Fiction reviewer Kerryn Goldsworthy and non-fiction reviewer Fiona Capp have four new titles each for you to explore, including their picks of the week.
Kiley Reid’s novel looks at race relations and inequality in the US.Credit:
Fiction
PICK OF THE WEEK
Such a Fun Age
Kiley Reid
Bloomsbury Circus, $29.99
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Emira Tucker is 25 and aimless, with no life plan. When not doing her part-time job, she babysits for Alix, whose daughter Briar is three. One evening, with Briar in tow, Emira is accosted and aggressively questioned by a grocery-store security guard. An indignant fellow shopper called Kelley records the encounter on his phone. Briar is white, and so is Kelley. Emira is not.
This is the moment from which the plot of this excellent novel unfurls, both forwards and backwards in time. Set in Philadelphia, the book explores the way that race relations colour even the smallest social actions and reactions. Kiley Reid does not preach, for this is not a polemical book, and every point it makes is made through characterisation and dialogue.
This beautifully written book is a classy page-turner, but it will cause white readers deep unease, and rightly so.
Mix Tape
Jane Sanderson
Bantam Press, $29.99
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Alison and David, teenagers in Sheffield in 1978, adore each other. Both love popular music and it plays a large part in their communication and connection. Daniel comes from a warm, solid Sheffield family, but Alison lives in a run-down suburb with her older brother, their alcoholic mother, and their mother’s sinister boyfriend. Disaster ensues and Alison runs away to Europe. More than 30 years later, living half a world apart and each of them married with grown-up children, Daniel and Alison get back in touch by chance, through social media.
The story of these two and the long trajectory of their relationship is beautifully told via their shared love of music, which they use as a delicate means of communication.
This is an intelligent, thoughtful, and intermittently funny novel about love, security, decisions and consequences.
Shirl
Wayne Marshall
Affirm Press, $26.99
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This is a collection of hilariously deadpan stories focusing on Australian masculinity, not that the women in these sometimes absurdist fables always get off lightly either. The title story features two unsatisfactory wives, Tracey who wants to go to Bali over Cup weekend, and Jacki who went on a bus trip to Albury to play the pokies and never came back. Wayne Marshall’s male characters often prefer more exotic female creatures, such as mermaids and aliens and kangaroos. But such otherness is not confined to women. There’s a lonely Yowie who finds himself on his way to the Desperate and Dateless Ball, where it’s assumed that he’s wearing a Yowie costume. These are funny, warm-hearted fables with some sharp edges, telling tales of a place where a year without football is a catastrophe, and any man seen crying is sentenced to death.
The Tiniest House of Time
Sreedhevi Iyer
Wild Dingo Press, $29.95
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In 1930 the Shastri family, who are Indian Hindus, are living in Burma under British rule. Years of racial and religious tension and political upheaval culminate in a terrible exodus after the Japanese occupy Burma in 1941, and the Shastri family along with many other refugees finds its way back to India on foot. These events are recalled by Susheela on her deathbed in Kuala Lumpur in 2007, after her granddaughter Sandhya has flown from Melbourne to be with her. As a young woman, Susheela falls in love with a Burmese Muslim boy, and half a century later, during the riots in Malaysia over the sacking of Anwar Ibrahim, Sandhya meets a similar fate. The historical background of this book is complex and fascinating, as is the story of these two women’s lives as they negotiate dilemmas around culture, religion, and race.
Non-Fiction
Dear Life
Rachel Clarke
Little Brown, $32.99
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Rachel Clarke had just qualified as a doctor when an oncologist told her to send a dying patient to "the palliative dustbin". This callousness, Clarke realised, masked the oncologist’s disquiet at his impotence and the medical profession’s failure to confront the fears death ignites. After witnessing too many deaths in hospitals that were "uglier and crueller" than they should have been, Clarke chose to specialise in palliative care. While she knew there was no palliative for "the savagery of grief", her work turned out to be "more full of meaning than any other form of medicine". Contrary to popular perception, she found hospices to be places charged with a heightened sense of life’s beauty. The stories she tells of her dying patients, framed by her beloved father’s death, are as profound and stirring as any story of medical heroics or defying the odds.
Dictionary of the Undoing
John Freeman
Corsair, $32.99
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All the recent laments about declining standards of grammar and expression pale into pedantry when one contemplates the brutalisation of language by governments and power systems in the information economy. If we want take power back from the demagogues and corporations, says former Granta editor John Freeman, we have to start by rejuvenating the building blocks of civic society word by word.
To reignite hope on a social level, we need to recover agreed upon meanings, beginning with an inclusive sense of ‘‘we’’. Only by doing this can we stop life-blood words such as ‘‘love’’ from being turned into empty synonyms for fame. We also need to enlarge ourselves with words such as ‘‘spirit’’ that prize intangibles above commodities. This rousing polemic is the adult version of what parents say to their tantrum-throwing toddlers: ‘‘Use your words.’’
No Visible Bruises
Rachel Louise Snyder
Scribe, $35
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Hidden in plain sight, domestic violence often becomes visible only when it erupts into homicide, leaving devastated families wondering how they missed the signs. One of the few heartening aspects of this unflinching study is the growing recognition of risk markers that can alert workers in the field of the need for intervention and so prevent these murders, usually of women and children.
The author’s conversations with the men who killed and the fathers who lost their daughters highlight the shame that festers like a canker at the heart of traditional masculinity, fuelled by fear of failure, of vulnerability and of not being in control. All those caught in this battlefield are brought to life with great care, from the women who fight and the men who kill, to the children caught in the cross-fire.
A Small Door Set in Concrete
Ilana Hammerman
University of Chicago Press, $51.95
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While Ilana Hammerman has travelled to the "ends of the earth", her most urgent, liberating adventures have happened at home, in the Palestinian territories and in Israel where she lives.
For decades she has made regular trips into the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to visit Palestinian families who have become her friends. As an activist, she not only documents the maze of laws and permits that Palestinians must navigate to get into Israel for work, and the Kafkaesque trials of Palestinians suspected of being members of outlawed organisations, but also helps them circumvent these laws by smuggling them in her car trunk through check-points or by taking Palestinian children to the beach. Her stories read like absurdist fiction, such is the surreal nature of life in this region.
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