Ten new fiction and non-fiction books to add to your reading list

Sydney Morning Herald

18-06-2025

From gothic horror in Italy and gay love in the outback to a poetic call to arms about our rivers and a guide to getting through the loss of a beloved animal companion, this week's reviews have something to appeal to every reader.
FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Their Monstrous Hearts
Yigit Turhan
HQ, $34.99
Butterflies are an intriguing locus of gothic horror. Yigit Turhan's Their Monstrous Hearts makes them seem like an inevitable and immortal choice. Struggling writer Riccardo has been invited to a mysterious villa in Milan, the home of his recently deceased grandmother Perihan. He had no contact with her for many years, and his memories of opulence and glamour jar with the sense of foreboding he gets when he arrives at her house. Pinned butterflies in cases line the walls, his grandmother's clique of friends are inscrutable to him, and when he discovers Perihan's diary, addressed specifically to him, a creeping sense of dread begins to mount. Something is not right in this place, and the more Riccardo learns about the vile secrets hidden on the dilapidated estate, the less chance he has of making it out alive. Turhan has given a familiar kind of creature horror a weird and novel skin. A blend of haunted house and original monster horror, it's a macabre, sumptuously rendered gothic fiction, perfect for fans of the genre looking for something new.
Best known for The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, fantasy writer V.E. Schwab has turned her dark tendrils to queer vampire fiction. Three women from different eras – all queer, all vampires – are united in hunger in Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil. The story starts in 16th-century Spain, with a beautiful girl seeking to escape a fate decided by men. It spins through Georgian London, where a cloistered young woman finds forbidden love. And it shifts to Boston in 2019, where Alice seeks a fresh start, and finds more and much less than she expected … Schwab's foray into 'toxic' lesbian vampire fantasy could have been titillating genre fiction, or conversely a mere frame for a novel of ideas, but it somehow digs into an unhallowed middle ground. Queerness is mainstream in vampire stories. Untameable hunger? Eternal sexual desire? They have always disdained the ordinary, and if Schwab's novel has its share of lavish sapphic fantasy, what makes it stand out is the depth of her engagement with the human stories behind the monstrous ones.
Rie Qudan achieved literary fame last year when she won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize for Sympathy Tower Tokyo, a novel about a skyscraper prison in a futuristic Japan. Artificial intelligence is one of its themes, and the author made headlines – and sparked controversy about the role of AI in creative writing – when she admitted that a small percentage of the text was written by Chat GPT. Now, two of Qudan's novellas – School Girl and Bad Music – have been translated into English by Haydn Trowell. The first of them views the influence of technology on human behaviour through the lives of a rich, bored housewife and her teenage daughter. Surreal maternal dreams and anxieties are juxtaposed with adolescent earnestness – the daughter taking to YouTube to vent her frustrations – before the generational clash finds common ground in an Osamu Dazai short story. Art breaks down boundaries in Bad Music, too, which follows a music teacher who lives with a painter contemplating a subversive course of action. They're stylish and strange fictions, marked by dark humour and human mystery.
From the author of Invisible Boys, adapted into an original TV series streamed on Stan, comes a gay coming-of-age story set in remote Western Australia. Jack was born Giacomo Brolo in Geraldton. He fled his hometown and his conservative Italian family after he discovered he was attracted to guys. Life halfway out of the closet hasn't been kind – Jack's a heavy-drinking, underemployed construction worker – and when a family wedding prompts the prodigal son to make a return, a reckoning with the past beckons. Jack may have fathered a child with his former girlfriend, for a start, and then there's his schoolfriend Xavier, on whom he had a mad crush. What happened to him? King of Dirt brings gritty earnestness to Jack's quest for love and acceptance in a hostile environment. There are obvious parallels with Christos Tsiolkas' Loaded, and if Sheppard's writing isn't as raw or rebellious, it has a fidelity to life, especially in depicting teenage male homophobia, or how queer folk can attract a found family when the one they're born into rejects them as they are.
Our New Gods
Thomas Vowles
UQP, $34.99
Gay sex in the city is where Thomas Vowles' Our New Gods begins, before immersing readers in the narrator's loneliness and confusion. Ash is a new arrival on Melbourne's queer scene. After a hook-up with the super-hot James, he wants to parlay the situation into something more intimate than the apps usually allow. Hedonism amid a queer share-house milieu awaits, although a tangled web frustrates the pursuit of love. Plus, there's stuff James isn't telling him, from traumatic secrets to a loaded gun. Ash weaves between a desperate yearning for intimacy and intense paranoia, and he can't help wondering if he's waded into dangerous waters. Our New Gods is billed as a literary psychological thriller, though that's a bit misleading. Vowles can write. The dialogue is well-differentiated, and the portrayal of queer community rings true, but the novel's plot plays second fiddle to a coming-of-age tale with a decidedly kinky ending.
Is a River Alive?
Robert MacFarlane
Penguin, $55
British writer Robert MacFarlane has written some superb books about mountains, forests, wild places and subterranean landscapes. But in Is a River Alive? he excels himself. His most intimate work so far, it brims with feeling for the three great rivers he writes about, and for the people who initiate him into these fluvial worlds and who are fighting for them. They're a lively cast of characters whose example spurs him to a deeper understanding of rivers as living beings. The Rights of Nature movement is gaining ground globally and river rights are central to it. If you find it a stretch to think of a river as alive, says MacFarlane, try picturing a dying or dead river. To walk with him to the source of the River of the Cedars in Ecuador through its luminous cloud-forest, or along the banks of the rivers in Chennai, India, which have been killed so that a city might live, or be immersed in the Mutehekau Shipu in Quebec, which would be drowned if hydro dams go ahead, is to taste the essence of these flowing bodies of water. In precise, poetic prose, MacFarlane challenges us not to personify rivers but to broaden and deepen what we think of as 'life'. It's an enthralling journey that powerfully brings home how rivers are part of us and we of them.
For years, Ephraim Finch has had a recurring dream. He is on a barge laden with souls going back and forth across a river. The dream is a distillation of his life's work as director of Melbourne's Jewish Burial Society and keeper of memories of the dead. Struck by Finch's boundless capacity to hold these stories and his feeling for those who grieve, Katia Ariel wanted to know more about 'this heart-language' and how she might become 'fluent in its lexicon'. Through her encounters with Finch, his journals and those whose lives he has touched, she not only creates a multi-faceted, nuanced portrait of a remarkable man and the wider community he embraced when he converted to Judaism, but also charts a deepening of her own heart-language. This is a work alive with conversations between the living and the dead, a reminder of the importance of ritual in the act of remembrance.
The Introvert's Guide to Leaving the House
Jenny Valentish
Affirm, $36.99
Being an introvert never bothered Jenny Valentish. But what did bother her was appearing weird, unlikeable or aloof. And she felt it was holding her back in life. She now describes herself as a 'mostly reformed sociophobe' as a result of exercises she refined over years of practice to help her get comfortable and confident with social situations, group activities and daily interactions. If this guide has an underlying philosophy, it is expressed by the US poet and activist Maya Angelou whom Valentish quotes. Once Angelou really came to terms with her mortality, she was able to be fully present. 'Give everything. All the time. It's great fun. And it's liberating.' It's a big ask, particularly for those who find themselves drained and daunted by small talk, parties, crowds and conversations with strangers, but Valentish's practical and sometimes left-field advice makes it feel doable.
Broken Heart, Shared Heart, Healing Heart
Barbara Allen
Broadleaf Books, $49.99
Jennie was the love of Maurice Sendak's life. More than a year after the death of his beloved terrier, he wrote that the pain was still 'unrelenting'. As a former animal hospital chaplain, Barbara Allen understands better than most the anguish that Sendak and other grieving pet-lovers experience. 'When an animal companion dies, the ratio of grief is not dependent upon the species but upon the love, the bond.' This book is a thoughtful meditation on the strength of this bond and a guide to navigating its loss. How to deal with the guilt of having one's companion animal euthanised? How to help children cope with the loss of a beloved pet and what it tells them about mortality? Will the human companion see their pet again in an afterlife? Allen offers no neat answers but instead urges that we give full weight to the love companion animals offer, and the heartbreak experienced when they die.
Sophy Burnham begins her series of letters to a younger cousin about what it's like to be old in a positive vein. At 85, she has never felt so happy, so free. She still even rides her horse. But just before you start to feel that this could get saccharine – the narrow perspective of a well-off white woman from Massachusetts – she gets real. She talks about how, as the product of a youth-obsessed culture that equates old age with obsolescence and decrepitude, she doesn't like to be seen or treated as old. The way she deals with her ambivalence is the most interesting lesson of the book. However, aspects of her New Age outlook – for instance, that the universe rewards the good and brings sorrow to those who aren't – are seriously jarring. There's much that's valuable about Burnham's honest grappling with old age, but it's hard not to be repelled by her self-serving take on her good fortune.