A passionate affair, an escape, and danger in plain sight: Thirteen new books to delve into

The publishing year may have had a gentle start last month, but February has some real gems heading our way. There are memoirs, novels, first fiction, hybrid essay collections, literary biographies, investigations and remarkable fiction originating from before white settlement in Australia.

Memorial Days
Geraldine Brooks
Hachette, $32.99
When the phone call came on Memorial Day 2019 in the United States, Geraldine Brooks’ world shattered. Her beloved husband, fellow author Tony Horwitz, had been felled by a heart attack on a Washington street. She was alone and in the midst of writing Horse. Life, hers and others, got in the way of really grieving, of letting herself savour their long love in retrospect. Eventually, she took herself to Flinders Island to do just that and this is the moving and inspiring story of him, her and them.

Nesting
Roisin O’Donnell
Scribner, $34.99
You read this novel about an Irish woman trying to escape the coercive control of her apparently upstanding, Catholic husband with horror as short-story writer Roisin O’Donnell ratchets up the tension. Ciara gets away from Ryan, taking her two children with her, but then finds herself pregnant. Set around the referendum on abortion in Ireland, this is an escape story from Jodi Picoult territory, but with a lot more bite.

Roisin O’Donnell has written award-winning short fiction; Nesting is her first novel.Credit: Ruth Medjber

Fully Sikh: Hot Chips and Turmeric Stains
Sukhjit Kaur Khalsa
Upswell, $29.99
Slam poet, playwright and producer Sukhjit Kaur Khalsa made a big impression on Australia’s Got Talent a few years ago with her spoken word, To Advance Australia Fair. Fully Sikh is a provocative and poignant exploration of how life is for a Sikh woman in Australia, from her earliest days up to her work today. It’s a hybrid sort of book, with prose, slam poetry and even recipes. The award-winning writer says her mission is “to prove to Sikh families all over the world that their kids can pursue the arts”.

Gutsy Girls: Love, Poetry and Sisterhood
Josie McSkimming
UQP, $34.99
February 4
In her memoir about her older sister, poet Dorothy Porter, Josie McSkimming calls herself “Dod’s confidante, unpaid therapist and handbrake”. But in telling Dod’s creative and emotional life, McSkimming chronicles their wider family story, her own relationship with Christianity and psychotherapy, and how Dod’s and her lives “wound around each other, and how her life slowly altered the trajectory of mine”.

Josie McSkimming’s Gutsy Girls is about her elder sister, Dorothy Porter.Credit: John Slaytor

Processed: How the Processed Meat Industry is Killing Us With the Food We Love
Lucie Morris-Marr
Allen & Unwin, $34.99
February 4
Lucie Morris-Marr’s book is an account of her own experience of stage-four bowel cancer and the gruelling treatment, including a liver transplant, she went through. It’s also an eye-opening investigation into processed meats such as ham and bacon and the dangers to health from the preservatives used in many of them. Indeed, the World Health Organisation has concluded that eating processed meat is a primary cause of cancer – apparently, it’s akin to asbestos and tobacco.

The Mix-Up
Kylie Ladd
Penguin, $34.99
February 4
”All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” wrote Tolstoy famously. But Kylie Ladd’s two families share their source of unhappiness when they learn their two IVF babies were muddled up in the hospital 14 years earlier. The two children are, of course, very different from each other and their supposed parents but after trials and tribulations, Ladd, who is also a psychologist, offers an imaginative and brave solution.

Somebody Down There Likes Me
Robert Lukins
Allen & Unwin, $32.99
February 4
As in Loveland, Robert Lukins sets his third novel in the US. This time, we’re in the world of the super rich in Belle Haven just as the Gulch children, Lincoln and Kick, return home – the latter for the first time in a decade – to hear that their father, Fax, and mother, Honey, “have some shit to lay on you”. The whole edifice is heading for a fall, and the pull between past and present brings the revelation of more secrets and skulduggery.

Joan Lindsay
Brenda Niall
Text, $36.99
February 4
When it comes to biography, Brenda Niall is indefatigable. Here, she is at the age of 94, coming out with a major look at Joan Lindsay, author of the much-loved and much-discussed Picnic at Hanging Rock. Niall has written about Martin Boyd, Archbishop Mannix, Ethel Turner and Georgiana McCrae, not to mention perceptive looks at her own craft and life. But this was her hardest book as “Lindsay was so carefully composed and self-protective, not to mention protective of her marriage”.

Joan Lindsay, who wrote Picnic at Hanging Rock when she was 70, with her husband, Sir Daryl Lindsay.

A Piece of Red Cloth: A Novel from Arnhem Land
Leonie Norrington et al
Allen & Unwin, $34.99
This novel stems from the oral history of the Yolngu people from well before James Cook’s arrival in Australia when they traded with Macassans. It deals with the dangers they pose to young Garritji and how elders can provide protection. Leonie Norrington worked initially with her adoptive Yolgnu mother, Clare Bush, but after her death the writing of the book was eventually completed with her three Indigenous co-authors, “holders of the Macassan time stories in their community”.

Anne Tyler’s latest novel is a gem.Credit: Andrew Mangum/The New York times

Three Days in June
Anne Tyler
Chatto & Windus, $32.99
February 11
At the age of 83, Anne Tyler has produced a gem of a novel, perfectly shaped and written with her characteristic wit and wisdom. Gail has lost her job, her daughter is getting married, and Gail’s ex-husband, Max, has turned up on her doorstep with a cat in tow. It proves to be quite a few days. The chair of the judges for this year’s Booker, Roddy Doyle, reckons she’s one of the greatest writers in English, so don’t be surprised to see this book on the longlist at least.

Outrageous Fortunes: The Adventures of Mary Fortune, Crime-writer, and her Criminal Son
Megan Brown & Lucy Sussex
La Trobe University Press, $36.99
February 11
Lucy Sussex has long been a champion of Mary Fortune as the writer of the first book of crime fiction published in Australia, The Detective’s Album. For more than 35 years, she has been crusading to have Fortune, whom she says “inhabits negative space, hidden in plain sight”, get the recognition she deserves. But this fascinating double biography, co-written with Megan Brown, is also an account of Fortune’s son, George, a bank robber and recidivist. It’s a remarkable work of research and scholarship.

Nobel laureate Han Kang’s latest book is We Do Not Part.Credit: Getty Images

We Do Not Part
Han Kang
Hamish Hamilton, $35
February 25
Han Kang’s most recent novel, The White Book, was her most experimental. In We Do Not Part, last year’s Nobel Laureate offers a story now translated into English also full of whiteness as Kyungha’s friend, Inseon, in hospital, asks her to travel to her home on Jeju Island and rescue her pet bird. A snowstorm strands her there, and gradually, details emerge from Inseon’s mother of the Jeju Massacre, which she survived, when up to 30,000 people were killed on the eve of the Korean War.

Love Unedited
Caro Llewellyn
Picador, $34.99
February 25
This deceptive novel seems to be about a passionate affair a young woman has with an older, literary writer but turns into a search for the author of an anonymous novel and also the truth about the New York-based Australian editor on whose desk the manuscript has landed. The former director of the Sydney Writers’ Festival, the Wheeler Centre and PEN World Voices in New York has drawn strongly on her life and experiences in her first novel. As one character says, “of course … the novel was based on my life”.

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