By Cameron Woodhead and Fiona Capp
FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Rare Singles
Benjamin Myers, Bloomsbury, $32.99
This novel features an unlikely friendship forged through music.
Benjamin Myers has enviable range as a writer. His last novel, Cuddy, was experimental and poetic in tone, its Yorkshire stories echoing across time, each tangentially linked to the life of St Cuthbert, an insular seventh-century monk. Rare Singles is also set in Yorkshire, but there the similarities end. This one features an unlikely friendship forged through music. A forgotten soul singer on the skids, Bucky Bronco, travels from Chicago to Scarborough to headline a soul-music festival. He isn’t sure he can; Bucky hasn’t performed in decades. His taste of success came 40 years ago, and now he’s addicted to opioids, avoiding his past, scrambling to make ends meet. Unfortunately, he leaves his drugs on the plane, but when middle-aged Dinah agrees to chaperone Bucky (soul music being a respite from her boring job, awful husband and stoner son), they become a source of inspiration to the other. It’s a charming literary pick-me-up, deftly told.
The Crag
Claire Sutherland, Affirm Press, $34.99
Claire Sutherland’s debut novel is a literal cliffhanger.
With the rise of parkour and indoor climbing venues, rock climbing has experienced something of a renaissance. Claire Sutherland draws upon the vertiginous power of climbing in the natural world for her debut thriller. Experienced climber Skye finds the body of a young woman with injuries suggestive of a climbing accident. Only trouble is, the location is kilometres distant from the nearest cliffs, at Mount Arapiles in Victoria’s Wimmera. As the police investigation proceeds, they draw upon Skye’s specialised knowledge and skills to assist, but if the victim was murdered rather than fell, and the killer is still at large among them, dangling from cliffs mightn’t be the safest place to be. Sutherland needs to work on distinguishing character and voice better, but it’s otherwise a solid and involving debut thriller, putting an Australian spin on the sort of literal cliffhanger that’s been popular since North by Northwest, as well as tapping deeper social fears.
By Any Other Name
Jodi Picoult, Allen & Unwin, $34.99
Jodi Picoult’s latest novel explores the theatre industry and arts criticism.
Emilia Bassano has been speculated to be the Dark Lady of Shakespeare’s sonnets. We know from history that she was educated and an accomplished published poet, and interest in reversing her historical erasure, notably Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s play, Emilia, has been growing. I’m not sure Jodi Picoult’s immense novel, By Any Other Name, which suggests Bassano might have written Shakespeare’s plays, isn’t counterproductive. The narrative is split between Bassano’s eventful life and the much less interesting trials of her descendent, Melina. A playwright wounded by a negative review from a prominent theatre critic, Melina writes a play a bit like Malcolm’s and has it promoted under a male pseudonym. The contemporary narrative strand is annoying. No question sexism still exists in the theatre industry, and in arts criticism. Still, Melina’s story feels like a distraction, overburdening what’s otherwise a vivid and expansive historical novel that Picoult’s fans should enjoy.
The Book of Elsewhere
Keanu Reeves & China Miéville, Del Rey, $34.99
This project could introduce readers to Miéville’s challenging work.
Alt sci-fi legend China Miéville hasn’t published a novel for 12 years. The Book of Elsewhere is an odd collaboration. The author has novelised a backstory for Keanu Reeves’ BRZRKR comics. Those feature an unkillable superhero, B, who yearns for mortality but can’t die, and so becomes an ultra-violent avenger who roves through prehistory and history, Highlander-like, killing and maiming and doing warrior-of-legend-type stuff. Miéville is a little hamstrung by the adolescent wish-fulfilment of the premise, but provides more than a fig leaf, lore-wise. The author teases out the existential aspect of the hero’s dilemma admirably, and his talent for speculative fiction invests the time-hopping carnage with more historical and intellectual juice than perhaps it deserves. It would be no bad thing if The Book of Elsewhere introduced a wider readership to Miéville’s more challenging and innovative weird fiction.
NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Tiny
Louise Southerden, Hardie Grant, $34.99
Tiny is the story of building a home while a relationship unravels.
At a time when the prospect of owning a home has slipped beyond the reach of many, the tiny house offers an affordable, more eco-friendly way of living. Travel writer Louise Southerden had been on the move for decades when the pandemic put an end to her wanderings. Inspired by a cabin she had visited in Norway, she started to dream of her own tiny home in northern NSW. Inseparable from this story is the slow unravelling of her relationship with her partner, Max, with whom she is building the house. The depth of love on both sides makes for an elegiac tale infused with yearning and eventual acceptance. Sadness is counterbalanced by the joy of designing, acquiring the skills and creating a home. This beautifully crafted work reveals much about the gender dynamics of such a collaboration while offering inspiration to anyone who shares this dream.
Wild Creature Mind
Steve Biddulph, Macmillan, $36.99
Steve Biddulph offers techniques for better understanding ourselves.
For millennia, meditation teachers have urged us to tune into the bodily sensations that underlie and often drive our thoughts and feelings. Neuroscience is now catching up, recognising the role played by the right side of the brain, which Steve Biddulph calls “wild creature mind”. This hemisphere, unlike the left, does not have words and speaks to us through felt sensations. “It is like an animal guardian, a guide to everything from danger to deep love and trust.” Many mental health symptoms such as anxiety, depression and traumatic stress, he says, are caused by being out of touch with this dimension of our experience. But really, this is a book for everyone, offering as it does scientifically informed and readily applicable techniques for better understanding ourselves. It’s lively, engaging and peppered with case studies to capture the difference that tapping into wild mind makes.
John Berger and Me
Nikos Papastergiadis, Giramondo, $32.95
A book on friendship, farm life and the author’s self-discovery.
“Whatever you do, don’t go and visit him in the village, there are pigs and shit everywhere!” Ignoring this playful advice from Edward Said, Nikos Papastergiadis spent many fruitful summers at the French farm of his PhD subject, art critic and author John Berger. Their burgeoning friendship is explored in this collection of impressionistic musings on the times spent with Berger, on Berger’s writings and on Papastergiadis’ own background growing up in a home without books as the child of Greek immigrants to Australia. For Papastergiadis, it is also a process of self-discovery as he is drawn to the kind of peasant life that his parents left behind. A recurring theme in Berger’s work, he says, is “the loss and love of home”. This is a book that offers aficionados of Berger’s oeuvre an intimate encounter with the man and his way of being in the world.
When Cops Are Criminals
Ed., Veronica Gorrie, Scribe, $36.99
Harrowing essays lay bare how some police punish those they should protect.
After abusing her for hours, Jacinta Ryan’s police officer partner would threaten her saying: “If I called the police now, you’d be sectioned and you won’t have custody of our kids.” Says Maria Markovska, whose partner choked her unconscious: “As a sworn member of Victoria Police, my police-perpetrator is a protected species.” A further complication for victims is the fact that the most common crime committed by police is domestic violence. This feeling of having nowhere to turn, of living in fear of the police, is all too familiar to Indigenous people. When Jacky Sansbury was at high school, police used to raid his house multiple times a week and regularly bashed and locked up his father. These harrowing testimonies and contextual essays lay bare how some in the police and justice system continue to intimidate and punish those they are supposed to protect.
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