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And in what seems like a blink of an eye we’re heading into the second half of the year. There are loads of good books coming our way in the next six months, but meanwhile here are 14 for the month of July.
The End of Romance
Maria Takolander
Text, $34.99, available June 30
Prize-winning poet Maria Takolander’s first novel is set in a fog-bound, discombobulating dystopia after the earth seems to have withdrawn its munificence. An unnamed woman wants to save her son from the military school all boys attend in preparation for dispatch to a distant planet, the Promised Land, as part of a colonising force to find a future home for humanity. They set off on a Road-like journey of survival, but is there sanctuary at journey’s end?
Getting Murdoched
Andrew Dodd & Matthew Ricketson
Hardie Grant, $39.99, June 30
Two experienced former journalists, now media academics, chronicle Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation in Australia, Britain and the US to show how the company wields its power against those it disagrees with or sees as challengers to its world view. The words of individual commentators and the power of outlets such as The Australian, News of the World, Fox News and more all feature, and some of the treatment they have dished out is startling.
Worry Doll
Laura McPhee-Browne
Scribe, $29.99, June 30
We are plunged into Heloise’s affair with Lacey, which has consumed her ever since they kissed on a train in Melbourne. The novel is divided into two parts − each covering a week and 18 months apart − one told from the point of view of Heloise, who lives with her boyfriend and is the older of the two women; the other from the point of view of Lacey, who lives in New Zealand and studies clouds. Worry Doll is a story of desire, memory and delusion.
People Like Us
Sally Piper
UQ, $34.99, June 30
Tina is living in a caravan, working at a service station and getting extra money by caring for elderly Mrs Bell. Tina’s in that “liminal space” between married life and her newly divorced state, and a rounded character, dealing with what life throws at her with kindness and morality. Sally Piper’s novel considers the plight of women whose lives blow up, leaving them sparse income and poor housing, “women hidden in plain sight” facing additional struggles to those that come with ageing.
Musquito
Naomi Parry Duncan
Allen & Unwin, $36.99, June 30
The portrayal of English-speaking Musquito as the sole leader and instigator of armed Indigenous resistance against the colonists in Tasmania is misleading, Naomi Parry Duncan says in her investigation of his life, which ended in execution in 1825. What is also fascinating is what she discovered about her own ancestors, one of whom was part of the group who first captured him in 1805, many of whom benefited from dispossessing the island’s original inhabitants.
Tight Lines
Allee Richards
Summit, $34.99, June 30
In Allee Richards’ third novel, teens Luke, and twins Josh and Matty are thick as thieves living their best lives on the Gippsland coast in the 1990s, surfing, fishing and pushing the boundaries. In the summer, visitors Millie and Jess join in as they taste the ups and downs of life. One terrible event splits the group asunder, leaving them to reach adulthood separate and bereft. The characters here are carefully delineated − can they find some sort of reconciliation?
Being
Rachel E. Menzies & Ross G. Menzies
Allen & Unwin, $34.99, June 30
The problem with being human is dealing with the heavy weight of expectation. How can we find meaning when we know death − “the worm at the core of existence” − as William James put it, lies ahead? In accessible terms, the authors, father and daughter psychologists, discuss the “indecisiveness scale”, Roberto Baggio’s shame, Ernest Becker on the role of culture and much more before concluding that despite our existential angst we really “have won the genetic lottery”.
Parramatta
Yumna Kassab
Giramondo, $34.95, June 30
The great thing about dictionaries is their expansiveness; they can take you everywhere and anywhere and be almost never ending. Yumna Kassab, whose most recent novel, Goodbye, My Love, came out last month, has reimagined the structure to encapsulate her own experience of Parramatta and create her own dictionary, which “is memoir and reflection and vision and gathering and story and documentary”. Dip in and be stimulated, educated and entertained.
I Made This Just For You
Chris Ames
Ultimo, $34.99, June 30
Chris Ames won the Victorian Premier’s award for an unpublished manuscript last year for this collection of stories, following in the footsteps of writers such as Jane Harper and Melanie Cheng. The opener has a man conjuring content for a sleep app, Inner Weather, that his wife refuses to use; an actor is asked to be his “authentic self” in a commercial audition; on a plane to Japan a man is hilariously lumbered with a baby, and there’s even a story as crossword.
Rite of Spring
Kris Kneen
Transit Lounge, $34.99, July 1
The irrepressible Kris Kneen’s latest, intensely erotic novel has a couple, Richard and Miranda, trying to repair their relationship by decamping to a Tasmanian lighthouse. He’s had an affair; she’s felt alone all her life and is angry “that she was nothing but the wife”. Marine biologist Miranda has an advantage only in the water but what is the keening she starts to hear, who is the stranger on the island and what is the urgent pull she feels from the sea?
The Twilight of Exceptionalism
Paul Kelly
MUP, $59.99, July 14
Veteran political commentator Paul Kelly focuses on the decade of evolving global changes in shared morality − “economics, technology, energy and society” − when Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison presided over “a governing failure” and “the party of the established order lost its hold on the nation”. But the problem of the demise of Australia’s exceptionalism remains, Kelly argues, and the job for both major parties is “to understand the future”.
A Short History of Longans
Mirandi Riwoe
UQP, $34.99, July 14
There’s a metaphor in Mirandi Riwoe’s latest novel that reflects its journey into the past of an Australian Irish-Chinese family. Daniel makes mosaic sculptures from fragments of china that belonged to his parents and other families. This delicate assemblage reflects the way the book delves gradually into the 19th- and 20th-century experiences of Daniel’s family and brings us to the truth about the Chinese bushranger Ah Yang.
The Last Movement
Robert Seethaler; trans., Charlotte Collins
Canongate, $24.99, July 14
The Austrian novelist, author of A Whole Life, takes on the final voyage of the great Austrian composer Gustav Mahler, who in 1911 travelled across the Atlantic to imminent death in his homeland. As he sits on deck he muses on his tricky relationship with his wife, Alma, and on his work: “the creative spirit … turned out to be just a whisperer of mistaken concepts and misguided ideas. He preferred to rely on his hearing, and … diligence”.
Krank Fuss
Andrew Upton
Puncher & Wattmann, $32.95, July 17
The eponymous heroine of playwright Andrew Upton’s novel is a chicken with a deformed foot (krank fuss means means “sick foot” in German) that comes in handy when things in farmer Spengler’s chicken coop, where she lives with five other hens, go awry. Krank Fuss forms a tight bond with Gibby, the toad that thinks he’s a frog and together they negotiate the chaos that breaks out. We’re in ’30s Germany and amid nature, red in tooth and claw, this sort of allegory offers hope through its galline central character.
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