A controversial artwork, a reckoning and a posthumous release: 12 new books to delve into

As autumn blows into Australia, it brings with it an array of new books, ranging from fiction and memoir to political and cultural history. Here’s a sample of 12 new volumes heading our way – and there are plenty more waiting at your local bookshop.

Blue Poles: Jackson Pollock, Gough Whitlam and the Painting That Changed a Nation
Tom McIlroy
Hachette, $34.99
There’s a great photo in Tom McIlroy’s book about Jackson Pollock’s painting that the National Gallery bought in 1973 for $1.3 million. It shows it as it lived for many years in art collector Ben Heller’s apartment. Imagine having that on your wall. McIlroy’s book is an account of the painting’s life and times and those of the people involved, from Pollock himself to Lee Krasner, gallery director James Mollison and many more. To be read in conjunction, perhaps, with Angela O’Keeffe’s novel, Night Blue, written from the painting’s point of view.

Tom McIlroy tells the story of Blue Poles and how Gough Whitlam rubber stamped its purchase.Credit: Belinda Pratten

The Buried Life
Andrea Goldsmith
Transit Lounge, $34.99
The great thing about Andrea Goldsmith’s novels, going back to earlier ones such as Gracious Living or more recent ones such as Reunion or The Memory Trap, is the life and strength of her characters. Here, there are four main ones − Tony, a would-be novelist; his put-upon wife, Laura; Adrian, an academic researching death; and Keziah, who has escaped a religious community. As our review says: “This is a novel in which sharp contrasts … are skilfully braided as the narrative moves towards its 13 pages of resolution, the artistry of which is moving and quite breathtaking.”

The great thing about Andrea Goldsmith’s novels is the life and strength of her characters.

What’s the Big Idea?
Eds., Anna Chang & Alice Grundy
Australia Institute Press, $34.99
Plenty, it seems, judging by the contributors and topics assembled in this collection of essays on matters pertinent to Australia now and into the future, to mark the 30th anniversary of the think tank The Australia Institute. It may be Bill Browne writing on the worth of parliamentarians and pointing out that without democracy “all ideas are inert”. Or climate scientist Joelle Gergis on the three key things to know about climate change, and the need to “accelerate the clean change energy transmission as fast as is humanly possible”. Stimulating bite-sized essays to make you think.

Twist
Colum McCann
Bloomsbury, $32.99
If you’ve ever wondered about the passage of information and other things carried through all those fibre-optic cables that slink along the sea bed between continents, then this dramatic novel – about a journalist and an engineer tasked with repairing damaged cables, who must face up to conflicting demands and ruptured connections – is for you. This is a return to straight fiction for the Irish-American writer, whose last book, American Mother, was written with Diane Foley, mother of James, the US journalist murdered by Islamic State.

The Strange Case of Jane O.
Karen Thompson Walker
Manilla Press, $32.99
The premise of this American writer’s first novel, The Age of Miracles, was intriguing: rotation of the Earth starts to slow, causing chaos, disease, intense storms and an existential crisis. In her third, she creates what is in effect a case study − both of a young mother, Jane O., and the psychiatrist treating her. After the first consultation, Jane disappears, only to end up in hospital with no idea of what happened. Dr Henry Byrd tries to find out what’s going on in her head, and thereby finds out plenty about himself.

Miles Franklin Undercover
Kerrie Davies
Allen & Unwin, $34.99
Kerrie Davies calls her book a “slice of life” biography, in that it follows Miles Franklin’s surprisingly tough life from 1901 – immediately after her iconic novel, My Brilliant Career, was published – to 1915. It was a time when Franklin worked as a servant in the posh homes of Sydney and Melbourne, before heading to Chicago where she wrote When I was Mary-Anne, a Slavey, a manuscript that was never published but that Davies mines along with the author’s diaries to reveal a fascinating story of an embattled talent.

Kerrie Davies gives the reader a slice of the life Miles Franklin.Credit:

One Hundred Years of Betty
Debra Oswald
Allen & Unwin, $34.99
The latest book by Debra Oswald, prolific playwright, novelist and creator of the hit television series Offspring, has a structure that allows her a vast canvas. Betty is about to turn 100 and this is her story, of a woman with gumption galore but living most of her days through a century that doesn’t allow women to live the lives they want, deserve or are capable of. Betty leaves Britain for Australia and finds fresh life, frustrations and rewards.

Chameleon: A Memoir of Art, Travel, Ideas and Love
Robert Dessaix
Text, $36.99
What a blessing Robert Dessaix has been to the readers of Australia. In this carefully crafted and moving memoir of sorts, he considers his life by addressing the man he used to be, Thomas Robert Jones, the name he was given on his adoption. So the refrain of this wide-ranging book that considers all aspects of his life – now that he has reached the “fraying, but suddenly illumined, highly coloured end of my life” – is “I have never been the man I seemed to be”.

Robert Dessaix address the man he used to be in Chameleon.Credit: Adam Gibson

First Name Second Name
Steve MinOn
UQP, $34.99
In Chinese folklore, a jiangshi is a sort of reanimated corpse. In Steve MinOn’s first novel that is Stephen Bolin, whose corpse comes back to a semblance of life when his request for his body to be taken back to Innisfail is ignored by his siblings. So off he goes and takes the reader for an engrossing journey through his family history, with its feedlines from China and Scotland, and along the way considers questions of identity − sexual and racial − with wit and pathos.

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
Omar El Akkad
Text, $32.99
As a journalist, Omar El Akkad covered the war in Afghanistan, trials at Guantanamo and the Arab Spring. As a novelist, he is best known for American War, which follows an orphaned girl in a second civil war. Now, in this bracing assessment of the moral failures of the West over the past 20 years or so, which our review will describe as “blistering”, he assembles a devastating account of damage and destruction. It’s the most cautionary tale it could possibly be: “We dismantle it now, build another thing entirely, or we hurtle toward the cliff …”

Dream Count
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
4th Estate, $34.99
The Nigerian writer has become something of a controversial figure following her TED talk We Should All be Feminists and her comments on trans women. But what she is at heart is a fine and significant novelist − Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sun and Americanah − so it’s good that after 12 years or so she’s back with a novel set partly in her homeland and partly in the US, where she lives most of the time, telling of the dreams, aspirations and achievements of four Nigerian female friends.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie returns to fiction with Dream Count.Credit: Getty

Looking at Women Looking at War
Victoria Amelina
William Collins, $34.99
Last week marked the third anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and given the renewed focus on the various struggles of the country, it’s the perfect moment for the publication of the late Victoria Amelina’s account of the women who resist the Russians. She tore herself away from writing her third novel and started documenting war crimes and stories of resistance. That took its toll, and she was due to leave Ukraine for a year’s writing residency in Paris, when she went for one last trip to Kramatorsk with visiting researchers. There she was killed in a Russian missile strike.

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