Millennials, mums and an Australian mermaid: eight new books

This week’s new releases include a tale of ageing Millennials, a study of race and sexual identity that features a mythological Chinese vampire, an exploration of our need for personal sanctuary and a compelling real-life tale of survival in the Amazon.

FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK

First Name Second Name
Steve MinOn
UQP, $34.99

Winner of a Queensland Literary Award for best manuscript, First Name Second Name explores Chinese-Australian history and springs from an undead creature in Chinese folklore – Jiāngshī, or the Chinese hopping vampire, is a corpse reanimated, walking among the living to fulfil a destiny unmet in life. For Stephen Bolin, his dying wish was to be laid to rest at his birthplace in Far North Queensland. His family denies it, so Stephen is reanimated to walk once more among the living, returning to his final rest under his own power. It’s a wild beginning to a historical novel which explores generations of an Australian family of Scottish-Chinese heritage, from the goldfields in the 1860s to “ten-pound Poms” in the 20th century, with a keen eye for what gets lost or suppressed or swept to the margins by the desire to fit in. The secret history doesn’t just get played out through migration, but also in Stephen’s own story of growing up gay in Queensland – a tale woven with gentleness to balance the sharply satirical lens the author turns on questions of race and sexual identity.

The Usual Desire to Kill
Camilla Barnes
Scribner, $35

A droll and moving portrait of an eccentric family, The Usual Desire to Kill is told by Miranda, whose parents have retired from academic life to bicker and sulk in a farmhouse in rural France, where they live with a menagerie of animals. Her father is a former philosophy professor, so arguments are second nature to him; her mother has developed quirks that resist all argument. Miranda spends her visits with them engaged in translation and triangulation. It’s a high-level diplomatic posting, given the habits they’ve formed after 50 years of marriage, and she leaves harbouring, as she keeps saying, “the usual desire to kill”. I would describe the novel as having a fly-on-the-wall quality, but it’s more intimate than that. With a long career as a playwright under her belt, Barnes writes dialogue that sounds so overheard you almost become part of the family. There’s a tragicomic ambit to the narrative, and brief correspondence from Miranda’s sister and daughter lend a depth of perspective to the narrator’s wry, brilliantly observed take on the foibles and dynamics that have shaped her parents’ lives.

Time Together
Luke Horton
Scribe, $34.99

Millennials on the verge of middle-age come together for a beachside reunion in Luke Horton’s second novel. It doesn’t have the perspicacity or sustained intensity of the relationship breakdown in The Fogging, but it avoids common traps – there are no hackneyed life lessons, nor deadening nostalgia, on display. Phil is grieving his mother’s death and invites old friends to stay at his father’s beach house. There’s the neurotic Bella and embarrassing dad Tim and their two kids, practical Jo and her leftie husband Lucas and their baby, and Annie – flying solo after leaving a toxic relationship. Four perspectives are brought to bear on the weekend, as the ghosts of the people they used to be quietly haunt them, and old habits and grievances resurface. Yet, there are also moments of serenity, and different kinds of love, some preserved merely by spending time together. We may need to wait another few years for a thorough exploration of what middle-age might mean to the generation that invented “adulting”, and some imprecision and vagueness creeps into the prose, though you only notice because Horton’s writing is typically so taut and uncluttered.

The Calendar Mums
Lauren K. McKellar
HQ, $34.99

Black mould is the initial villain in Lauren K. McKellar’s The Calendar Mums, and it is admittedly a terrible evil. A bad case of it threatens a community centre for new mothers with closure, and the mums of Hickory Creek must work together to save the only such service for women in their community. Their fundraising idea – posing for a nude calendar – isn’t exactly original, but as with the 2003 film Calendar Girls starring Helen Mirren and Julie Walters, their plan might just have life-saving results. Some of the women confront limiting social expectations and pressures of the mothering role. Rhea feels guilt at being (able to afford to be) a stay-at-home mother; single mum Samantha is grieving and anxious about coping; Tahlie has a seemingly perfect and supportive husband and can’t understand her loneliness. They all arrive at the conclusion that they’re human beings before they are mothers or anything else, though a highly derivative plot and undistinguished characterisation make this a rather throwaway bit of genre fiction.

NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK

An Architecture of Hope
Yvonne Jewkes
Scribe, $39.99

Our homes are places for aesthetic expression as well as shelter. Put someone in prison and you strip away not just their freedom but their individuality. For criminologist Yvonne Jewkes, the human need for beauty lies at the heart of her work in rehabilitative prison design. As she takes us into these mostly harsh institutional environments, reflecting on ways they could be made more civilised and healing, she tells her own story, exploring the extent to which we are the “architects of our own imprisonment”. The restoration of her house after the breakdown of her long-term relationship becomes a metaphor for the curative power of one’s environment. Like the natural light that now saturates her home, her writing in this clear-eyed yet compassionate book is made all the more luminous by the darkness she has had to confront both in her work and her life.

The Next Conversation
Jefferson Fisher
Penguin, $36.99

Jefferson Fisher might be a lawyer but his advice on how to conduct a successful conversation is the opposite of adversarial. He wants to show people how to argue constructively, not provocatively. If you approach an argument as “a window into another person’s struggles,” he says, you’re on the way to a real connection free from defensiveness or the desire to win at all costs. Useful strategies on pre-empting escalation of a dispute or conflict include remembering to breathe, pausing and tuning into your body before responding, to stay in control of your emotions and thoughts. When it comes to speaking, he counsels succinctness and respectful assertiveness. Homespun anecdotes and scenarios illustrate how this advice can be put into practice. This is a timely guide to civility and self-awareness in a world where swaggering aggression and intolerance run rampant.

Forty Days in the Jungle
Mat Youkee
Scribe, $36.99

A light aircraft crashes in the Colombian jungle. Everyone on board is killed, except for four indigenous children who are missing. This reconstruction of events is much more than a sensational search and rescue drama with a happy ending. Zooming out from the crash that gripped the nation, Mat Youkee takes in the broader social and political landscape for what it tells about the harsh reality of life for indigenous peoples of the Colombian Amazon. At the centre of the tale is Magdalena, the mother of the children, and her boyfriend, Manuel. Why was Magdalena fleeing her riverside settlement? Why had Manuel disappeared before her? Youkee skilfully addresses these questions as he enters into the children’s experience in the jungle, following the many twists and turns that emerge about their family to shed light on the larger forces at work in their lives.

Annette Kellerman Australian Mermaid
Grantlee Kieza
ABC Books, $35.99

Unable to walk because of rickets, her legs strapped in braces to straighten her bones, Annette Kellerman took to the water at an early age, finding a freedom she lacked on land. She went on to become a swimming champion, a pioneer of the one-piece bathing suit, a star performer in films featuring aquatic adventures. She swam the Yarra, the Thames, the Danube. She cried “Cooee” as she plunged through the air during her high diving routines. Both a consummate athlete and maverick entertainer at the turn of the 20th century, she inspired women to “throw off their domestic shackles, toss out their corsets and embrace strength and fitness”, wowing audiences with her honed physique, her daring and sometimes risqué performances. This workmanlike biography is animated by Kellerman’s drive, vitality and chutzpah.

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