From a twisty thriller to a moving Ukrainian war diary: eight new books

This week’s reviews include a tale of obsessive love, vivid nature writing, a forgotten Anzac hero and a bizarre expedition of the colonialist period.

FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK

Cuckoo
Callie Kazumi
Century, $34.99

This debut psychological thriller about obsessive love, from British-Japanese writer Callie Kazumi, really knows how to put a twist in the tale. It opens in the aftermath of a murder light on details, before introducing Claire. An apparently innocent, soon-to-be-wed young woman who works in PR, Claire has an ebullient personality plastering over a shockingly bleak backstory – one that makes her dote even more on her fiancé Noah. When she rocks up to his workplace unannounced to surprise him on their anniversary, she’s appalled to learn that he hasn’t worked there in nine months. Worse, he won’t return her calls, and Claire is forced to turn sleuth to find out what’s behind the lies and the ghosting. You think you know where it’s all going to lead, but when the killing happens, unreliability makes itself felt. The story doesn’t quite add up, and the mystery will keep you guessing, and turning the pages, as the diaristic narrative gives way to a criminal trial, and this smartly turned psycho thriller plays out in the theatre of the courtroom.

I Leave It Up to You
Jinwoo Chong
Scribe, $35

Waking after a car accident that has left him in a coma for two years, 30-year-old gay Korean Jack Jr. finds the world, and his own life, have left him behind. He missed the pandemic. His fiancé Ren moved on. He lost his copywriting job and his Manhattan apartment, and he’s forced back into the bosom of his family in New Jersey, schlepping in the kitchens of the sushi restaurant they run. It’s ultimately a romantic comedy, but Jinwoo Chong runs a zany line in Asian-American family dysfunction – culturally mainstreamed by the success of the film Everything Everywhere All at Once – and the way strong personalities chafe against each other’s expectations in this novel makes for some entertaining comic clashes. Emil, Jack’s former nurse, helps Jack to adjust, though he’s struggling with his own complications. Amid domestic farce and the kind of arrested development you suspect predated the accident, I Leave It Up to You offers an insightful, heartwarming tale of recovery from disaster.

Black Woods Blue Sky
Eowyn Ivey
Tinder Press, $34.99

Alaskan author Eowyn Ivey returns readers to the wildness and wilderness of her home state in Black Woods Blue Sky. Young single mum Birdie works nights at the Wolverine Lodge, leaving her six-year-old daughter Emaleen alone. It’s a hard-drinking sort of place and Birdie can’t resist cutting loose; she’s hungover as often as not. When Birdie’s employer decides to move her to the day shift for Emaleen’s sake, the little girl is wide-eyed at the lodge’s daytime denizens. She finds one loner – the quiet, hulking Arthur – especially intriguing. He’s a recluse who lives in a remote cabin in the woods, and slowly Birdie and Emaleen become seduced by the tranquil idea of a life off the grid with him. So, they move into Arthur’s cabin. There, they try to make a home, despite unsettling clues that Arthur is not who he appears to be – the cabin is unusually dilapidated, and Arthur disappears into the woods for long periods without explanation. Ivey combines gritty domestic drama, vivid nature writing and snowbound fairytale in a suspenseful novel that feels slightly undermined by its final twist.

Fire Exit
Morgan Talty
Scribe, $32.99

Indigenous people of mixed race can encounter very particular forms of exclusion, and Morgan Talty’s soulful Fire Exit is inspired by his own situation. Talty has Penobscot heritage, but his wife isn’t Native, so his son cannot attain membership of the tribe under federal Indian law in the US. The novel’s narrator, Charles, has a white mother, Louise, and Native father, Frederick. On becoming an adult, Charles is forced by tribal law to leave the reservation where he was raised, and his dad helps him build a cabin on the other side of the river. When Charles fathers a child, Elizabeth, his girlfriend takes the extreme step of denying Charles’ paternity, so their baby can be enrolled in the tribe. It’s a big secret to keep, and turns Charles into a laconic and lonely outsider, though he does cherish the few human connections he does make. He cares for his elderly mother, who suffers dementia, and sees his two friends – one Native facing difficulties of his own, the other an alcoholic he met at AA. Will Charles decide to tell his daughter the truth, even if it costs her dearly? He wrestles with the question, but it’s the melancholy shadow of the life he might have led that lingers in this haunting, powerfully understated debut.

NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK

Where the Old Roses Grow
Janelle McCulloch
Pimpernel Press, $39.99

The public may now flock to Sissinghurst Castle in Kent to view its gardens and heritage roses, but when writer Vita Sackville-West bought it in 1930 it was a ruin. Janelle McCulloch’s highly informed study of how Vita and husband Harold Nicolson transformed the place focuses largely on the war years; the air war raged directly above them, when surrounding fields were littered with plane wreckage and a German bomber missed the castle by yards before crashing. Defying government orders to dig up the rose garden (the estate was big enough to cultivate vegetables and roses) Sackville-West concentrated on creating a thing of beauty in ugly times to share with people – often opening the estate to the public during the war. As much a portrait of the artist as the place, this is an absorbing virtual walk through its gardens and colourful history.

Looking at Women Looking at War
Victoria Amelina
William Collins, $34.99

When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, acclaimed Ukrainian novelist Victoria Amelina decided to keep a diary about Ukrainian women investigating war crimes going on around them – such as the abduction of a celebrated poet arrested by Russian soldiers, who shot him and dumped his body in a mass grave. Her heroes include a woman code-named “Casanova”, a researcher for Truth Hounds (a human rights group) and a lawyer who joined the army to fight the invasion. Tragically, Amelina never finished the book, which she chose to write in English for a greater audience, because she was killed (at just 37) when a Russian missile landed on the pizza house she was in. But her record of Putin’s criminal war lives on, by turns astonishingly calm and collected, outraged, and deeply moving.

A Training School for Elephants
Sophy Roberts
Doubleday, $36.99

In 1879, King Leopold of Belgium financed one of the more bizarre expeditions of the colonialist period. Four Asian elephants were transported from India, “a region with a tradition in working elephants, to Africa, which did not”. The object was to establish an elephant training school. Once trained, the elephants would go to work for the empire in the scramble to ransack Africa. Journalist Sophy Roberts stumbled upon the story, and the more she delved into it the more it became emblematic of the whole colonialist period and the Western “invention” of Africa. In part, it’s written with the fate of the elephants in mind, especially the barbarity with which elephant calves were separated from their mothers and the violence inflicted on them during their training. There’s a lot of detail (possibly too much), but it’s an intriguing tale.

The Man the Anzacs Revered
Daniel Reynaud
Signs Publishing, $29.95

Major William “Fighting Mac” McKenzie of the Salvation Army may have passed into relative obscurity these days, but during and after World War I he was, it seems, as famous as Billy Hughes. Reynaud’s biography is, in this sense, an act of retrieval. He takes in McKenzie’s pugnacious Scottish Presbyterian childhood, emigration to Australia, intense religious visions, joining the Salvos, becoming an army chaplain, going to Gallipoli and France and receiving the Army Cross. His bravery under fire became legendary to the point, says Reynaud, that he was worshipped by the troops. But the paradox at the heart of his tale is that he was also a wowser (supposedly everything the larrikin Digger wasn’t), sometimes physically throwing soldiers out of brothels. A solidly written and researched portrait of a forgotten, unlikely war hero.

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