By Cameron Woodhead and Steven Carroll
A road trip from hell is served up in this outback crime thriller.
FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
High Wire
Candice Fox
Penguin, $34.99
Outback crime novels are flavour of the month in global publishing, and Candice Fox has shifted gear lately from more psychologically driven fiction into action-thriller mode. In High Wire, Fox serves up a road trip from hell. Ex-military action hero Harvey Buck risks a murderous unmarked track through the forbidding outback, desperate to reach his dying girlfriend. He picks up Clare Holland, whose car has broken down in the wilderness, but the pair are soon ambushed by a lawless crew with a score to settle. The baddies aren’t shy about inspiring terror; Harvey and Clare are coerced into a violent crime spree on pain of death and a white-knuckle game of catch and kill across the red desert unfolds. Meanwhile, outback cop Edna Norris has retrieved a big-talking teen runaway when, unwittingly, she runs into a trail of criminal mayhem – arson, robbery, kidnapping, murder – and an ordinary night on the job becomes a savage, action-packed fight to stay alive. Fox writes cinematic action with moody characters, a high-octane plot, amid a Wake in Fright-like atmosphere of absurdity and menace.
A murder mystery and domestic drama wrapped in a Grimm-like fairytale.
All the Bees in the Hollows
Lauren Keegan
Affirm Press, $34.99
A historical murder mystery with a mystical streak, Lauren Keegan’s All the Bees in the Hollows follows a fraught mother-daughter relationship. It transports the reader back to remote Baltic forests in the 16th century. Here, bereaved widow Maryte is a traditional beekeeper who must prove (to men) she can run the business alone (without a man). Her devotion to the old ways, keeping bees in accordance with the laws of nature, with not a few superstitions attached, is what gets Maryte through the hardships of grief and rising taxes. Her daughter Austeja is more of a rebel, fleeing into the wild forests to find her freedom. When they discover the corpse of a hollow keeper in one of their trees, they suddenly face what appears to be a murder. They are likely to be framed for the crime and must investigate to save themselves. Keegan combs a liminal world where Christianity and underlying pagan ritual meet in a novel that delivers a murder mystery, wrapped in a domestic drama, wrapped in a Grimm-like fairytale.
How a woman protects herself and keeps her obligation to her mother.
Madwoman
Chelsea Bieker
OneWorld, $32.99
A legacy of abuse recurs in a woman’s life in Chelsea Bieker’s Madwoman. Clove is a well-off suburban mum caring for two young kids and a husband in the finance industry; she appears to be secure, though she is constantly distracting herself from the rigours of domestic life with compulsive shopping and a devotion to wellness regimens.
When she receives a letter from jail, Clove’s traumatic childhood resurfaces. Her mother Alma – who murdered her husband after years of shocking physical abuse – is having her case reconsidered post #MeToo and needs Clove to testify to the horrors inflicted upon her behind closed doors. Suspense builds as the life Clove has built for herself – a meticulous attempt to put trauma behind her – runs into her obligation to her mother. Madwoman creates an unflinching and confessional narrative voice. It’s subtle in revealing the refracted torments of intergenerational trauma, and in the difficulty of untangling justice for victims of domestic abuse.
Emma Grey takes the chick-lit genre to disturbing terrain.
Pictures of You
Emma Grey
Penguin, $34.99
Following her debut romance The Last Love Note, Emma Grey’s Pictures of You takes the conventions of chick-lit into more disturbing terrain. Evie Hudson is recovering from an accident that killed her husband and has left her with retrograde amnesia. The 30-year-old doesn’t remember much of her adult life – she thinks she’s still 16 – and the novel has her piecing together her past with the help of Drew, her best friend at high school (who still has the hots for her at 30, even though she’s mentally still a teenager due to the amnesia, which is all kinds of creepy). The novel is split between teenage Evie and her recovery. In the process, it reconstructs memories of an abusive relationship, and how Evie might have come to marry a man who isolated, undermined and controlled her. Grey is acute on domestic violence, and especially the psychological impact of repeated manipulation on victims. The set-up is better than the hastily sketched resolution, but I can imagine Colleen Hoover fans making TikTok videos of themselves sobbing over the toxic relationship dynamics in this one.
NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Lisette
Catherine Rey
Gazebo Books, $24.99
A deceptively simple, impressively crafted recollection of friendship.
In August 2002, French-born novelist Catherine Rey made a commitment to write about her fellow French friend, the eponymous Lisette. Rey was 45, Lisette Nigot was 79 and had decided to end her life before reaching the age of 80. It took Rey 20 years to feel ready to fulfil the commitment. The result is a deceptively simple, beautifully poised recollection of Lisette and their friendship, Rey creating vivid images of her subject’s youth and maturity, a life in which she brushed with the likes of Charles de Gaulle and Marilyn Monroe. But it is also a moving, deeply thoughtful meditation on youth, ageing and death, as Rey, as she ages herself, comes to a clearer understanding of what drove Lisette. The scenes in which Rey imagines her friend’s last hours are poignant, Lisette’s death depicted as a triumph. Impressively crafted.
A collection that reads like a cultural history.
Essays That Changed Australia: Meanjin 1940 to today
Ed., by Esther Anatolitis
MUP, $34.99
The phrase “cultural cringe”, from the 1950 essay by Arthur Phillips – part of this collection of Meanjin essays – has become part of everyday language. It perceptively locates a continuing cultural malaise, but read today, is also very much of its time too. The essays are diverse and strong, like Tony Birch’s trailblazing 1992 Nothing Has Changed, which examines the inherent racism in European place names. It’s unclear what Thea Astley’s 1968 grumbling about the shortcomings of the younger generation is doing here – perhaps to show that some things don’t change? On the other hand, it was a pleasure to read Manning Clark’s brilliantly excoriating response to the Whitlam sacking, likewise Amy McQuire’s plangent and disturbing study of the “disappearances” of Indigenous women and girls. In some ways, this reads like a cultural history.
Labor MP Andrew Leigh fears we will “sleep walk into a more unequal Australia”.
Battlers & Billionaires
Andrew Leigh
Black Inc, $29.99
Australia, Labor MP Andrew Leigh writes in this updated study of national inequality, has a deeply entrenched sense of egalitarianism. But, he argues both engagingly and clearly, it’s not reflected in our wealth distribution – a trend that set in with the early 1980s. Invoking an image invented by Dutch economist Jan Pen, Leigh asks us to imagine an hour-long human parade in which height signifies wealth: a parade of dwarves, until the final minutes in which giants hoarding obscene wealth appear. His fear is that “we will sleep walk into a more unequal Australia without realising what is being lost”. An alarming point, poignantly put. To stop the “social fabric” becoming so strained it divides the country and we lose the best us, he emphasises the importance of strong but fair economic growth, education, unions and community.
Two veteran cricket writers examine one of Australia’s cultural artefacts.
The Baggy Green
Michael Fahey and Mike Coward
Gelding Street Press, $34.99
The rise of the baggy green cap to iconic status in Australian cricket, like the “traditional” Boxing Day Test, is a recent phenomenon. Veteran cricket writers Fahey and Coward (with a contribution from Peter Sharpham) take us right
back to the beginning (especially tours of England in the 1880s) when there was no “baggy green”. These teams wore various colours, including those of the Melbourne Cricket Club. The cap as we know it today (green and gold, coat of arms and, yes, baggy) started to emerge only following Federation. Steve Waugh and Mark Taylor venerate the cap, and are largely responsible for it being raised to a level of religious significance. Richie Benaud, who basically played hatless throughout his career, said he couldn’t understand all the “kerfuffle”. Fun history and reading of a cultural artefact.
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