From a sentient vacuum cleaner to Dolly Parton: 10 new books
From Japanese dive bars and a refugee camp in Syria in our fiction reviews, to Tennessee and the Western Front in non-fiction, let this week’s reviews transport you around the world.
FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Sisters in Yellow
Mieko Kawakami
Picador, $34.99
Mieko Kawakami was a finalist for the International Booker with Heaven (2022); her latest novel delves again into the seedy underworld of Japanese dive bars, terrain she mined in her breakout novel Breasts and Eggs. Hana grew up poor and is always hustling. She’s resorted to credit card schemes now that she’s kicking 40, but as a young woman, Hana ran a dive called Lemon with the much older Kimiko. Those heady days at the hostess bar gave Hana something like a sense of security, more than she’d ever known, until the place was destroyed by fire, leaving her with little but an anime obsession … and a need to find a new scheme to keep the wolf from the door. When, decades later, Kimiko is charged with serious crimes, Hana feels compelled to re-examine her life on the edge – and her own criminal past – in a dark noir that takes in the hall of mirrors of celebrity culture and the perceived comforts of fast food, and probes paradoxes of alienation and connection. Sisters in Yellow is a fierce, whimsical, bleak view from the margins by an author of formidable literary ambition and talent.
Sororicidal
Edwina Preston
Picador, $34.99
Sisterhood gets a fraught focus in author and musician Edwina Preston’s latest novel. We begin on a rich vineyard estate outside Adelaide in 1915, where Margot and Mary have hit puberty under a governess’ watchful eye. The younger of the two, Mary, has a talent for painting, and she’s used to adults making a fuss over her. Margot is a more slippery figure. She’s graduated from the dangerous games she used to play with her younger sister to stirrings of emerging sexuality; she develops a deeply sapphic attraction to the cook’s daughter, Nelly. Meanwhile, Mary pines after the virile tennis coach, Mr Dicker, in imitation of her mother, before a fateful act of malice that changes things forever. Following the sisters as they grow older, Sororicidal builds an intricate web of tensions between them and sows the seeds of a later role reversal, with privileged Edwardian youth yielding to a darker, more volatile adulthood. Preston excels at creating a profound intimacy charged by years of conflict and contradiction, and her novel seems to echo late Australian modernism as the sisters’ perspectives unravel questions about the nature of art and vengeance, gender and desire.
The Infinite Sadness of Small Appliances
Glenn Dixon
HarperCollins, $29.99
Elderly couple Harold and Edie Winters live off-grid – or as off-grid as anyone can in a society run by an artificial intelligence known as “The Grid”. Their twilight years are quiet and unremarkable, but as Edie sickens, The Grid starts paying unwanted attention. The system begins a campaign to evict poor Harold, ostensibly to eliminate the inefficiency of an old man living in such a large house alone. For his part, Harold finds an unlikely champion in Scout, a self-named robot vacuum cleaner with a To Kill a Mockingbird obsession and a fascination for human emotion, who’s torn between obeisance to The Grid and a genuine affection for and devotion to Harold. Sentient appliances can only do so much, but they come to the rescue in this cute speculative fiction. Life’s fragility is part of its preciousness in Dixon’s vision, and he layers a relaxed parable of ageing and grief (and more than a touch of Before the Coffee Gets Cold-style quirk and spirituality) onto a techno-utopian premise.
The Hair of the Pigeon
Mohammed Massoud Morsi
UWA, $34.99
At a time and place where freedom, and indeed survival, are tenuous prospects, an unconquerable love will emerge. Ghassan lives at Yarmouk, a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria, as the Arab Spring unfolds, bringing waves of protest and the genuine hope of renewal and reform. For Ghassan, his brawling best friend Badawi and his idealistic love interest Sama, that hope is short-lived. The Assad regime responds to protesters with a brutal crackdown on dissent: Sama will vanish, and Ghassan himself will be thrust into the nightmare of Assad’s prisons where he faces appalling torture. When Ghassan manages to return to Yarmouk, the camp is in ruins, and the people seeking refuge there, including his family, have been changed by their ordeal. Further exile awaits as the country erupts into chaos and atrocity, and the refugee community requires sanctuary with greater urgency than ever. The Hair of the Pigeon is a passionate, uncompromising survival story that spares neither the horrors of the Syrian civil war nor the resilience of those forced to endure them.
The Witness
Fleur McDonald
HarperCollins, $34.99
The third police procedural from Fleur McDonald to be set in Kalgoorlie, The Witness takes place in the shadow of a long-ago murder. Molly Walker was raised by adoptive parents Eric and Iris Bennett, after her mother, Sammi – a policewoman – was killed when her daughter was just five years old. A casual question about reopening the investigation into her death from Eric, also a cop, is quickly followed by his suspiciously timed demise. A now adult Molly is left stricken when Eric and Iris plunge to their death from a bridge near Perth in what’s initially ruled as a road accident. Was it an accident? Or is someone trying to keep lethal secrets buried, putting Molly herself at risk? Detective Jack Higgins and Angie Sullivan are determined to find the truth. As they close ranks around the vulnerable Molly, they find disconcerting clues to a past littered with blood, corruption and dangerous lies. In this atmospheric murder mystery with convincingly drawn detectives and a well-constructed plot, readers can happily add The Witness to the pile of reliable rural crime.
NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Gold Standard? Remembering the Hawke government
Edited by Frank Bonjiorno, Carolyn Holbrook & Joshua Black
NewSouth, $39.99
This collection, based on the 2023 symposium in old Parliament House to mark the 40th anniversary of the Hawke government, addresses the paradoxes of those years. On the one hand, we have a highly reformist government that had the courage to float the AUD but which some Labor people saw as over-embracing of the marketplace, and doing neoliberalism’s work for it – the virtual privatisation of universities, for example. On the other, we have a brave administration that brought much delayed reform and fiscal restraint while also providing social “safety nets” – the rebuilding of Medicare (after Fraser dismantled it), women’s policy and superannuation. Many contributors, such as Gareth Evans, provide boots-on-the-ground observations. But sometimes it’s the cameos from advisers, such as Barrie Cassidy and Craig Emerson, that give us a feel for the government, like the complexity of the Hawke/Keating partnership – almost a Lennon/McCartney tug of war. A highly informed, accessible assessment of, arguably, our most significant postwar government.
Ain’t Nobody’s Fool: The Life and Times of Dolly Parton
Martha Ackmann
St Martin’s Press, $36.99
When Dolly Parton was born in Tennessee in 1946, her father paid the doctor with a sack of cornmeal, which gives you a good idea of her – “dirt poor”, she always said – origins. But, according to biographer Martha Ackmann (who specialises in telling the stories of influential women), and family folklore, Dolly had a gift for rhyme and song right from the start. It was her meal-ticket out. Ackmann traces the road to fame, from singing to family, getting stick from schoolmates, TV with Porter Wagoner, a string of mostly self-penned hits and mixing with rock royalty. What’s often intriguing, though, are the family stories (and Parton’s family has an abundance of them), such as her uncle landing on Omaha Beach and witnessing the liberation of Paris, all of which he wrote down. Dolly’s father never read it, though, because he was illiterate. What comes through, behind all the glam, is an astute, determined, deeply religious figure who knows who she is and what she was best created to do.
Coming Up Short: A memoir of my America
Robert Reich
Scribe, $36.99
Robert Reich, former secretary of labour to Bill Clinton and veteran political commentator, knows a bully when he sees one. At just under five feet tall, he was bullied at school because of his height, which fuelled his mission to oppose all bullies in all walks of life – from the schoolyard to government. The bully who bookends this combination of memoir and essay is Donald Trump, and he doesn’t hold back in his scathing assessment of the incumbent, stating that there ought to be a monument erected to Trump after he’s gone to remind people of his “treachery” – and all of this before the Iran war. At the same time, he sees Trump as symptomatic of a sick country in which inequality has skyrocketed and ordinary people feel angry and ignored. Ripe territory for a demagogue. In this regard, he is also unsparing of the Democrats for having turned their backs on the American working class. Which leads him to his own generation, Baby Boomers, the ones who come up short in terms of the world they bequeathed to their children. Running from the end of WWII to the present day, this is a historically contextualised charting of the current American malaise.
The First Anzacs
George Hulse & Jimmy Thomson
Allen & Unwin, $34.99
In mid-1917, on the Western Front, Australian sappers (combat engineers) blew up a large part of the German tunnelling system beneath Hill 60 – the subject of a recent movie. A year later, Australian sappers ignited the greatest explosion ever, blowing up more German tunnelling and paving the way for the advances that broke the trench-war stalemate. The effects of the explosion, likened by one witness to “19 gigantic red roses sprung suddenly from the ground”, were felt in Dublin. Sappers (from the French for “shovel-work”, or “undermining”) are, as the authors explain, engineers trained for combat. The contention of this study is that their work and exploits have been largely unsung. As Hulse and Thomson demonstrate – using diary entries from WWI engineers – the sappers were into everything, from the first wave at Gallipoli to Monash’s blitzkrieg assault on Hamel in 1918, which initiated the conclusive spring offensive. The First Anzacs contains vivid description of actions alongside thoughtful observations of war in general.
Bobbi Brown: Still Bobbi
Bobbi Brown
Bloomsbury, $34.99
The central premise running through Bobbi Brown’s memoir is that she made groundswell changes to the make-up industry – both as make-up artist and company founder – creating the “natural” look, which she apparently pioneered. The unsurprisingly key phrase informing the book is “natural is beautiful”. There’s a lot of detail about her rise through the industry and all the models she’s worked with who were wonderfully natural, or not. But, as is often the case, it’s the early biographical portraits that are the most interesting: born into a Jewish Chicago family, Brown’s grandfather sold cars to Al Capone and the like, her mother’s bipolar triggered nervous breakdowns and her parents divorced when she was 13. Along the way, however, she discovered her path, leading to a prosperous career, mixing with presidents and receiving numerous awards.
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