‘Inconvenient women’, mortality and a controversial work by Joan Didion: 13 new books to delve into

So here we are, going into the last month of autumn and if you’re one of those people getting ready to hunker down in the impending cooler weather then there are plenty of new books for you to stock up on. Memoirs, fiction, science, even a controversial posthumous publication − so much to feast on. No wonder May is named after Maia, the Roman goddess for fertility and growth.

Always Home, Always Homesick
Hannah Kent
Picador, $36.99
April 29
Burial Rites, about the last woman executed in Iceland, was one of those books that captured the imagination of readers when it was published in 2013. Now Hannah Kent has written a lovely memoir about the curious path she took to becoming a writer − an exchange program took her as a 17-year-old to Iceland, a country she chose because she had never seen snow. She had the luck, she writes, to be born into a story-loving family and with that legacy has written three novels and now this tender account of how Iceland captivated her and forged her literary career.

Hannah Kent has written a memoir about her relationship with Iceland.Credit: Ben Searcy Photography

Desire Paths
Megan Clement
Ultimo, $36.99
April 29
In her introduction, Megan Clement, who has lived in Australia, France, England and Zimbabwe, writes that 2020 was the year when “grief” and “trauma” were dropped into the cultural mainstream. In the course of this touching and carefully constructed memoir of dealing with the stringencies of the Melbourne lockdowns and the impending death of her terminally ill father, she also considers the nature of home, belonging and the meaning and realities of borders.

Little World
Josephine Rowe
Black Inc., $27.99
April 29
Orrin Bird has been left an unusual bequest − the incorruptible body of a saint in a box made of canoe wood. (Remember the saint in Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional?) The saint was young when thought to have died brutally, but her mind is still active, “time breaking contract with her body” and “death has brought very little in the way of answers”. In clear prose, this short, idiosyncratic novel brings us the people with whom the little saint “travels” through time and landscape, her response to their predicaments and her reflections on her own existence. A remarkable concoction.

Everything Lost, Everything Found
Matthew Hooton
HarperCollins, $34.99
April 30
What was it Faulkner said? “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” The revisiting of earlier events occurs in many novels, and does so again in Matthew Hooton’s much-admired third. Jack is 12 years old when his mother is mauled by a croc in the Tapajos River in Brazil. Many years later, Jack, by now a grandfather, recognises he doesn’t “have infinite time to curate my own past” as his wife Gracie “slips into ever longer states of forgetting”. But how can he come to terms with the past and his present?

Lonely Mouth
Jacqueline Maley
Fourth Estate, $34.99
April 30
The first novel by Jacqueline Maley, columnist with The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, became a bestseller. Her second opens with a paragraph that leaps off the page and plunges you into the story of Matilda, a fry chef at posh Sydney restaurant Bocca, her younger half-sister Lara, a model who lives in Paris, and their flighty mum, Barbara. When Lara’s father, the decidedly dodgy actor Angus, reappears in their lives, any sort of equilibrium goes up in smoke. It’s hard to put down.

Should Joan Didion’s posthumous book have been published? That is the question.Credit: NYT

Notes to John
Joan Didion
Fourth Estate, $34.99
April 30
This book is slightly problematic. You wonder whether its author − were she still alive − would have approved of its publication. Joan Didion wrote the adored Year of Magical Thinking, about the 2003 death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. This posthumous book consists of notes addressed to him reporting on sessions with her psychiatrist, and reveals frank comments about their adopted daughter Quintana, alcoholism, depression and much more. If you love Didion, you’ll probably want to read this.

I Want Everything
Dominic Amerena
Summit Books, $34.99
April 30
“I acted immorally, but what did literature have to do with morality?” asks the would-be literary star − “a style machine with no substance” − early in this absorbing novel about truth and ambition. The unnamed narrator stumbles on a controversial, reclusive author − “sharply chiselled cheekbones, like the bust of a deposed dictator” − and proceeds to try to find out why she disappeared from the public eye. But to woo Brenda’s trust, he tells a porky or three, and she might just be leading him on for her own purposes. All will be revealed in Dominic Amerena’s delicious debut.

The Opposite of Lonely
Hilde Hinton
Hachette, $32.99
April 30
The world takes its toll and Rose is well aware of that. Somehow, she seems to have shaken off friends, her father has died, her husband is no longer her husband and even her young son Max is trying her patience more than usual. After a near disaster while out shopping, a knight in shining armour comes to the rescue; Ellie, who becomes her new bestie. Loneliness is a curse at the best of times, so a friend indeed for a friend in need is a good thing … usually. Hilde Hinton has written another gentle and perceptive look at the travails of life.

Raina MacIntyre laments the rise of health disinformation.Credit: Jennifer Soo

Vaccine Nation
Raina MacIntyre
NewSouth, $34.99
May 1
Biosecurity expert Raina MacIntyre’s latest book is a lament at the rise since 2020 of health disinformation and a plea to understand the value of vaccinations given the sad inevitability of a new pandemic. She points out that flu vaccinations in Australia in the over 65s are at 60 per cent, whereas only a few years ago, 70 per cent was the norm. To improve public perception of vaccines and public health, according to MacIntyre, we need “political will, global cooperation and an integrated approach”.

Inconvenient Women
Jacqueline Kent
NewSouth, $34.99
May 1
Jacqueline Kent’s titular women are the “daughters of the suffragists, the mothers of … 1970s feminists”. These are the writers, ranging from Jean Devanny, author of the controversial The Butcher Shop, to Kath Walker (Oodgeroo Noonuccal), Katharine Susannah Prichard and Nettie Palmer, who “used their power with words in support of their beliefs, and to question and change elements of the world”. There are plenty of familiar names, but many not so well known, and Kent brings her cast of writers effortlessly to life.

The Power of Choice
Julian Kingma
NewSouth, $49.99
May 1
Julian Kingma is a wonderful photographer. In this book, he has chosen to photograph terminally ill people who have decided to make use of Voluntary Assisted Dying legislation to ease their anxiety about death and regain dignity through their control of it. His stark black and white images are confronting, tender, beautiful, and terribly revealing. As 82-year-old former yoga teacher Liberty Pack says, “I have no anxiety. I have a very peaceful feeling about the way my end will be.” The Power of Choice also has short introductions by Andrew Denton and Richard Flanagan.

Ocean Vuong’s second novel is about an unusual but telling friendship.Credit: Celeste Sloman/ New York Times

The Emperor of Gladness
Ocean Vuong
Jonathan Cape, $34.99
May 13
The American poet and novelist won acclaim for his first novel, the brilliantly titled On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, and follows it up with a story that begins with 19-year-old Haia about to jump from a bridge. He is stopped by an old Latvian woman, Grazina, suffering from dementia, who invites the troubled youth to stay with her. Both are struggling, but the connection they form through their friendship − their love − from their particular edges of American society brings meaning to them both.

The Names
Florence Knapp
Phoenix, $32.99
May 13
Does it matter what name you have? In Florence Knapp’s first novel, Cora gives birth to a boy and wants to call him Julian. Her domineering husband reckons he should be named Gordon, as he is, while her nine-year-old daughter, Maia, reckons the moniker should be Bear. And so Knapp gives us three versions of the boy’s life when the family circumstances are at times grim, and his life takes differing paths depending on his name. There’s big word of mouth in the publishing world about this sliding doors novel.

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