By cameron woodhead and Fiona capp
FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Everywhere We Look
Martine Kropkowski
Ultimo Press, $34.99
Three women reconnect in a country town in this unsettling Australian gothic fiction. Melissa, Bridie and Cassandra crave a weekend away from their families, but they are haunted by a fourth absent member of their group, and the country folk are only friendly to a point. When the three women witness a teenage girl being coerced into a car and are powerless to stop it, they face a choice that challenges their friendship, compelling them to acknowledge an unspoken legacy of domestic abuse. Martine Kropkowski’s Everywhere We Look appears headed for slow-burn small-town gothic, but it veers away unexpectedly to explore the social dimensions of intimate partner violence. The horror and the haunting feel existential. The novel’s crime? A world that’s unsafe for women. Its solace? A nuanced portrayal of female friendship and solidarity.
Feast While You Can
Mikaella Clements & Onjuli Datta
Simon & Schuster, $24.99
Lesbian vampires have just about always been a thing, from the early vampire novel Carmilla (1872) to the smouldering Sapphic vision of Catherine Deneuve seducing Susan Sarandon in queer cult classic The Hunger (1983). Feast While You Can is horror-romance in which only queer love can contain the monster. It’s the 1990s, in the Italian mountain town of Cadenze. Handsome Jagvi had an awkward teen romance with Patrick – and broke his heart – but it’s his sister Angelina who’s caught her eye now. Just in the nick of time, too, for it seems only Jagvi’s touch can stop Angelina from turning into a monster who feeds on human possibility. This queer vampire romantasy won’t feel much like a faithful recreation of the 1990s to those who lived through them, but it does have sassy characters, and it draws voluptuously on all the erotic and allegorical potential in queer femme monstrousness to tell its tale.
The Chibineko Kitchen
Yuta Takahashi
John Murray Press, $22.99
Comfort food for the bereaved takes a literal twist in feelgood Japanese series The Chibineko Kitchen, the eponymous kitchen serving up a suite of tales from a small but distinguished restaurant by the sea in Chiba prefecture. The house speciality is remembrance cuisine, and 20-year-old Kotoko Niki first goes there heartbroken over the death of her slightly older brother. A meal is served that transports Kotoko back into her memories and allows one last chance to speak to her brother again. Grief touches them all but each new diner in the restaurant has a unique encounter, as the history of the enigmatic establishment – led by the mysterious head chef Kai, though in fact ruled over by a small horde of cats – gradually emerges from its mystic and minimalist frame. Takahashi treads a fine line between kawaii and well-turned melancholy, and you can breeze through the tales in this popular book without setting off your toxic positivity alarm.
Endgame
Sarah Barrie
HQ, $34.99
The fourth and final in Sarah Barrie’s series of crime thrillers following vigilante turned cop Lexi Winter, Endgame brings to a head a psychotic game between Lexi and her nemesis. Preyed upon as a girl by a paedophile known as the Spider, Lexi turned to sex work and computer hacking, moonlighting as a vigilante on the side. She then went legit in the crime-fighting biz, and she is studying for detective exams when series arch villain Vaughn resurfaces with a murder game. He taunts Lexi to identify and rescue five seemingly random victims before the month is out. If she can win, Vaughn will turn himself in, but the deadly mindgames already have Lexi on edge, and tensions rise as her colleagues begin to doubt the influence of Lexi’s traumatic past on her judgment. The body count climbs. A deranged web of manipulations unfurls, and Lexi must hold her nerve and choose carefully her moment to strike. Readers can expect a suitably epic climax to this action thriller series featuring a likeable badass heroine with many skills.
NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Saltwater Cure
Ali Gripper
Murdoch Books, $29.99
“If you look after the ocean, it looks after you.” This observation by First Nations scientist Chels Marshall captures perfectly one of the main currents in this moving collection of profiles of Australians whose lives have been saved, transformed or profoundly enriched by the sea and who have been inspired to do what they can to protect it. Alongside the stories of well-known, life-long oceanophiles like Tim Winton, Layne Beachley and Valerie Taylor are those who were baptised by the healing power of the sea as adults. Traumatised ex-soldiers like Tony for whom surfing is “better than any medicine”, and Indian migrants Rajbir Kaur and Sumit Singh who almost drowned in the surf and went on to face their fears and embrace saltwater swimming and snorkelling. Part celebration, part elegy, part clarion call for action, Saltwater Cure fizzes with a fierce and jubilant love of mother ocean.
Words to Sing the World Alive
Edited by Jasmin McGaughey & The Poet’s Voice
UQP, $34.99
Fundamental to language is the act of listening, the pregnant silence that makes communication possible. This is why Torres Strait Islander elder Aunty Rose Elu values the word “kurusipagiz” so highly. Yuwaalaraay storyteller Nardi Simpson tells of swimming in the “ageless melody” of “yilaalu”, an all encompassing word that spans past and future and stresses listening “so that you might come to truly understand your place, your role, your value to the continuance of others”. For First Nations people who did not grow up hearing their language spoken, learning it later in life is both grounding and challenging. As poet Evelyn Araluen writes, “I am trying to sing like hill and saltwater,/to use old words from old country .../and god, I don’t even know/if I’m saying it right”. What all these contributions share is the appreciation of language as inseparable from Country, the sacred, home.
Cat Lady Manifesto
Anna Go-Go
Affirm Press, $34.99
J.D. Vance did Anna Go-Go a big favour when he dismissed leading US Democrats as “a bunch of childless cat ladies”, bringing into the spotlight the misogyny behind this stereotype. In her entertaining and playful riposte, she embraces and subverts this put-down, unpacking the crazy cat lady trope “like my cat Princi unpacks my undies draw if I accidentally leave it open a crack.” She tells of the joys and companionship cats have given her since childhood, extols famous cat lovers such as Elizabeth Taylor and “honorary” cat ladies such as Abraham Lincoln, and finds early symptoms of cat lady prejudice in the historical fear of witches with their feline familiars. The “crazy cat lady” is seen as a threat to society, she argues, because she fails to conform to the traditional role of wife and mother. Go-Go encourages women to embrace their “inner cat lady” as a superhero for our times.
Marramarra
Brook Garru Andrew & Jessica Neath
NewSouth, $49.99
Marramarra is a Wiradjuri word meaning “create, make or do”. This beautifully produced book not only showcases the work of First Nations artists from around the globe, it highlights their shared concerns with sovereignty, the bloody violence of colonialism, “memory hidden in plain sight” and the healing power of land as a sentient being and repository of ancestral knowledge. It features paintings, video stills, images of performance art and poetry by First Nations people from Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand, Norway, United States, Taiwan, Guatemala and Brazil. Their creations are complemented by interviews with artists and essays which provide a historical context for the work. This is art as activism that seeks to open the eyes and hearts of its audience to the vibrancy and wisdom of Indigenous culture, the wrongs of the past and the holistic worldview of these diverse peoples.
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