Eight new books, including a Nobel Prize winner, YA romantasy and a year in Seoul

This week’s reviews feature something for all genre lovers, from a post-colonial coming-of-age story to an anthology of the autistic experience, and a wry dissection of society and nature.

FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK

Theft
Abdulrazak Gurnah
Bloomsbury, $32.99

The first novel from Abdulrazak Gurnah since he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2021, the seeds of Theft are sown in Tanzania in the 1960s, as it throws off the shackles of colonial rule. But this is a postcolonial coming-of-age story, largely set in 1990s Zanzibar. Three young people – Karim, Badar and Fauzia – grow up in unhappy families. Karim is a living embodiment of his mother Raya’s disastrous youth: she was forced into a loveless marriage to an abusive older husband (and bore Karim not long before escaping). Badar, meanwhile, is related to Raya’s second husband, Haji, though he’s treated as a servant rather than a family member. Despite both suffering parental abandonment, Karim is an ambitious pragmatist, Badar a romantic. Wild accusations of theft bring conflict over inheritance and bonds of fraternity, while a somewhat underdeveloped third figure, Fauzia, copes with a traumatic legacy of her own. A sort of recolonisation via Western tourism adds a layer of satire to the love triangles and family drama.

Colony
Annika Norlin
Scribe, $32.99

Swedish author Annika Norlin has written an incisive, character-driven dissection of society and human nature. Emelie is an overworked journalist facing burnout. She withdraws into her home, before deciding to go off-grid and camp in the woods. There, she meets the teenager Låke, who’s been raised in a remote forest colony peopled by escapees from urban life and strikes up a friendship that leads her to join their isolated community. Each character is strongly individuated, and have their own reasons for leaving society at large – from Aagny, unable to reintegrate after serving time in jail, to Sagne, Låke’s mother, whose sense of disconnection from the rest of humanity is amplified following an assault. Emilie’s journalistic instincts do not leave her – she’s inquisitive, and her arrival exposes interpersonal conflict and power dynamics usually submerged among the group. Colony is smart and often droll. It features strong characters and world-building, all portrayed with compassion for the nuances of human resilience and frailty.

Grace of the Empire State
Gemma Tizzard
Hachette, $32.99

New York. Early 1930s. Dancer and former circus performer Grace comes from a large Irish immigrant family still reeling from the death of its paterfamilias, and struggling to survive as the Great Depression bites. Her younger sister Connie has a lung infection, but they can’t afford to see a doctor. Calamity continues to strike when her show in Times Square closes, and her twin brother – a riveter on the half-finished Empire State Building – has an accident at work, narrowly avoiding falling to his death but breaking his arm in the process. It’s up to Grace to put on hobnail boots and engage in gender illusionism of the Twelfth Night variety, taking her twin’s place among the construction workers onsite at what will be, upon completion, the world’s tallest structure for 40 years. Grace of the Empire State is a colourful, maximalist historical novel with a likeably realised heroine. So full of incident it can feel crowded at times, the storytelling remains secure – cleverly juxtaposing dangerous work on a skyscraper with the abject want of a safety net for those living in poverty.

Our Infinite Fates
Laura Steven
Penguin, $24.99

In this epic young adult romantasy, the teenaged Evelyn is fated to fall in love in every life she has ever lived … and doomed each time to die before her 18th birthday. This time around must be different. Evelyn’s sister needs a bone marrow transplant, and for Evelyn to save her, she’ll have to save herself first. Confronting the fate that has locked her, for countless millennia, in Arden’s lethal embrace won’t be easy. Love does not always feel freely chosen, and with the origins of the curse lost to time, figuring out how to break it will require a cool head – a hard thing to keep in the face of a deadly soulmate. Love and death are the twin impulses in cap-R Romantic art, and Laura Steven yokes them together in a fairytale written for a younger audience addicted to genre fiction and small-r romance. Teens will find relatable characters speaking in accessible, ordinary sounding dialogue, and our heroine encounters high stakes, with emotions running even higher.

NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK

Five Seasons in Seoul
Christine Newell
Affirm, $34.99

We’re used to the yearly pattern of four season, but in Korea they have a fifth, between late summer and autumn, when, as Christine Newell writes in this thoroughly engaging memoir of her time in Seoul, “the energies of yin and yang are perfectly balanced”. In many ways, it is the metaphor that informs her tale. She had experienced the highs and lows of being a theatre performer, but after the death of her father in 2003, her career spiralled and she found herself playing Tappy the tap-dancing dinosaur for children’s theatre – anxiety and despair flowed, along with tears. Something had to give. Then came the life-transforming offer of working with a theatre company in Seoul. With admirable ease, she vividly evokes the sights, tastes and feel of the city, ranging from the exotic to the kinky, incorporating customs, beliefs – and a little romance.

The Age of Diagnosis
Suzanne O’Sullivan
Hodder Press, $34.99

Medical science has come on in leaps and bounds, but has it led to an age of overdiagnosis? Neurologist Suzanne O’Sullivan thinks we need to find a balance between “the benefits of our diagnosis-driven culture … and the downsides that come with it”. Along the way she challenges many medical assumptions, like the belief that early diagnosis and intervention is best, asking if patients are increasingly having operations they don’t necessarily need. Incorporating case studies, she examines a broad range of diseases and conditions, including autism, anxiety, depression and ADHD, and wonders if we are not pathologising “normal” – is sadness a natural part of life or a lack of serotonin? Then there is online self-diagnosis and psychosomatic illness. A highly complex issue, circumspectly examined in accessible, clear writing.

Someone Like Me
Edited by Clem Bastow and Jo Case
UQP, $36.99

Autism – say the editors of this anthology of the autistic experience by gender diverse and women writers – is still seen as a white, male condition. And it is precisely that dominant stereotype that this collection seeks to subvert. Incorporating essay, memoir, graphic and experimental writing, the contributors not only cover a wide variety of styles, but a broad range of experiences. Fiona Wright looks at how her own diagnosis was “overshadowed” by her anorexia, and (Wright taking a “delicious” delight in this particular medical term), the “co-morbidity” of autism and anorexia. Clem Bastow strongly evokes the feeling of “what being in my body is like”, and Marlee Jane Ward describes the impact of autism in relation to the intensity of her sexual experience. Vivid self-portraits, often written with powerful immediacy.

Creating Schools Where Teachers and Students Want To Be
Michael Lawrence and Dr Fabio D’Agostin
Melbourne Books, $34.99

In another life when I was a high-school English teacher, we had a good degree of autonomy in deciding what we taught and how. Without that vital teacher input we run the risk – say Lawrence and D’Agostin in this clear and passionate study of the state of Australian education – of “turning our classrooms into sterile environments”. At one meeting of a state government curriculum-setting body mentioned by the authors there were no teachers present. Teacher autonomy is one of their key priorities in creating better schools – the authors citing Finland, where there is a high degree of teacher autonomy, teachers are highly respected and there is no teacher shortage, unlike here. Another is an awareness of students’ needs and what might make them want to go to school. A specialist study that concerns all of us.

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