F
rom a literary identity thriller to the secret lives of Victorian-era women detectives, here are eight new books for your reading pleasure.
FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Blob: A Love Story
Maggie Su
Sceptre, $32.99
Credit: AP
Twenty-four-year-old college dropout Vi Liu is going through a rough patch. She’s been dumped by an insensitive white boyfriend who views her through a lens she doesn’t recognise herself in. She’s struggling to forge her own identity and find her place, and Vi’s anomie and sense of deracination are amplified when her Taiwanese father and white mother sell her childhood home without informing her. While working in a low-paying job at a low-cost hotel, Vi finds what she thinks might be a blobfish, calling the blob “Bob”. Bob the blob starts to grow and becomes her couch companion, as Vi binge-watches bad television to stave off ennui. Soon enough, the creature has morphed into the perfect himbo (complete with an impressive package) as Vi looks on in fascination but is eventually appalled. A coming-of-age tale with surrealist elements, Blob: A Love Story combines offbeat humour and poignancy and draws its narrative architecture from a conscious mash-up of Frankenstein and The Frog Prince. If the moral of the tale isn’t as coherent as either, that only echoes the confusions of the age.
The Three Lives of Cate Kay
Kate Fagan
Bloomsbury, $32.99
An internationally renowned author with a blockbuster franchise to her name, Cate Kay is finally ready to reveal the truth. She has three names, three identities, three lives. She used to be Annie from upstate New York, where she met the charismatic Amanda; they fell in love and dreamt of making it in Hollywood. Only one of them escaped after tragedy struck and the relationship fell apart. Annie reinvented herself as Cass Ford – taking another lover who helped remove all links to her previous identity. Then, she assumed the pseudonym Cate Kay to write a bestselling dystopian trilogy (a la The Hunger Games) that borrowed heavily from events in her life. The Three Lives of Cate Kay is a clever metafictional roman a clef that bristles with sapphic romance. It’s a love story as well as a literary identity thriller, and asks thorny questions about how power and perspective, performative identity and celebrity can influence, to paraphrase Joan Didion, the stories we tell ourselves in order to live.
Confessions
Catherine Airey
Viking, $34.99
Opening in New York on 9/11, Cora looks at the burning towers and knows she has been orphaned. The jaded teen’s dad worked as an accountant in one of them; her mother, Màire, an artist, died seven years prior. From that climactic scene, Confessions unspools the thread of time, moving back to rural County Donegal, Ireland, in the 1970s, where we learn the family’s suppressed backstory through Cora’s aunt Róisín. The weight of sexual assault and intergenerational trauma stalks Màire, who moves to Manhattan to escape the clutches of her childhood and pursue her artistic ambitions amid a lively and progressive arts scene. Róisín herself is a computer wizard and the history of female gamers is worked into the mix. Catherine Airey’s ambitious saga weaves a complex tapestry, a secret women’s history approached through eclectic literary devices, including second-person narration, epistolary chapters and the use of antique computer script. The plot proceeds in fits and jerks, and it isn’t the chief pleasure of this debut novel, which leaves the reader brooding on big questions, and immersed in Airey’s sharp evocation of lost voices and communities on the fringe.
Sorrow Spring
Olivia Isaac-Henry
Harper Collins, $45
Olivia Isaac-Henry’s folk horror novel takes its title from an isolated village with a dark history and blood-curdling secrets. Rina Pine is abandoned there by her hippy mother in the late 1970s. Living with her ageing aunt Agatha, she comes to realise the village is in thrall to ancient traditions and superstitions, kept alive by a secretive sisterhood. When a child vanishes and a mother is slain, Rina fears the grip of this occult sorority could be responsible. Decades later, Cate first learns of the existence of Rina – an aunt she never knew she had, an aunt, moreover, without official identity documents, or any internet trail that might provide clues to her whereabouts or activities. It seems like a wild goose chase, but the search will lead to a secret world of darkness and dread. The novel could be tighter, though it’s steeped in gothic and occult atmosphere, and seethes with a palpable sense of mystery and menace that will attract horror fans.
NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Enchantment by Birds
Russell McGregor
Scribe, $39.99
They are “feathered poems” and watching them is “an escape to reality”, wrote two ardent birdwatchers of the second half of the 20th century. Their 19th-century counterparts were equally passionate about the subject but thought nothing of shooting birds for specimens and raiding their nests for eggs. This lively history of birding nicely captures the contradictions and controversies that have marked the relations between birds and humans since European settlement. It is not a chronological account but one refracted through the stories of particular birds, bird lovers and the evolution of bird-watching as a pursuit. We learn how the egret was saved by a campaign against plumes for hats, how photography allowed bird lovers to collect “images not carcasses”, and how the advent of the field guide saw the binoculars replace the gun by encouraging people to identify birds in the wild.
The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective
Sara Lodge
Yale University Press, $41.95
Like the vanishing woman in the magician’s trick, the Victorian female detective disappeared from sight. Sara Lodge brings her back into focus in this marvellous piece of scholarly detective work. Some women began as “searchers” for Victorian police stations to frisk female suspects for stolen property, and then applied their skills more widely, identifying thieves, fraudsters and illegal abortionists and working in sting operations to “catch crooks in the act”. Others worked as private investigators, often dealing in cases of adultery, marital cruelty and blackmail – all fallout of the 1857 Divorce Act. Fascination with the female detective was reflected in popular theatre of the day. But while fictional heroines triumphantly saved the day, actual early female detectives tended to be working-class women plying their trade in the shadows. Lodge gives them their due and uncovers the complexity of their lives.
Exit Wounds
Peter Godwin
Canongate, $39.99
In her 90th year, Peter Godwin’s mother started speaking in the poshest of posh voices. Once restrained and conflict-averse, the “Empress Dowager”, as he now calls her, spills blunt truths about her life and her family. As he recounts her dying days, Godwin is inspired to reflect on the family’s traumatic history – his father’s family obliterated by the Holocaust, his sister killed on the eve of her wedding, his mother’s revelation that she was too busy working as a doctor to come to her son’s side when he was so ill it was thought he would die. Although this fine, limpid memoir is crafted with wry detachment, intergenerational pain surfaces like hunger stones exposed in riverbeds during drought, infusing it with great depth of feeling. The tale ends where it began, with the story behind his mother’s new voice and what it tells of her life as a girl before “everything went to hell”.
The Story of Nature
Jeremy Mynott
Princeton University Press, $51.95
“No one ever wrote a poem to Biodiversity,” writes Jeremy Mynott, but our culture is “saturated with references to nature as the source of some of our deepest emotions and strongest attachments”. What is the narrative we tell ourselves about nature and our place in it? Ambitious and wide-ranging, this work attempts to answer these questions by spanning the grand sweep of Western history – from the cave paintings of Lascaux and the agricultural revolution to the future of nature as envisioned in science fiction and climate modelling. Words matter, Mynott argues, because written language was an early tool in our objectification of, and dissociation from, nature. With the ancient Greeks, nature began to be categorised. In the Enlightenment, nomenclature fuelled humanity’s control over nature. But, as Mynott shows, words can also kindle wonder and help us see nature more clearly.
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