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Beware the Ides of March, a soothsayer told Julius Caesar in Shakespeare’s play. But book lovers needn’t fear the month: the publishing industry is back in full swing and here is just a selection of the many new offerings it has for you.
Something New
Alex Sarkis
Ultimo Press, $34.99
Out now
The publisher is likening Alex Sarkis’ second novel to Looking for Alibrandi for a new generation, and you can see why, given its concerns with family, identity and the many different forces pushing and pulling its main character, Lebanese-Australian Nicole. She featured in Sarkis’ first novel, Something Blue, but now she is in her early 30s, escaping COVID in London in August 2021 for hometown Sydney, leaving footballer boyfriend Jamie behind. At its heart, it’s all about place and love, as Nicole would say.
A Better Life
Lionel Shriver
The Borough Press, $34.99
The controversial Lionel Shriver relishes poking liberal sensibilities with her iconoclastic satires that infuriate but also entertain. In her latest, Nico is a slacker − no job, no girlfriend, still living at home several years after college. His life and that of his divorced mother, Gloria, and two sisters are disrupted when she takes in a Honduran migrant as part of a New York social program, “Big Apple, Big Heart”. You know it’s going to go disastrously wrong, but there are some narrative surprises as Shriver rather unsubtly skewers well-meaning New Yorkers.
On Not Climbing Mountains
Claire Thomas
Hachette, $32.99
Claire Thomas follows up her two earlier novels, Fugitive Blue and The Performance, with a lovely piece of fiction − autofiction? − about a woman, Beatrice Angst, visiting Switzerland, the homeland of her late father. As she navigates the various cantons, she meditates on writers, performers and artists − Nabokov, Chaplin, Mansfield, Baldwin and von Arnim − who have embraced the mountainous landscapes through which she travels. This is a book of images, resonances, memory, and the mingling of art and life that becomes something beautiful and tender.
The Library That Made Me: 200 Years of the State Library of NSW
Eds., Richard Neville & Phillipa McGuinness
UNSW Press, $49.99
The State Library of NSW turns 200 this year. It’s a pretty fabulous achievement – to mark it, the editors of this impressive hardback have included a revealing essay by the manager of the Indigenous Engagement Branch, Damien Webb, and a history by Mitchell Librarian Richard Neville. There are also personal pieces on the importance of the library from fond users such as Anna Funder, Cressida Campbell, Tom Keneally, Glenn Murcutt, Suzie Miller and more. As State Librarian Caroline Butler-Bowdon says in her preface, libraries provide “a defence against societal ‘demagoguery’”.
Raven Mother
Jane Messer
NewSouth, $34.99
Jane Messer delves into three generations of her German Jewish Australian family to examine the life of her grandmother Bella, “part of a history of parents forced … to send their children to safety elsewhere to ensure their survival”. Bella left Messer’s father, Michael, now 99 years old, at a school in England in 1935; from the year after, he never saw her again. Bella escaped Germany to what became Israel, where she took her own life in 1949. Messer writes about refugees, history, memory and family trauma with care and tenderness.
The House of Blue Glass: A Life of Penelope Lucas
Alan Atkinson
NewSouth, $39.99
How do you write a biography of someone who has left few traces in history? Alan Atkinson says “guessing runs right through these pages, but useful guessing has its limits”. Having written brilliantly about the Macarthurs, he focuses now on the woman pastoralist John Macarthur brought back with him from a sojourn in England in 1805. They bonded over conversation, and like him “she was by temperament open-minded and optimistic”. Intelligent and educated, Penelope Lucas had her own money, came as governess to the Macarthurs’ daughter and became “a live-in partner in the family enterprises” and close friend of his wife.
Fourteen Ways of Looking
Erin Vincent
Upswell, $32.99
March 3
Erin Vincent was 14 when her mother and father were hit by a truck while trying to cross a freeway. In this frankly brilliant, imaginative reflection on her grief at losing her mother − her feelings are more ambivalent about her father − she uses the number 14 as a Perec-like structure through which to interrogate that grief. At one point, she asks the world plaintively: “When does grief end?” The answer is, of course, it doesn’t, but you suspect that through her incisive, analytical, personal and deeply moving work, Vincent goes a long way towards assuaging it somewhat.
Shellybanks
Louise Milligan
Allen & Unwin, $34.99
March 3
Louise Milligan returns to the travails and trauma of journalist Kate Delaney, the protagonist of her confronting first novel, Pheasants Nest. Kate has retreated to her spiritual home of Ireland and is soon intrigued by the truth of her aunt Dolores’ perplexing history and sadness. Milligan is in sort of Claire Keegan territory, albeit in more expansive prose. Milligan’s own stellar career as a journalist clearly informs this gripping book, and she has created some disturbingly creepy characters.
Life Drawing
Emily Lighezzolo
UQP, $34.99
March 3
“You think that because you’ve seen me naked, that gives you the right to presume?” Maisie says to Charlie, who first encounters her in a life drawing class where Maisie is the model. They become housemates in a share house in Brisbane while at uni, and then more than friends. But their relationship is far from smooth. Emily Lighezzolo’s first novel is about body image, self-esteem and confidence. Written in three parts, each set several years apart, it takes on a darker hue as the black dog starts barking and a major crisis ensues.
Bring Back Yesterday
Bob Carr
Allen & Unwin, $32.99
March 3
It was an aneurysm that killed Helena, Bob Carr’s wife, in a hotel in Vienna after a night at the opera. They met in January 1971 at a tourist hotel outside Papeete, returning from separate trips to the US. He asked what she was reading and with that, “I was launching a relationship that would sustain both of us for half a century”. This candid memoir chronicles this caring, intelligent woman’s life and tells of how Carr navigated his grief after “the death that descended on her without warning”. Written in both the first and third person and diary form, Carr’s book is driven by nostalgia.
The Mother of All Calamities
Lisa Moule
Allen & Unwin, $34.99
March 3
Lisa Moule has had plenty of success with her short stories and now expands her writing into a first novel that exposes the ups and downs of suburban parenting over the course of one eventful school year. Here are those families that seem − from the outside, at least − to be in perfect harmony with each other. But as we all know, behind the scenes lurk those unseen realities of contemporary life, the tensions and the tears, and we see them from the perspectives of four women − Jenny, Estelle, Chrissy and Viv.
A Far-flung Life
M.L. Stedman
Penguin, $34.99
March 3
If you are one of the millions of readers who gobbled up M.L. Stedman’s The Light Between Oceans 10 years ago, you’ll be keen to get your hands on her second novel. It begins in 1958 on a vast pastoral station in Western Australia, but slips back and forth in time, after a fatal accident shatters the lives of the MacBride family. This is an expansive saga that invites immersive reading. At its heart, as the drama plays out, is the notion of “forgetment”, which Stedman uses as the opposite of memory for the things that are, crucially, forgotten.
Dog Stayed
Tammy Forster & Margeaux Davis
Allen & Unwin, $24.99
March 3
There’s a Raymond Briggs feel to this lovely picture book for children (and grown-ups) about an elderly widower struggling after his wife’s death. Mr Hindbottom has turned into something of a curmudgeon and doesn’t welcome people, memories or animals. But he can’t shake off Dog, the scruffy mutt who turns up one day and gradually inveigles his way into Mr H’s heart. As it will, life gradually takes its toll, and the lesson of this deceptively simple tale, which is beautifully illustrated with a lovely eye for detail, is of the endurance of love.
Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!
Liza Minnelli
Hodder & Stoughton, $55
March 10
Liza Minnelli, the only child of Judy Garland and film director Vincent Minnelli, has told her story to musical collaborator Michael Feinstein. Having grown up with Garland’s addiction and been devastated by her early death, Minnelli went on to win an Oscar for Bob Fosse’s Cabaret − “the most exciting time of my life”. Her memoir is “not just about the good times. My battle with addiction has been as much part of my story as my life as a performing artist”. Minnelli, who will turn 80 two days after the book’s publication, leaves little untold.
Look What You Made Me Do
John Lanchester
Faber & Faber, $34.99
March 17
It’s been 30 years since John Lanchester’s brilliant first novel, The Debt to Pleasure, appeared. Since then, he has shown his considerable versatility, writing striking novels, including Capital and The Wall, books about the GFC, the London Underground and a memoir with an astonishing secret at its heart. Not to mention his extensive journalism, notably for The London Review of Books. This London revenge comedy pits Kate against Phoebe, a TV writer whose show seems to be based on chunks of the former’s marriage. How and why? Lanchester is a writer to be relished and this had me laughing out loud.
The Minstrels
Eva Hornung
Text, $34.99
March 24
A new novel by the South Australia-based author of Dog Boy is always something to look forward to − they don’t come frequently. In The Minstrels, close siblings Gem and Will live in drought-stricken Dunriver, near the eponymous Minstrels, a gorge and “the site of various legends, some suicides, accidental deaths and many conceptions”. During “the run to the Minstrels”, a terrible incident is the catalyst for an equally terrible outcome. Gem’s immersion in the local Indigenous culture expands the ideas of time at the heart of an intriguing, powerful novel.
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