A deep dive into a controversial star and a sudden inheritance: 15 books to read

T.S. Eliot may have called April the “cruellest month” but for lovers of Australian writers and writing, it’s a bumper month. There are masses of impressive new books coming out, and here is a small selection of what’s going to be available for your delight.

When I Am Sixty-Four
Debra Adelaide
UQP, $34.99

At the heart of this beautifully written autofiction about Debra Adelaide’s long and deep friendship with the writer Gabrielle Carey, whom she refers to only as “my friend”, is a great and enduring love. The book goes back to their days at primary school, chronicles their respective determination to be writers, and Carey’s struggles with the depression that battered her life, which she took when she was 64. Adelaide tried so hard to prevent her from slipping further into the gloom, and this book is a moving tribute to Carey, their friendship and her life.

Good Boy
Michelle Wright
Allen & Unwin, $34.99
Cookie is banged up for murder and coming to the end of 20 years of porridge in an open prison. There’s a program for the cons to train difficult dogs for adoption by families on the outside, but Cookie’s canine chum is an angst-ridden creature and has little chance of passing the test despite all the illicit tranquilisers snaffled into his favourite marshmallows. So the motherless, brutalised Cookie makes a run for it with “Good Boy” in tow, and a journey towards the truth and some sort of redemption begins in this tender, heartfelt second novel.

Errol Flynn
Patricia A. O’Brien
Allen & Unwin, $36.99
For my sins − and his − many years ago, I read Errol Flynn’s autobiography, My Wicked, Wicked Ways. It was determined not to tell the whole truth about many of his experiences as “the most renowned Lothario of Hollywood”, as his lawyer put it during his trial for statutory rape, and earlier in New Guinea where he fathered at least one child and evaded a murder charge. This fascinating and scrupulously researched biography won’t necessarily leave you admiring the Tasmanian-born Flynn, but no one would deny he lit up the screen in several classic films.

Griefdogg
Michael Winkler
Text, $34.99
Michael Winkler follows up his extraordinary first novel, Grimmish, with the hydrology-drenched story of Jeffrey, a man whose sudden inheritance prompts him to give up his water work and live as the family pet. But Hubert, as he becomes, taps into “the movement of groundwater in our hearts” and discovers that “the teetering, dumping wave of human misery … is washing through him” and his beautiful instinct is “to do something. To cry people better.” Griefdogg is a wonderfully eccentric novel, and Winkler seems to have an unending line in dad jokes.

The Trap
Fiona Kelly McGregor
Picador, $34.99
The Trap is Fiona Kelly McGregor’s sequel to her Miles Franklin-shortlisted novel, Iris, which delved darkly and deeply into the underworld of queer Sydney in the 1930s through the figure of Iris Webber. Here, it’s wartime, and the cops are pulling a racket, snaring “sword-swallowers” in the public toilets, including her friend, Ray Sayles. Meanwhile, Iris, so alive as a character, bemoans a world for women who want another woman. In vibrant vernacular, McGregor brings that world to vivid life in what she calls “fiction, based on fact alchemised by my imagination”.

The Paradise Pact
Anita Heiss
Simon & Schuster, $34.99
Anita Heiss, author of romance and historical fiction, editor and academic, has returned to the (almost) here and now after two striking novels set in the 19th century, with the story of 55-year-old Abbey’s broken heart and her friendship with her tiddas, Stevie and Cait. The latter refers to the trio as “jaguars” − too old to be cougars. Off they go to Hawaii for sun, to run and perhaps have a whole lot of fun. As you would expect from Heiss, there are slivers of politics − it’s set just after the 2023 Indigenous Voice to parliament referendum − and laughs along the way to new realisations.

The Secret Landscapes
Clara Brack
Upswell, $32.99
This book, by the daughter of artists John Brack and Helen Maudsley, addresses what she calls “the disjunction between the artist as a parent and the artist in their work”. The problem is that both painters believed what Maudsley said: “Private is private, public is public.” Brack employs different literary techniques − memoir, of course, but also biography and imaginative fiction − to create a tender but candid portrayal of her parents and, indeed, herself. As she says: “No one starts out writing knowing where it will take them.”

Kill Your Boomers
Fiona Wright
Ultimo Press, $34.99
Essayist and poet Fiona Wright’s first novel wittily gets to grips with one of the issues of the day: housing. Keira is desperate to buy a home − even her friend, Dylan, has thanks to a parent’s demise − but how can she while struggling to pay rent in the sharehouse with the hole in the kitchen floor that seems to play Lady Macbeth to her Macbeth? As Keira says, “I don’t need much. But here’s the thing: I do need.” When events conspire to give an opportunity, she … but no spoilers. It’s all a bit of a hoot with a dose of acerbic social commentary.

Journey to the End of Time
Alex Miller
Allen & Unwin, $34.99
In a poem towards the end of this collection of stories, memoirs, and essays, the two-time Miles Franklin winner describes the process of writing as a “migration away from the familiar into an unknown/ that will become familiar”. He writes that he doesn’t really know why he chose to become a writer, but he does “know that I’m inspired by other writers”. And by other artists, and by friends, it seems, many of whom have influenced him over the years and, indeed, inspired him to become the significant literary artist he is.

Circle of Wonders
Kathryn Heyman
Fourth Estate, $34.99
”In the end,” thinks the cancer-stricken Roni, “there is only this: how you arrive in the world, and how you leave it. Everything else is just middle.” But, she knows, the middle is pretty important and hers has been something of a mess, with consequences for her daughters, Belle and Shanti, sister Anna, her redoubtable circle of friends, and her estranged and also dying mother, Silvie. At the heart of Kathryn Heyman’s tender seventh novel is the need to know “how to let love in and how to let love go”.

A.D. Hope
Susan Lever
La Trobe University Press, $36.99
Alec Hope was frustrated by the slow progress of his career in poetry. A discursive and perceptive critic, he was 48 when The Wandering Islands appeared. He went on to write many more collections, including A Late Picking, which won the Age Book of the Year in 1976, a decade in which his considerable “status as a poet reached its peak”. Susan Lever acknowledges the various reasons for the later decline of interest in his work, but says: “Readers can still come to Hope’s poetry and find it intelligent, challenging and surprisingly readable.”

Frogsong
Melissa Manning
UQP, $34.99
I got to page eight of this first novel by the winner of the Victorian Premier’s Award for fiction before my eyes began to prickle. She won for her short stories, Smokehouse, but in Frogsong, she tells the story of Caro and Danny, who knew in primary school “where they’d been headed from the beginning”. But life has a habit of getting in the way of best intentions, with death, grief and drugs adding to its bumpy road. Manning writes their stories with a tender touch that somehow disguises nothing. Watch out for the froglings and tadpoles.

Challenging Anzac
Eds., Mia Martin Hobbs, Carolyn Holbrook and Joan Beaumont
NewSouth, $39.99
April 1
It’s the month of Anzac Day so watch out for books published to coincide. In this collection of essays, subtitled “Stories that don’t fit the legend”, historians examine the myths that have emerged from April 25, 1915 from different angles. As the editors point out, the legend “has proved flexible enough to accommodate new perspectives”. So we have “as yet untold stories of Australian service that challenge the hegemony of Anzac in Australia” and there are pieces here that will have you thinking again about several crucial aspects of Australia’s history.

The Ruin of Magic
Kate Holden
Black Inc., $36.99
April 7
Kate Holden describes her personal, autobiographical and expansive essays predicated on questions of belonging as a series of explorations rather than answers. There is pondering on the nature of a home, the concept of home, ideas of heritage and a fair amount of nostalgia, all informed by wide-reading and an acute sensibility. As she writes in one of the essays: “Throughout my young life, we went each day into Australia and came home to some other country.” The tone is warm and the rewards many.

A Rising of the Lights
Steve Toltz
Penguin, $34.99
April 8
Nobody in Australia writes books quite like those of Steve Toltz. They are crammed with ideas, written in vivacious prose, and sure to make you laugh; you may well get exasperated as well. Here’s Rusty Wilson, whose parental family was divided on a throw of Monopoly dice, whose wife is sleeping with someone else, and who promptly loses his job. But there’s always the Secret Alibi Club with old school friends Fergus, Charlie and Edwina. A meeting is convened 32 years after the previous one, and Rusty’s life begins to take on a very different hue.

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