T
his week’s new releases traverse the literary gamut from dark fantasy to a journey through the interior of the human body.
FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Grave Empire
Richard Swan
Orbit, $34.99
A new flintlock fantasy horror trilogy from Richard Swan begins in Grave Empire. Set in the Empire of the Wolf, 200 years after the events of a previous trilogy, you don’t need to have read what has gone before to enjoy the intrigue and epic world-building here. Magic has long been outlawed for anything but mundane purposes, and the world is run by money and machines of war. The people of Sova are fighting a losing battle on more than one front. We follow Renata, a junior diplomat on a mission to the sunken domain of vicious mer-people; Peter, whose family has purchased him a disastrous commission in the Sovan army and Von Oldenburg, a noble who sidesteps the law, planning to return magic to the empire. This is a world of monsters, of arcane secrets and ancient doom foretold, but also a world of war and religious schism. It’s the expansive sense of social collapse in this “early modern” civilisation, and the humans who inhabit it, that provide thematic grist to this elaborate dark fantasy, and most of the true horror.
The Rest of You
Maame Blue
Verve Books, $24.99
Massage therapist Whitney Appiah has a special gift: a physical intuition allowing her to pinpoint exactly where in the body to concentrate on, so her clients’ pent-up anxiety and trauma will release. Her own trauma is a different story. Whitney came to London from Ghana, with her aunt Ma Gloria, when she was still a toddler. She recalls little of that time, until fragmentary memories resurface after a sexual assault. As Whitney tries to make sense of the shards of a past which has been kept from her, she presses Gloria for details of the real story of her earliest years. The novel flashes back to Ghana in the mid-1990s: Gloria and another aunt, Aretha, are entrusted with caring for baby Whitney following their sister’s death in childbirth, and the truth about how her father died soon afterwards is revealed. The Rest of You explores migration and Black British identity and intergenerational trauma. The younger women are lively and complex, though the plot seems underdeveloped, and extended sequences of second-person narration – a demanding device, best used sparingly – can grate.
An Onslaught of Light
Natasha Rai
Pantera Press, $34.99
Another migrant story closer to home for Australian readers, Natasha Rai’s An Onslaught of Light focuses on a couple, Indu and Vijay, who move here from India seeking a better life. For the softly spoken Indu, the dislocation from family is a wrenching burden, quietly borne; for Vijay, ambitious but struggling to adapt to a culture he fails to comprehend, the frustrations of a first-generation migrant will be visited upon his children. An emotional reckoning comes when Vijay faces a health crisis, and his solitary daughter Archana, bullied as a kid, returns to the fold at her brother’s request. It’s a role reversal and a difficult relationship for Archana to manage – she soon finds herself staying at a motel – amid a clash of expectations and values, and a growing awareness of her sexuality. Rai is an unshowy but incisive writer who can get under the skin of characters. It may be familiar, the familial clash between first and second-gen migrants, but this is such an insightful and empathetic portrayal, it freshens the step on a well-worn literary road.
The Antique Hunter’s Death on the Red Sea
C.L. Miller
Macmillan, $34.99
Following on from The Antique Hunter’s Guide to Murder, C.L. Miller’s latest features the return of Freya Lockwood and Aunt Carole, intrepid sleuths who have set up the Lockwood Antique Hunter’s Agency. This one takes place aboard a cruise ship full of antiques enthusiasts bound for Jordan. Freya and Carole have snuck aboard to investigate a murder mystery involving a painting stolen from a maritime museum – a crime that might be linked to a corpse found nearby. Freya’s mentor had a list of unsolved cases, and the ship’s art gallery seems to be a veritable showcase of stolen antiquities. Is the sinister art trafficker known as The Collector aboard? Will another corpse be found before this unlikely pair of sleuths solve the case? This one’s billed as cosy crime for fans of Antiques Roadshow, and although “cosy” here seems to mean that the plot unlocks in a way that’s a touch too formulaic for my taste, there’s no question C.L. Miller knows her stuff, having worked in the antiques trade herself.
NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Alive
Gabriel Weston
Jonathan Cape, $36.99
If Gabriel Weston doesn’t fit the stereotype of surgeon-as-tradie – good with their hands but not always good with the whole person – it may be because she did an English degree before studying medicine. Her literary bent may also explain why she found the body, especially when it is cut open, so exquisitely beautiful. In the process of writing the book, her love of the aesthetics of anatomy came up against the “messy and frightening” reality of her own worsening heart condition and her son’s diagnosis with a cavernoma, a cluster of abnormal blood vessels in the brain. The heightened appreciation of life and beauty she always felt when in an operating theatre was now deepened by the experience of living in body which had “suddenly become a text for other doctors to read”. All of which makes for a richly holistic journey through the interior of the human body focusing on the vital organs.
Pain Free
Mark Stephens
Hachette, $34.99
Mark Stephens discovered the power of breath meditation as a young man who suffered debilitating asthma attacks. Since then, he has evolved strategies using meditation and self-hypnosis, which he calls the “four-step pain-free method”, to help people struggling with pain. In this easy-to-follow handbook, he explains how breath work, meditation, hypnosis and mantras can boost the feel-good chemicals in our bodies – dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin and endorphins. The traditional exhortation to “become one with your pain” is made more approachable, for instance, by guidance which encourages curiosity and acceptance. Case studies help illuminate particular visualisation strategies that have worked for others. For those who feel powerless in the face of their pain, Stephens’ buffet of practical techniques is not an alternative to Western medicine but a complement to it.
Vessel: The Shape Of Absent Bodies
Dani Netherclift
Upswell, $29.99
“Is not the corpse itself the elegy for the body that preceded it?” asks Dani Netherclift in this threnody for her father and brother, who drowned in an irrigation channel in north-east Victoria more than 30 years ago. Although Netherclift witnessed it, her memory of what happened was shattered by shock and disbelief, leaving her with fragments that surface and resurface in this poetic, discontinuous narrative. The engine of this work is the incomprehensible fact that her father and brother disappeared before her eyes and yet she could not see where their bodies had gone because of the opacity of the turbulent water which sucked them to their deaths. “We are powerless to stop the dead from disappearing,” she says. And yet, towards the end, she does “find” her brother again in his old diaries. In this haunting moment, he is “so vividly present that I laugh out loud, and sob and giggle”.
The Power of Two
Lisa Messenger & Sarah Megginson
Pantera Press, $34.99
Lisa Messenger was into her eighth round of IVF when her friend Sarah Megginson offered to be a surrogate for her. But Messenger wasn’t yet ready to go down that route. Three years later, after 18 rounds of IVF, it was a different story. The Power of Two alternates between the two women’s perspectives as they tell their shared tale of the pregnancy that gave Messenger the child she had so longed for. It’s the right structure for such a story because it gives both women an equal voice, capturing the extent to which this was a joint venture in every respect except for the carrying of the child. As the mother of three, Megginson knew well the gift of creating life and giving birth. And Messenger, deeply grateful to her friend for this gift, felt pregnant herself. “There was no chance this wasn’t a baby of my creation.” A snappily written, uplifting tale of how altruistic surrogacy can work.
The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from Jason Steger. Get it delivered every Friday.