Eight new books for you to read this week
Cheryl Akle looks at eight new titles out this week, including a fun book about a celebrity weather forecaster and some new Aussie crime.
Cheryl Akle looks at eight new titles out this week, including a fun book about a celebrity weather forecaster and some new Aussie crime.
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Broken Bay
Margaret Hickey blazed onto the Australian crime writing scene in 2021 with Cutters End, introducing Detective Mark Ariti, a relatable, flawed protagonist. Her 2022 follow-up, Stone Town, was just as well received and had Mark, now a Senior Sergeant, hoping for a quiet posting in his old hometown but nothing ever goes to plan for Mark. In Broken Bay, he is on holidays, reflecting on his life, and once again embroiled in a murder. Hickey excels at using the setting to add tension and, here, it is the South Australian coast and underwater limestone caves. It is a fresh setting for a crime novel, and the underwater scenes are suffocatingly horrifying.
Border Crossings: My Journey as an Outsider
Part memoir, part travel writing, Border Crossings is an episodic journey through Mohammad Chowdhury’s remarkable life. It spans his travels through more than 80 countries while he reconciles his British, Bangladeshi and Muslim identities. Artfully balancing the personal and the universal, the relatable and the spectacular, the highs and the lows, Chowdhury brings his unique lens to the timeless themes of belonging and identity. I imagine many readers will be amazed at Chowdhury’s experiences, while others will find themselves nodding along in recognition. In Waleed Aly’s words, it is “the kind of book I might have written if only my life had been much more interesting.”
The Daughters of Madurai
Growing up in Australia, Nila knows very little about her Indian heritage, until she returns there with her mother and the Pandora’s box of their past is opened. Rajasree Variyar’s powerful debut is set over two time periods and locations: Sydney in 2019, and Madurai, India, in 1992. It is a mother-daughter love story that gives an insight into female infanticide, as well as the fortitude necessary to be a woman and a mother. Variyar possesses a voice that is filled with candour and compassion, as she invites us to shift our perspective on parents, who have their own complexities and histories. This is a story of the love we have for the women who gave us life, and for the children we give life to.
Yellowface
Laugh-out-loud funny meets moments of moral horror meets thriller and satire in the brilliant Yellowface. One very unreliable narrator, June Haywood, has taken her dead friends’ manuscript and published it under a pseudonym – Juniper Song. The book isn’t hers, nor is the name or the ethnic-looking author photo. In a time where we are navigating what’s appropriate, what’s appropriation, what’s straight out stealing and what role censorship – if any – should play in the arts, Yellowface is a timely and brilliant read. Rebecca Kuang’s writing is smart, savvy and deliciously ironic. If there were a novel of the year that most encompasses and highlights the tone of our times with wicked wit and relish, this is it.
Storylines
Thirty-something Nessa emerges from a traumatic car accident, scarred both physically and emotionally. And yet she’s opened Nevada, a healing retreat on a rustic property outside of Perth, where women come to heal, reinvigorate, repair and reinvent themselves. Seasoned writer and journalist Carrie Cox maintains a delicate balance between pathos and humour in this beautifully written and artfully executed novel. Her wry insights into the perception of beauty and our capacity for harsh self-criticism are insightful and wise. Storylines is a poignant and exquisitely beautiful read. Through writing it, Cox has provided us with the opportunity to rewrite our own stories and our perceptions of what beauty truly is.
Rain God: The Highs and Lows of Clement Wragge
By Ian James Frazer
Silverbird Publishing, Biography
458pp, $35.00
Clement Wragge was Australia’s first celebrity weatherman. We are told: “His forecasts and meteorological homilies rippled with melodrama that endeared him to fans and infuriated his peers. Rivals scorned his speculative science, farmers banked on his scent for rain, sea captains trusted his storm warnings, and all, to an extent, indulged his eccentricities.” And there were many. He travelled the world on a quest to prove himself, advocated for conservation schemes, co-founded the Queensland Theosophical Society, and attended seances to contact his son who was killed at Gallipoli. Journalist Ian James Frazer paints a fascinating picture of this ambitious, self-taught weatherman, who not only shaped the science of modern meteorology but also predicted the current changes to Australia’s climate.
Barren Grounds
By B. Michael Radburn
Bloomsbury, Fiction
360pp, $29.99
Barren Grounds astutely deals a case that continues to haunt Senior Detective Joe Capello and ultimately demands he return to the force. B. Michael Radburn is the founder of Dark Press Publications and the former editor of the Australian Horror and Fantasy Magazine and, here, he weaves his love of darkness into this immersive read. The novel moves between young Joseph’s early days in Australia, having fled Mussolini’s Italy with his parents, to an immigrant camp in Victoria. Life is tough and there is an immediate sense of foreboding. Fast paced with a nightmarish undertone, Radburn cleverly interweaves flashbacks from Joe’s childhood that propel the adult Joe’s plot forward, to an ending with a sensational twist.
Southern Aurora
By Mark Brandi
Hachette, Fiction
288pp, $32.99
Mark Brandi, the Dagger Award-winning author of Wimmera, has delivered a new novel about small town life on the wrong side of the tracks, and a protagonist that could well become one of Australia’s classic characters. There’s a Mark Twain innocence and inner wisdom to Jimmy, one far beyond most adults, as he scouts his underprivileged life, seeking meaning and dreaming of a larger existence. Brandi’s observations are breathtakingly original and his use of language is the perfect balance between lyrical and economical. Southern Aurora tackles issues of brutality, addiction, domestic violence, abandonment and grief and the dislocation of people who live on the fringe, but it’s all done with a purity that’s as rare as it is precious.
World away from Bond
The James Bond star gives a raw performance in Queer, based on the semi-autobiographical novella by William S. Burroughs.
This series should be subtitled: ‘Hell came to the promised land’
This savagely violent survival tale is set within one of the more pitiless and uncompromising periods of American history.