’s fourth novel looks at the unreliability of bodies. Credit: Eddie Jim

The Immigrants
Moreno Giovannoni
Black Inc., $36.99
July 1

“You must understand,” writes Moreno Giovannoni in the author’s note at the start of this delicious autobiographical novel about Italian migrants in Victoria’s tobacco-growing country, “that after 50 years, all places, and people, are fictional”. Based very much on the experiences of his family and using old photographs to good effect, The Immigrants starts, quite literally, with a bang and charms with its large cast of distinct characters, tender wit and sensitivity.

The Gifts of Reading for the Next Generation
Ed., Jennie Orchard
Scribe, $35
July 1

Inspired by an essay by Robert Macfarlane, Jennie Orchard has invited a diverse group of authors − including Diana Reid, Colum McCann, William Boyd, Tristan Bancks, Madeleine Thien and Pico Iyer − to write about what reading means for them, now and when they were younger, and what they recommend for future readers. As Shankari Chandran puts it: “Books are the efforts of storytellers to honour human strengths and weaknesses”. And Ben Okri advises people to read outside their own nation, colour, class and gender.

Irish writer Colum McCann is one of the authors in this anthology.Credit: Leonardo Cendamo/Getty Images

Sweet Nothings
Madison Griffiths
Ultimo, $36.99
July 1

When Madison Griffiths was a student, she became her teacher’s lover and then, as she puts it, “a thorn in his side”. Following on from Tissue, her book about abortion, she investigates the experiences of four women who have had relationships with their lecturers. As she puts it, “the professor who whispers sweet nothings into his students’ ears makes sweet nothings out of them”. She writes in an idiosyncratic, poetic and personal way that makes her account all the more impressive and forceful.

The Last Outlaws
Katherine Biber
Scribner, $36.99
July 2

Katherine Biber has written an absorbing account of the crimes of Jimmy Governor − Jimmie Blacksmith in Tom Keneally’s 1972 novel. But Biber, who had the co-operation of Governor’s descendants, puts his murders and execution in the context of “how law, politics, science and religion … made modern Australia in the wake of the Governor brothers”. Governor’s rampage took place in the months leading up to Federation, and his execution only 18 days after. Biber sees him as “an ordinary man who carried intergenerational trauma, and who was pushed too far”.

The Revisionists
Michelle Johnston
Fourth Estate, $34.99
July 2

According to journalist Christine Campbell, the main character in Michelle Johnston’s novel, reporting is “accurately documenting current events”. But the accuracy of her Pulitzer-winning work is called into question when a former colleague turns up after 23 years and the focus for the two women turns to what happened when they covered the contested territory of the North Caucasus in the late 1990s. What is the truth about the ambush of a bus full of refugee children? As Campbell asks herself, how many times can you disrupt the chain of fate and get away with it? Indeed, has she got away with it?

My Sisters and Other Lovers
Esther Freud
Bloomsbury, $32.99
July 3

If you read Hideous Kinky, Esther Freud’s first, autobiographical novel, you’ll be back on some familiar territory: two sisters − Lucy, the narrator, named this time, and the older Bea − and their flighty mother, navigating communal life, drugs, work, lovers and each other. Freud writes beautifully and tells her story in an episodic style, flitting through time and space. It’s an easy book to get immersed in, and Freud, daughter of the great painter Lucian, will be visiting Australia in August.

Looking for Elizabeth
Helen Trinca
La Trobe University Press, $36.99
July 15

What prompted Elizabeth Harrower to give up writing in 1977 after publishing four novels, including the masterly The Watch Tower, has been one of the great mysteries of Australian literature. She withdrew her fifth, In Certain Circles, and that was only published nearly 50 years later after she had been “rediscovered” by Text Publishing and given the acclaim she was due. Like tardy buses, Helen Trinca’s carefully researched biography of Harrower will be followed by Susan Wyndham’s in October.

There are two biographies of Elizabeth Harrower coming out within months of each other. Helen Trinca’s is first.Credit: Lidia Nikonova

The Last Tour
Ann Curthoys
MUP, $36.99
July 16

Paul Robeson had presence, real presence. I remember my mother enthusing about seeing him perform, something she never forgot. But Robeson was so much more than a singer − he was also a left-wing activist, civil rights campaigner and a visitor to the Soviet Union. In fact, he was everything the US authorities loathed after World War II. After being blacklisted in the McCarthy era, he and his wife, Essie Goode, travelled around Australia and New Zealand in 1960, performing and helping Indigenous activists. Historian Ann Curthoys creates a vivid and detailed account of the long-awaited trip.

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