By Jason Steger
This month Salman Rushdie writes about the appalling attack on him that left him blind in one eye; a Miles Franklin winner turns to crime in Cambridge; an award-winning novelist directs his attention to the state of the oceans; there are a couple of powerful memoirs, and a husband-and-wife team write a novel set in an acute psychiatric war. And there’s more. In other words, plenty to read.
Knife
Salman Rushdie, Jonathan Cape, $36.99. April 16
The subtitle of Salman Rushdie’s memoir is Meditations After an Attempted Murder and refers to the incident in 2022 when he was attacked on stage and lost an eye. He said the book was a way to take charge of what happened, and to answer violence with art. In his earlier memoir, Joseph Anton, he wrote about his time in hiding during the Fatwa against him in the third person, but he told The New Yorker this would be a first-person account: “When somebody sticks a knife into you, that’s a first-person story. That’s an ‘I’ story.”
Hope
Rosie Batty, HarperCollins, $35.99. April 3
It’s more than 10 years since Rosie Batty’s 11-year-old son, Luke, was killed by his father. In this follow up to A Mother’s Story, she writes that “no one can predict how they’ll react if the worst happens and they are plunged into a cauldron of acute trauma”. This memoir is her account of the aftermath, of her address to the waiting media – “In those few minutes, unintentionally, I found a new path and purpose” – and the start of her campaign against domestic violence. So moving; so inspiring.
James
Percival Everett, Mantle, $34.99. April 11
In its review of the prolific and brilliant Percival Everett’s latest novel that bounces off The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The New York Times described it as his “most thrilling novel, but also his most soulful”. In it, he tells of Huck and Jim on the run, but breaks away from Mark Twain by telling it from Jim’s perspective as a runaway slave in the Deep South and sets the action 20 years on from Twain’s classic so the US Civil War is brewing. If you haven’t read Everett, now’s the time to try.
American novelist Percival Everett has retold The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of Jim, the runaway slave.Credit: David Levenson
Deep Water
James Bradley, Hamish Hamilton, $36.99
Take the plunge with novelist James Bradley into the wonders of our seas, their hidden depth, and the dangers that they face from ... us. Our reviewer describes it as “a subtle but mesmerising call to action; a reminder of just how extraordinary this planet’s oceans are, and a plea to every individual to keep fighting to save what’s left of them”. Written with his customary stylistic grace and imbued with a long-standing passion, Deep Water should be essential reading.
Crimes of the Cross
Anne Manne, Black Inc., $36.99
At the core of this investigation into the paedophile ring involving priests from the Anglican diocese of Newcastle is the figure of Steve Smith – aka Smiley, whose vivacious image sits adjacent to the opening chapter of Anne Manne’s book. What he and many other boys went through is told in clear, heart-rending prose, while Manne lays bare the egregious attempts by some diocese figures to protect and excuse the perpetrators. She describes the courageous Smith as “a remarkable person, so crystal clear on right and wrong and in his belief in justice”.
The Work
Bri Lee, Allen & Unwin, $32.99
Like Louise Milligan, journalist and activist Bri Lee has written influentially about sexual abuse, the law, power, and the education system. Now like Milligan she has turned to fiction, though not crime fiction. There are arguments about art and politics; there are power disparities and there’s sex. Lally is a gallerista in New York, whom we meet in an unfortunate encounter with one of her hot young artists; Pat has just started at a Sydney auction house. Can art and commerce and sex really mix? That’s the question.
Bri Lee has written her first novel.Credit: Saskia Wilson
Love, Death and Other Scenes
Nova Weetman, UQP, $34.99. April 3
Children’s novelist and essayist Nova Weetman had a great, 25-year romance with her playwright partner Aidan Fennessy. But when he was diagnosed with cancer their lives and those of their two children were changed irrevocably. He died at the worst time for anyone – during lockdown. Weetman writes movingly and at times with disarming candour about the before, the during and the after. “That’s where I look for you,” she concludes. “In the gaps.” It’s a beautiful book, but be warned: you’ll cry.
No Church in the Wild
Murray Middleton, Picador, $34.99
Murray Middleton’s pedigree is as a short-story writer. In 2015, his collection, When There’s Nowhere Else to Run, became only the second book of stories to win the Vogel Award. A few years earlier he had won the Age short-story award and in 2016 was named a Sydney Morning Herald best young Australian novelist. So there’s a lot of interest in what will actually be his first novel, which tells the story of tensions in a multicultural community in Melbourne and students, teachers and police training for a community-building exercise on the Kokoda Trail.
Anne Buist and Graeme Simsion want “better recognition of the challenges patients and mental health workers face”. Credit: Wolter Peeters
City in Ruins
Don Winslow, HarperCollins, $37.99. April 3
The great American crime writer Winslow has said that this third book in his Danny Ryan trilogy will be his last ever. The trilogy emerged from his love of the Greek classics – the Iliad, Aeneid and the Odyssey. The second volume, City of Dreams, left his hero, Danny Ryan, fleeing for his life with a baby and senile father in tow. Now he has fetched up in Las Vegas and 10 years on is very rich. But trouble isn’t far away. Winslow may have given up writing – so he says – but his fierce online campaign against Donald Trump goes on.
Death of a Foreign Gentleman
Steven Carroll, Fourth Estate, $32.99. April 3
How’s this for an intriguing set-up. DS Stephen Minter is an Austrian-born Jewish Cockney investigating the murder of a German philosopher in Cambridge in 1947. Regular readers of Carroll’s fiction will recall Minter trying to track down T.S. Eliot’s missing wife, Vivienne, in the final of his tetralogy of novels about the poet. It seems Carroll − who is a Miles Franklin winner and also reviews for his masthead − was so fascinated by the detective he created that he has now committed to a series of novels about him.
How to Knit a Human
Anna Jacobson, NewSouth, $34.99
Poet Anna Jacobson has written a strikingly personal memoir about her experiences as an involuntary patient. The impetus, as she puts it, was the “splintering of my memory and self after psychosis”. Her evocative title refers to her process of reclamation, and the weaving of extant memories around the gaps left by those that had vanished. “There was no one way to try this, except through knitting and assemblage, which is an ongoing exercise.” It’s a very distinctive way of telling her story.
Andrew O’Hagan’s latest novel is set in north London.Credit: Rosdiana Ciaravolo
Caledonian Road
Andrew O’Hagan, Faber, $34.99. April 9
The first thing you encounter in Andrew O’Hagan’s whacking great north London novel in the epigraph from Robert Louis Stevenson: “After a certain distance, every step we take in life we find the ice growing thinner below our feet ...” followed by a list of the many characters like in a Russian novel. O’Hagan, a prolific novelist and journalist, is best known for his last novel, the brilliant Mayflies, and for pulling out of ghosting Julian Assange’s memoir a few years ago. Campbell Flynn, art historian, is O’Hagan’s man on thin ice. If you liked John Lanchester’s Capital, you’ll love this.
The Glass House
Anne Buist & Graeme Simsion, Hachette, $32.99
He wrote the bestselling Rosie Project and other novels; she’s a professor of women’s mental health. Together they wrote Two Steps Forward about walking the Camino. This latest novel is clearly informed by Buist’s experience: Hannah Wright is a registrar starting work in acute psychiatry, “the emergency medicine of mental health”. It’s a full-on position as the team deals with seriously unwell patients – all in a health system struggling to cope. The authors are clear about their intentions: they want “better recognition of the challenges patients and mental health workers face”.
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