By Cameron Woodhead and Steven Carroll
FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Wild Ground
Emily Usher
Serpent’s Tail, $34.99
Now working at a cafe in London, Jennifer has reclaimed sobriety and distanced herself from an impoverished childhood in a Yorkshire town. Memories of that turbulent time are stirred by the arrival of Denz, a blast from the past who reminds her of adolescent years spent with Danny, her friend and first love.
Together, they endured oppressive conditions that warped their prospects – for Jennifer (then known as Neef), addiction and poverty and parental neglect, while Danny, who’s black, faced racism too. Rays of creativity poke through the clouds of youth – Neef’s dreams of becoming a writer; Danny’s green thumb for gardening and horticulture. Living poor amid the stark pessismism of Northern England, conditions don’t seem to throw enough light for them to escape trauma and thrive.
Emily Usher’s Wild Ground delivers a hardscrabble Bildungsroman in a limpid, unpretentious style, with dialogue in accessible light dialect, and layers of emotion and insight that feel authentic and earned.
The Hitwoman’s Guide to Reducing Household Debt
Mark Mupotsa-Russell
Affirm, $34.99
Olivia Hodges has a successful business and a loving marriage to sweet house-husband Jai, primary carer to their girls. He’s oblivious to her dark past as a hitwoman in Spain, of course, and if Olivia is convinced that her criminal history will catch up with her, it is not through a twinge of conscience (the book literally begins with “I think I’m missing a piece inside. Something crucially human”) so much as a sense of karmic debt.
When tragedy strikes, and a small-time gang is thought responsible, Olivia’s rage reignites her talent for murder. She’s thorough, too. Using a mix of painstaking investigation and high-stakes action, she contrives to assassinate her targets through undetectable means, using their own toxic masculinity and vices against them, while keeping the cops from her trail.
An enticing reversal of a familiar crime-fiction formula, The Hitwoman’s Guide to Reducing Household Debt sports mordant wit and psychological depth, lying closer to Patricia Highsmith than the lurid black comic panache of Carl Hiaasen.
The Girl With No Reflection
Keshe Chow
Penguin, $27.99
Keshe Chow’s YA romantasy, The Girl with No Reflection, takes inspiration from Chinese history and myth.
Young noblewoman Ying Yue has been chosen by royal matchmakers to marry the crown prince. Her fairytale wedding quickly sours. The royal family is notoriously reclusive. Whispers abound of seven previous brides vanishing, and her new husband turns out to be awful.
In her isolation, the new princess begins to see sentient reflections – unlocking a Mirror World where she and a Mirror Prince are all smiles. Horror and fantasy combine. There’s a terrible war between the two worlds into which the heroine is destined to be swept. Romance does take over, but insta-love tropes must yield to Ying assuming an active role if she’s to avoid the fate of her predecessors. A real critic might shrug at most romantasy, but this one’s imaginative and pacy enough to leave the Mirror Critic smiling.
There Are Rivers in the Sky
Elif Shafak
Viking, $34.99
A single raindrop coursing through centuries of human history unites the disparate characters in Elif Shafak’s There Are Rivers in the Sky.
There’s the mighty and learned Ashurbanipal, an ancient ruler of Mesopotamia; Narin, a young Yazidi girl and her grandmother in Iraq, starting on a pilgrimage to the holy site of Lalish; Arthur Smyth, a Victorian-era street urchin who’s destined for great wealth and adventure and melancholy hydrologist Zaleekhah Clarke, newly resident on a Thames houseboat, who meets a mysterious tattooist.
Shafak’s fluid maximalism is far from plain sailing. The plot meanders along implausible courses, essayistic digression is always at high tide and the dialogue sometimes sprays into florid sentiment. Still, many sunken treasures lie within the novel’s watery depths, including sections on the history and culture of the Yazidis, and their brutal persecution through the ages.
NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Russia in Four Criminals
Federico Varese
Polity, $41.99
One theory of Russian history is that it is a tale of action, reaction, and nothing in between. Federico’s Varese’s study of four high-profile Russian criminals, emblematic of post-Soviet Russia, is consistent with this.
When the economy was freed up, Varese argues, there wasn’t really an effective system of government regulation enshrined in observed laws. The vacuum, filled by criminals – mafia and oligarchs – resulted in the mob wars of the 1990s and Putin.
But he begins with a tale of innocence, a young currency trader he met in a student hostel in Russia in 1994, who fell foul of the mafia. Then he moves on to the serious, government-tolerated crims who define post-Soviet Russia’s mob rule. If, he says, Russia ever embraced democracy, it was fleeting. His hope, in informed, lively writing, is that Russia’s past does not define its future.
Nature, Culture and Inequality
Thomas Piketty
Scribe, $27.99
The title of this extended essay by French economist-theorist Thomas Piketty may focus on global inequality, but he also states that there has been a “gradual movement to equality” since 1789, albeit a “halting, chaotic” one.
Integral to his thesis is that we need to know the cultural/historical factors that drive both inequality in parts of the world (especially Latin America) and equality. Along the way, he dismisses the capitalist notion that inequality is an inevitable aspect of the “order of things”. His test case, Sweden, shows that cultural factors moved them toward greater egalitarianism.
On climate change, he says that a resolution between man and nature is not possible without what he calls a “participatory, democratic ecological socialism”. Not a walk in the park, but his most recent book was one of those unlikely bestsellers, and this could be too.
Australia in 100 Words
Amanda Laugesen
NewSouth, $32.99
When we refer to something going “bung” – a career or a car – we are using a derivative of an old Indigenous word. It’s one of the many examples of Indigenous words entering the mainstream that lexicographer Amanda Laugesen cites in this catalogue of Oz usage.
Some, like “bonzer”, have had their day, but perennials such as “no worries” linger on. In many ways, this is a snapshot of Australian culture, expressed through local words and phrases, that often mirror varying shades of the collective temperament; be it irreverence, as in to do a Harold Holt (bolt), the self-conscious stereotype of the “ocker”, and the enduring diminutive “Aussie”, which emerged in WWI, when “diggers” sought to define their distinctiveness.
In an increasingly homogenised world, Laugesen is confident Oz usage will continue to reinvent itself.
The Battle of the Generals
Roland Perry
Allen & Unwin, $34.99
When General Douglas MacArthur made his escape from the Philippines in 1942, eventually fetching up at Spencer Street Station, Melbourne, it was the beginning of two battles.
One, the defence of Australia, the other, an ongoing conflict with Australian General Thomas Blamey, who had been called back to Australia from the Middle East by prime minister Curtin, only to discover en route that MacArthur had been named Supreme Commander in the Pacific, and, effectively, Blamey’s boss.
Veteran military chronicler Roland Perry delves into the ructions and manoeuvrings between the two in informed, entertaining detail, providing portraits of them – Blamey pugnacious and militarily astute, MacArthur, a showman as much as a commander – while also looking at how posterity has treated the two. Smooth, engaging popular history.
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