This week’s new and recent releases range across cli-fi and espionage drawing on real events to a doctor’s moving account of his work in Gaza and manual to navigating the ocean.

FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK

A Guardian and a Thief
Megha Majumdar
Scribner, $29.99

Author of A Burning (2020), Megha Majumdar now has Oprah’s seal of approval, with A Guardian and A Thief selected as a pick for her Book Club. It’s cli-fi that draws energy and suspense from its plausible imaginative extrapolation of the effect of climate change on the Global South. A mother referred to only as Ma must resort to unscrupulous measures to make ends meet in a near-future Kolkata. Ma hopes to join her husband in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he works as a medical researcher; she and her toddler Mishti, along with her elderly father Dadu, have all been granted climate visas for that purpose. Ma’s plans go awry when a thief, Boomba, discovers that she’s been cadging food from her workplace. On the eve of the family’s departure for America, Boomba takes the opportunity to purloin for himself their precious immigration documents. The fate of the passports will link two families, equally desperate to survive amid rampant inequality and moral and social decay, accelerated by a climate catastrophe which hits the poorest hardest. Hectic with suspense and mired in ethical dilemma, this is unusually vivid and authentically imagined dystopian fiction.

The Transformations
Andrew Pippos
Picador, $34.99

If Andrew Pippos’ second novel has a smaller frame than his first – the intergenerational migrant epic Lucky’s, shortlisted for the Miles Franklin in 2021 – that may be in part because it’s set in the dwindling world of print journalism in 2014. The industry faces headwinds unknown to the bustling restaurant chain featured in the author’s debut. Redundancies loom at The National, a fictional daily newspaper in Sydney, and home to subeditor George Desoulis – an unobtrusive type, relentlessly improving copy as he nurses hidden wounds. A fat fraction of the narrative sees George falling into and navigating a non-monogamous relationship with the married Cassandra – an ambitious newshound at the paper; and trying to parent Elektra, a teenage daughter he fathered in young adulthood who’s been absent from his life for complex reasons. The nostalgic inside eye on how the newspapers of yore operated doesn’t always ring true to my experience of them, though it is steeped in some idealised version of the real and should draw in unfamiliar readers. Other drawcards are emotionally and psychologically complex characterisation, and the quiet way The Transformations pulses with erotic, platonic and familial love.

Sharp Force
Patricia Cornwell
Sphere, $34.99

Think your family Christmas is a nightmare? You’ve got nothing on chief medical examiner Dr Kay Scarpetta. Patricia Cornwell’s inveterate forensic investigator features in almost 30 thrillers, and she performs pre-Christmas autopsies the way other people have pre-Christmas drinks. In Sharp Force, though, Scarpetta receives a chilling Christmas Eve phone call telling her that a serial killer has struck again. The Phantom Slasher has the residents of Northern Virginia living in fear, each killing preceded by stalking and minute surveillance, before a holographic climax that sees victims bleeding out in their beds. It’s a dramatic and technologically sophisticated modus operandi with some fascinating science involved. The case is also a ghost story that will haunt Scarpetta. To catch the killer, she’ll be lured to a psychiatric hospital on Mercy Island, where a fresh victim and a lone survivor await – one of them a figure from her past. Cornwell changed the game with her Scarpetta novels, helping to popularise and shape the subgenre of crime thrillers which focus on forensic medicine and science. The latest is slick, ghoulish, and a reliable stocking-filler for crime fiction lovers.

Red Dirt Blue Lights
Tess Merlin
AndAlso Books, $25

Tess Merlin has written a nonfiction work, RANK, about her time as a policewoman in 1970s Queensland, and the glaring disparities and cultural disconnect between police and Indigenous communities. Her slender novella Red Dirt Blue Lights is fictionalised, but it has the kind of directness, humility and empathy that allows it to serve as an important act of truth-telling. Told from multiple perspectives, the narrative comes steeped in the history of Cherbourg – an Indigenous community on Barambah Creek in Wakka Wakka Country, near Kingaroy, the hometown of Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen. Jemma is a young Aboriginal woman torn between romantic love and familial and cultural obligation. She must decide whether to leave Cherbourg, and her ageing grandmother Merinda, to live with her boyfriend. Meanwhile, Tess, a naive police recruit posted to the area, witnesses first-hand Indigenous resilience, and how racist assumptions, ignorance, and a legacy of intergenerational trauma reverberate with continued injustice. It’s a modest book, but an honest one; the author forges a firm alliance between imagination, historical research, cultural consultation, and the testimonial quality of lived experience.

Revelation Beach
Susan Francis
Wild Dingo Press, $32.99

Fifty years ago this October, five Australian journalists were killed by Indonesian Special Forces in the lead-up to that country’s military invasion of Timor-Leste. The case of the Balibo Five lies buried in the shadows of Susan Francis’ Revelation Beach, an espionage thriller which unfolds when forty-something translator, Eleanor Freeman, is threatened by a murderous legacy. The daughter of a former Australian ambassador to Indonesia, Eleanor flees to the family lighthouse on the northern NSW coast after her stepmother Ida dies in a Sydney house fire. It looks like arson, and the ensuing police investigation reveals disturbing evidence that, back in the 1970s, Ida was a spy for the Indonesian government. With a target on her own back and the trauma of a secret family history, Eleanor sets off for Timor-Leste, attempting to track down the truth. Amid the geopolitical power play that saw the island country subjugated by force, she uncovers human rights violations and untold atrocities within a web of deception, greed, complicity and international intrigue. An atmospheric spy thriller inspired by notorious historical events.

NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK

Diary of A Young Doctor
Ezzideen Shehab
Readers and Writers Against Genocide, $24.99

To open this book is to descend into the circles of hell and witness human beings enduring the unendurable. Ezzideen Shehab, a young doctor not long returned from studying abroad, volunteers at a hospital in northern Gaza after October 7. In the early days of the war, he loses 42 members of his family in an airstrike. When the hospital is destroyed, he co-founds a medical clinic. In stories that could have come straight from the Old Testament, he tells of a boy who sets up a tent on top of the rubble that buried his family; a baker who asks a renowned author if he can buy his library to fuel his oven to bake bread; a woman, carrying two children, who looks like “someone who had travelled not just for days but through time itself, through the centuries of betrayal that humanity has inflicted upon itself”. The beauty of Shehab’s prose and the depth of his compassion for the people he tries to help makes his diary a document of heartrending power and eloquence.

Brave New Wild
Richard King
Monash University Publishing, $32.99

In Aldous Huxley’s dystopic novel Brave New World, human beings are “designed” to fit a socially engineered world. Riffing on this grim vision, Richard King’s Brave New Wild warns of a future in which the “technofix” is hailed as the answer to the damage we have already wreaked with technology. King applies a cultural and philosophical lens, arguing that at root, climate change is a social and political problem. “Ecomodernism”, he contends, assumes that we must remake nature – through bioengineering, nuclear power, nanotechnology and AI – in order to save it. The better way forward, he argues, is through “ecohumanism”, which recognises humanity’s genius for technology, but grounds it within a deeper understanding of our relationship with nature. The environmental crisis cannot be solved through “state-political action” or technology alone. “It is a crisis in our way of life – a crisis of human identity.” While grappling with dauntingly big issues and challenging philosophical ideas, Brave New Wild is always accessible, drawing the reader into a frank and soul-searching conversation.

Dirty Politics
Macquarie Dictionary
Macmillan, $19.99

Freud asked his patients to say whatever words came to mind to allow repressed material to surface. This compilation from the Macquarie Dictionary political Word of the Year archives functions similarly for the unconscious of the nation. It tells us what’s been on our minds when it comes to affairs of state. If one word could sum up the way governments seem to work these days it would be “adhocracy”, a wonderful coinage that refers to short-sighted, kneejerk policies. At the other end of the alphabet, the complement to these measures is “zombie savings”– cuts listed in a budget which the government knows are unlikely to be passed by parliament. While we collectively teeter on the edge of all-out cynicism, there’s enough black humour and wordplay – revealed in phrases such as “bonk ban” and “front stab”– to suggest that we could step back from the brink if only our politicians offered what George W. Bush dismissively called “the vision thing”.

Best Australian Science Writing 2025
Edited by Zoe Kean & Tegan Taylor
NewSouth, $32.99

Lightness of touch and directness of style distinguishes this year’s Best Australian Science Writing. Whether it’s the “epic poem of the earth” told by soft sediments from the bottom of the ocean in Lucinda Duxbury’s account of her time spent on a “floating lab”, Jackson Ryan’s wry engagement with a climate denialist, Sally Montgomery’s immersive exploration of freediving or Amalyah Hart’s depiction of the pointy end of consciousness studies via the tiny head of a fruit fly, these pieces show science at work as lived experience. A more confronting form of lived experience is the subject of Felicity Nelson’s account her and her partner’s struggle with long COVID and the difference that family and friends can make for those still debilitated by it. The personal perspective continues in the final piece of this collection, a quirky survey by Tabitha Carvan on the punch packed by PhD science thesis acknowledgements and the emotional journey behind the research.

Wisdom from the Ocean
Robert Kenn
VG, $29.95

Anyone who has ever surfed or tangled with the ocean knows that it’s one big classroom out there. You can either pay attention to the lessons it teaches or pay the price. After being pulled from a rip at Manly half drowned, Robert Kenn became fascinated with the wisdom gained from regular engagement with the surf. His first lesson came from his rescuer, who explained how rips work and how to extract yourself from them. Life, Kenn concluded, was full of rips. The key was going with the flow rather than resisting it. He approached other surfers for their insights. One experienced surfer speaks of the difficulty of raising his hand when he was getting seriously thumped. His message being that asking for help is not a sign of weakness but of strength. Another reflects on how surf is that great equaliser that renders social status irrelevant. This is a no-frills self-help manual offering down-to-ocean advice about how to navigate the rips and dumpers of life.

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