Japanese fantasy, espionage and colonial adventure: eight new books

From the lost worlds of old Shanghai to the very modern concerns of everyday anxiety, here are eight new books to get you reading this week.

FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Home Seeking
Karissa Chen
Sceptre, $32.99

Teenage sweethearts are united and divided in this beautifully written historical saga spanning decades. Home Seeking opens in Shanghai, 1947, where Haiwen and Suchi first meet and fall in love. Haiwen is a violin prodigy; Suchi dreams of becoming a chanteuse but is being pressured into running the family bookshop. When a fortune-teller prophesies that the pair are destined to meet again and again, the teens cannot foresee how China’s civil war will drive them apart. Haiwen’s father is accused of consorting with communists; his son enlists with the Kuomintang and ends up in Taiwanese exile for decades. Meanwhile, Suchi is sent to Hong Kong for safety, her dreams of becoming a singer realised in a nightclub. Karissa Chen’s sweeping epic is deeply immersed in the travails and predicaments of the Chinese diaspora. It evokes the lost worlds of Old Hong Kong and Old Shanghai with immediacy and engrossing vividness and is as fine at painting the massive canvas of geopolitics and world history as it is on the intimate human scale of those subject to its forces.

Water Moon
Samantha Sotto Yambao
Bantam, $34.99

Food and drink are linked to big life questions in Japanese culture and contemporary fiction – think of the time-travelling cafe in Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s bestseller Before the Coffee Gets Cold, which sends grieving patrons back to a significant memory with a lost loved one. This oneiric Japanese fantasy novel begins with a similar premise. A cosy little ramen restaurant is, for some, a mystical pawn shop in which they can trade their biggest regret for forgetfulness, and the chance to move on. Water Moon soon distinguishes itself. The shop’s new owner, Hana Ishikawa, is burgled, and a mysterious stranger arrives to help her retrieve a stolen treasure. Their quest will take them into a strange and disturbing underworld, and as Hana learns, each regret her customers exchange for amnesia transforms in this place into a bird. Here, people’s life choices are tattooed onto them, the terror enhanced by masked beings who police the fate of the populace without mercy. It’s imaginative and full-blooded fantasy, and a Studio Ghibli film waiting to happen.

The Writing Class
Esther Campion
Hachette, $32.99

After her writing program at the Devonport Library in Tasmania’s north was delayed by the COVID pandemic, Esther Campion turned the idea into a novel. In it, the central figure, Vivian Molloy, is dragooned into teaching a writing class, even though her life has fallen apart. She retired early from teaching to spend more time with her husband, Dave, who then abandoned her without explanation after a weekend away. As she struggles to cope, Vivian throws herself into helping her students, each of whom has a traumatic backstory. Oscar must face career failure and childhood bullying. Young single mum Sienna barely managed to survive her violent partner; seemingly indomitable Marilyn, too, has survived an unsafe domestic environment … by escaping into books. Unlikely strangers who become friends through an amateur art program is a familiar trope – Annie Baker’s play Circle Mirror Transformation is one example. Campion’s characters grow on you, but her efforts to be heartwarming may seem too deliberate to achieve genuine uplift.

More or Less Maddy
Lisa Genova
Allen & Unwin, $32.99

Lisa Genova is a Harvard-educated neuroscientist who rose to literary prominence in 2007 with Still Alice, an exploration of living with early onset Alzheimer’s disease. More or Less Maddy takes on bipolar disorder. Life is hectic for Maddy Banks, an overworked student at a New York university still adjusting to a pace that outstrips anything she knew growing up among picket fences in Connecticut. When she suffers a devastating burnout, Maddy goes on antidepressants, which seem to cause an exhilarating (and then terrifying) mania. Diagnosed with bipolar disorder, she must navigate the complicated consequences for almost every aspect of her life. She runs a gauntlet on her odyssey – between the Scylla of manic and depressive symptoms, and the Charybdis of losing her identity to psychiatric imperatives, of succumbing to a disempowering sense of “normal” she can never achieve. Genova writes with deeply informed empathy about the complex experience of this mental illness.

NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK

Kings, Queens and Fallen Monarchies
Robert James Stove
Pen & Sword, $75

Just how do you tell Kaiser Wilhelm that he needs to kill himself for the good of the German nation? It’s a question that preoccupied much of the German High Command in 1918 with the country’s defeat looming. All agreed, it was … tricky. In the end it was simply announced to the nation (without telling him) that Kaiser Bill’s reign was over and neutral Holland awaited. It’s just one of the tales in this study of the fates of European royal houses between the wars, one of its more tantalising ideas being that had the German monarchy been restored (it was still mooted in the 1930s), Nazism could have been avoided – a view held by Churchill and Lloyd George. Highly informed, but written with wit and relish, there are times when this telling of interwar dynastic implosion unfolds like a dark, Feydeau farce – which, in many ways, it was.

Colonial Adventure
Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver
MUP, $29.99

Colonial adventure, say Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver, is one of the grand narratives of colonialism. Using explorers’ records, memoirs, journals and fiction, they examine the concept and the way it played out in colonial Australia – both its “achievements” and “disasters”. Many of the adventurers were, of course, in the service of British imperialism, the authors here emphasising the violent, dispossessing destructiveness of the adventure. But there are also the free radicals such as found in convict sagas (especially William Buckley), the “roaming” idiosyncratic figure of William Dampier and bushrangers who, far from being in the service of empire, sought to redistribute the many gains of imperial plunder. From Cook and the First Fleet to BHP, this is witty, entertaining and authoritative cultural theory at its best.

Intelligencer
Alan Fewster
Australian Scholarly Publishing, $49.95

Spymasters, by the nature of their craft, tend not to loom large in popular awareness. Their work, as this detailed, scholarly biography of “intelligencer” Walter Cawthorn reveals, goes on in the background. Alan Fewster charts the life of “Bill” (as he was commonly known) from relatively humble origins in Melbourne where he graduated from the newly established Melbourne High School just in time to enlist in the AIF, see Gallipoli and France, before transferring to the British Army after the war and playing a key intelligence role in Pakistan before returning to Australia in 1951. His diligence and organisational talents ensured he rose through the ranks, but even so, he struggled to find work in Australia until eventually landing the directorship ASIS in 1960. An intriguing and solidly written walk through the shadowy, though often routine world of real spying.

Beyond Anxiety
Martha Beck
Piatkus, 34.99

When Nicky, a lawyer, pops up on the screen for her appointment with life coach Martha Beck, she’s in a classy Manhattan apartment, wearing a Versace suit – weeping and wretched with anxiety. It’s typical of this age of anxiety, which Beck traces back to the Industrial Revolution and an education system that trains us to be cogs in the machinery of progress. The result is a way of living that heavily emphasises the logical, analytic left side of the brain at the expense of the right, attuned to intuition and seeing the wonder of life. Anxiety is the symptom of a world pursuing the wrong things, mostly material wealth. It’s not the anxiety sufferer who is “weird”, it’s the world. Yet when Beck tells Nicky this, she insists she is living the American Dream. No, the nightmare, says Beck, emphasising what she calls the gentle “art of calm”.

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