Medieval women, 1970s suburbia and modern divorce: Eight new books

This week’s reviews range from Anne Tyler’s latest romantic novel (her 25th!) to a guide to saving both money and the planet and a celebration of Tasmanian forests.

FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK

Three Days in June
Anne Tyler
Chatto & Windus, $32.99

Intimately observed romantic drama is Anne Tyler’s hallmark, and unlike more expansive novels such as The Accidental Tourist and Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, her latest is a chiselled affair. Divorced couple Gail and Max are chalk and cheese – she’s anxious and orderly and a bit spiky when it comes to asserting boundaries, he’s a big-hearted agent of chaos, the kind of bloke who rocks up at his ex-wife’s house in Baltimore with an elderly cat in need of a new owner. The occasion for their reunion? Their daughter Debbie is getting married, and when the revelation of a recent infidelity threatens to derail her relationship, her parents’ contrasting personalities shape their responses. The drama also prompts them to reflect and resolve questions over the sudden end of their own marriage. Tyler’s dialogue and characterisation are, if anything, more masterly in an abbreviated form. The depth and emotional insight in her portrayal of this middle-aged couple – who know every corner of each other but still hold mystery and untold feeling in themselves – make this short novel a joy to read.

The Grapevine
Kate Kemp
Hachette, $32.99

Set in suburban Canberra in the 1970s, Kate Kemp’s The Grapevine opens with a housewife getting out the Ajax at 3am to scrub bloodstains from bathroom tiles. By morning, the quiet cul-de-sac of Warrah Place will be an echo chamber of rumour and suspicion. Antonio Maretti has been murdered, and we will soon discover how many of the friendly faces in this tight-knit community are masks, hiding darker truths. Kemp introduces a child sleuth, 12-year-old Tammy, an aspiring scientist determined to solve the mystery of what happened to her friend Antonio. She’s extremely intelligent but doesn’t understand all the adult motives behind the gossip and rumour mongering, which sometimes has scandalous results. The reader does, though, and Kemp – a psychotherapist turned novelist – is deft at crafting credible and complex suspects amid a 1970s suburban milieu that plays to nostalgia and pierces it, too. This one’s an atmospheric, slow burn mystery, with an unanticipated twist, more satisfying for drawing out the darkness and disorder under the prim veneer of suburban life.

The Day of the Roaring
Nina Bhadreshwar
Hemlock Press, $32.99

This rather busy police procedural starts with a flashback to the horrors of the Mau Mau rebellion against British colonial rule in Kenya in the 1950s. Six decades later, in Sheffield, Detective Inspector Diana Walker is investigating the death of a headmaster, whose corpse has been dismembered and dumped at a now-defunct school. Her colleagues believe it’s just another grim instance of gang violence, but Diana isn’t convinced, and her search for the truth will lead her into marginalised communities, where distrust of authority appears to have led someone to take the law into their own hands. Confronting a wall of silence, a shield against collective trauma and the lateral violence (including domestic violence) that flows from it, Diana must discover whether a murderer is being protected. It’s a difficult crime novel in which to immerse yourself. The Afro-Yorkshire dialect is vivid, if unforgiving to the uninitiated, but the narrative feels too overburdened with characters, perspectives and digressions to fully cohere.

The Knowing
Madeleine Ryan
Scribe, $29.99

Forgetting to take your smartphone is something everyone remembers. Maybe you felt naked, maybe you felt free. You had feelings about being disconnected from the ubiquity of tech-mediated experience, and you lived life differently. That’s the premise of Madeleine Ryan’s second novel The Knowing. Camille commutes between country Victoria and a posh florist shop in the city, and one Valentine’s Day – the busiest of the year in the floristry trade – she leaves her phone at home. Camille’s mind wanders through epistemic, cod-spiritual implications of being phoneless. She observes daily life with renewed attention. She remembers moments of personal significance with her partner Manny, while enduring the hard-edged obnoxiousness of her boss Holly – a toxic binary to Camille’s constant feels and her somewhat essentialist style of feminism. That dynamic is all very black and white, and as a philosophical meditation on the ineffable, The Knowing feels undermined by the kind of cliche too readily deployed by those who would monetise mysticism.

NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK

The Ancients
Andrew Darby
Allen & Unwin, $32.99

As he recovered from stage four lung cancer, Andrew Darby knew what he wanted to do with his second chance at life: to see for himself the giants and ancients of the Tasmanian forests. These paleoendemic trees, which grow nowhere else, first appeared tens of millions of years ago and some living specimens have been around for millennia. Alongside well-known ambassadors for tree longevity such as the Huon pine, Darby seeks lesser known and rare species such as the elusive King’s lomatia, the “weather-whipped” pencil pines, the “great living towers” of giant eucalypts such as mountain ash, and the myrtle beech which dominate the Tarkine rainforest. It’s a story inseparable from the human history of the island and from the ever-looming threat of devastation by fire. And it’s a thrilling reminder of our good fortune in having these living monuments of deep time on our doorstep.

365+ Ways to Save the Planet and Your Money At the Same Time
Lottie Dalziel
Murdoch Books, $34.99

This eye-opening book provokes a “Yikes!” on every page, but it’s a good “Yikes!” The kind that galvanises you into action and makes the prospect of living in a healthier, more sustainable and less costly way feel eminently doable. Each chapter has three levels of savings (from $75 to $210 a month) that can be made through small changes to your lifestyle such as setting the washing machine on cold to save on energy consumption, ditching chemical cleaners for bicarb and vinegar to minimise chemical pollution, or avoiding farmed fish, teabags and bottled water to reduce the microplastics consumed. Lottie Dalziel offers a bracing mix of scary facts to shock us to our senses and simple, practical, achievable hacks that can counteract the negative impact of many unthinking daily actions. An invaluable bible for modern living that both empowers and engenders hope.

Poet Mystic Widow Wife
Hetta Howes
Bloomsbury, $34.99

It says much about the lot of English women in the Middle Ages that hundreds chose to be confined to a cell for life as an anchoress rather than endure the trials of marriage and motherhood. Yet women did find ways to navigate the suffocating constraints imposed upon them during this period, as Hetta Howes shows through her portraits of four women in particular: poet Marie de France, mystic Julian of Norwich, widow Christine de Pizan and unruly wife Margery Kempe. Being well-connected and educated helped women forge their own path but chutzpah, literary talent, single-minded devotion and a refusal to be silenced were qualities that enabled them to leave their mark. Drawing on years of scholarship, Howes shines a light on the daily realities of medieval women’s lives from sex and childbirth to friendship and death, in prose that matches the irrepressible spirit of her subjects.

The Joy of Connections
Ruth K. Westheimer
Scribe, $29.99

Nonagenarian therapist Ruth Westheimer speaks from deep experience when she offers counsel on how to overcome loneliness. She lost her family in the Holocaust and grew up in an orphanage. Since then, she has gone out of her way to create a “chosen” family, to “find friends and knit them together”. Putting an end to loneliness, she says, requires self-examination, effort and a willingness to make peace with your limitations, which in turn helps short-circuit the impulse to instantly judge others. While work on the self is integral to her advice on combating loneliness, it’s not all about introspection. She urges readers to take practical steps: get a dog, buy colourful clothes, be an active listener, become a mentor, talk to strangers, write honest profiles on dating apps. A lifetime’s insight informs this upbeat guide to building social and intimate connections with others.

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