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Sydney Morning Herald

09-07-2025

This week's reviews include historical fiction about Florence Nightingale, a love letter to letter-writing, a stirring take on growing wiser and tales of Indigenous women trailblazers.
FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Stories for Mothers and Daughters
ed. Molly Thatcher
British Library, $22.99
This collection of tales from the British Library focuses on mothers and daughters through the 20th century and includes contributions from masters of the form, including A.S. Byatt, Jeanette Winterson and Jamaica Kincaid. There's an awful lot of tea in this book, though the prim confines of a particular kind of British femininity provoke moments of tiny rebellion that snowball, as the anthology proceeds, into open revolt. In Psalms, Winterson goes down the rabbit hole of a daughter's recollections of her devoutly religious mother – describing the death of a pet tortoise with darkly subversive wit. Byatt's intergenerational Rose-Coloured Teacups is a sly, vividly rendered portrayal of the necessity of breaking tradition as well as transmitting it, with shattered artefacts passed down the maternal line and tart one-liners such as: 'She was overdoing the pink.' Kincaid's My Mother departs most from a naturalistic mode, utilising surrealism and fantastical metamorphosis to capture the evolution of the mother-daughter relationship at its core. Changing expectations of motherhood and new freedoms won by feminism permeate these stylish short stories from celebrated literary women.
Jeanine Cummins
Tinder Press, $32.99
Controversy over 'authenticity' attended the publication of Jeanine Cummins' 2020 novel American Dirt, a tale of Mexican immigrants fleeing narco-traffickers. The author herself was neither Mexican nor an immigrant, though she did have a Puerto Rican grandmother – a fact revealed in the febrile debate over ethnicity, and its fictional representation, that ensued. Despite outrage from some quarters, Oprah refused to pull the book from her book club. It became a bestseller. The fallout does seem to have influenced Cummins' follow-up, Speak to Me of Home, which introduces a fictional Irish-Puerto Rican family resembling the author's own. For matriarch Rafaela, her memory might be going, but she still has vivid recollections of childhood in sun-drenched San Juan. Her daughter Ruth lives in New York and has long navigated ambivalence about her mixed ancestry, while her daughter Daisy strives to reconnect with her heritage, returning to Puerto Rico, where she suffers a misfortune that causes sudden amnesia. Cummins' novel is a riposte to her critics and a family saga that ripples with the complexities of ethnic identity across three generations.
Florence Nightingale observes boys tormenting an owl near the Parthenon – and wonders how to tell the story of it – at the start of Laura Elvery's historical novel about the world's most famous nurse. It's a book that ripples with violence even at a structural level, the narrative splintering across Nightingale's long life like shrapnel. She receives a visitor in her old age – Silas Bradley, who claims to have met her 55 years before. A young nurse under her charge, Jean Frawley, holds the key to the connection, and it is through her we view Nightingale overseeing care at a military hospital during the Crimean War. In the aftermath of it, Nightingale became a public figure, blamed for failures that weren't her fault, perhaps a patriarchal reaction against an ambitious upper-class woman refusing to toe the line in a society that expected people like her to be passive, idle things. Plot isn't the novel's strongest point, but the storytelling doesn't drag, and Elvery's atmospheric attention to detail compensates. Nightingale contains a brisk evocation of war's brutality and monotony and horror, and dwells on the textures of the unglamorous work women undertook to repair what could be repaired and endure the rest.
The Correspondent
Virginia Evans
Michael Joseph, $34.99
Veteran writers of letters to the editor might enjoy this epistolary novel from Virginia Evans, which follows a compulsive letter-writer, Sybil Van Antwerp. As her diverse correspondence reveals, Sybil is a spiky woman now in her seventies, with a tart sense of humour. She's retired as a judge's clerk and has two adult children – a third died in childhood – and her progressive vision impairment threatens to destroy her ability to write as she has always done, as a form of empowerment but also as a shield against the vulnerability of more direct contact. The novel is composed entirely of letters – sent and unsent – to family and associates, to a mysterious figure from her past, and rather wonderfully to famous literary figures such as Joan Didion. Books in this form are rare in modern publishing and tend to focus on adolescence – Sue Townsend's The Diary of Adrian Mole is probably the best known – so it's remarkable that Evans has created such an appealing, flawed, tragicomic character at the other end of life. Writers of all stripes should be attracted by the packaging: the story comes wrapped in a love letter to the art of letter-writing itself.
The Listeners
Maggie Stiefvater
Hachette, $32.99
Set in a high-end hotel in West Virginia during World War II, The Listeners tells a story of luxury and intrigue with a splash of romance and magical realism thrown in. Diplomatic families from Axis powers – Nazis among them – have been detained at the Avallon Hotel, to the discontent of staff. The retreat is overseen by June Hudson, an orphan taken in by the wealthy Gilfoyle family, and the late paterfamilias left her in charge of the business, though his playboy son Edgar owns the place. Jane communes with the magical 'sweetwater' spring upon which the hotel is built, pursues love interests and runs what has essentially become a luxurious internment camp as government agents flit in and out and the motley cast of guests – some clearly evil, some merely unfortunate children – await a political solution that will return them home. This is the debut adult novel from YA bestseller Maggie Stiefvater, and while there are charming elements and cinematic set-pieces, it feels overwhelmed by research at the expense of pace and plot and can be very slow-going.
NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
A Wisdom of Age
Jacinta Parsons
ABC Books, $34.99
The growing trend in books about ageing has been largely driven by Baby Boomers, which is why it's heartening to encounter one from a younger author who wants to learn from the women who go before her. How to defy the negative stereotypes? How to age with joy, grace and courage? How to celebrate the wisdom that accumulated years bestow? 'Ageing is not a malady,' observes Jacinta Parsons. 'It doesn't need to be fixed.' Reframing the accepted narrative of decline, she seeks out those who can teach her about rebellion, about reconnecting with the timeless, ageless aspect of the self, about how to embrace the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. In her conversations with women from all over the country, she tells of Deborah who has discovered the transgressive thrill of street art, of Guosheng who, after much pain and loss has become a beacon for younger women, of Liz, who started her comedy career at the age of 93, and of Jean, who appreciates solitude because she's also known loneliness. This stirring book is a reminder that the getting of wisdom is a lifelong project.
The Invention of Amsterdam. A History of Europe's Greatest City in Ten Walks
Ben Coates
Scribe, $29.99
You might want to argue with the superlative in the subtitle, but claims to greatness are always arbitrary. Ben Coates – an Englishman now living in the Netherlands – has a passion for his adopted city tempered by a strong dose of irreverence that makes his city walks fun as well as educative. Take the city's foundational myth about a seasick dog that puked when it made landfall, marking the original locus of Amsterdam. 'An early tribute, perhaps, to all those stag-party tourists who still regularly Jackson Pollock the canal sides after enjoying too many Heinekens.' As he wanders the streets and canals, Coates charts the city's history, from its early marshy days and its rise as a centre of commerce, to its role in the slave trade and the dark period of the Nazi occupation. He walks in Rembrandt's footsteps, has an obligatory joint at a 'coffee shop' and visits the Red-Light District as well as going off the usual tourist track. Travellers who want the complex reality behind the usual guidebook cliches are well-served by this entertaining work.
Aboriginal Women By Degrees
Edited by Maryann Bin-Sallik
UQP, $19.99
Before they went on to tertiary education, the Aboriginal women who tell their stories in this collection already had a rich education in their cultural lore or a sense of rootedness in their extended family and community. But to realise their dreams of becoming teachers, lawyers, social workers and role models, they had to navigate the alien institutional environment of academia. The shock of leaving home and straddling two worlds is a recurring theme. Artist and educator Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann, who was born under a tree not far from the Daly River Settlement, came to Melbourne to gain her degree. 'The faces around me were strange and unknown and not always friendly.' But she firmly believed in the importance of a Western education to help Indigenous people manage their own affairs. This is echoed by all the contributors, despite the struggles they faced, the racism they encountered, the family responsibilities they had to juggle while studying. These stories of Indigenous trailblazers provide a valuable education for us all.
It's easy enough to have worthy intentions and take the moral high ground. But Rutger Bregman doesn't have much time for those he calls 'noble losers': people who demand change without practical strategies to implement it. Look at what happened to the Occupy movement, he says. In this handbook for how to become an 'effective idealist', one of his main messages is that you can't afford to be a purist. If hobnobbing with the rich to raise money for a good cause is required, so be it. It's a view that will rile those who believe that structural change and collective action is what's needed. Bregman's focus is, however, on how individuals can make a difference. He's interested in mavericks and change agents with a singular sense of purpose, from abolitionist Thomas Clarkson to civil rights activist Rosa Parks. While Moral Ambition has a fervour typical of the motivational genre, Rutger is not afraid to needle his readers into taking action.
Glennon Doyle, Abby Wambach & Amanda Doyle
Vermillion, $36.99
Whether you agree with the authors' selection of what constitute the 'big questions' in life or not, this collection of inspirational quotes and reflections casts a net wide enough to capture issues that trouble most of us at challenging times in our lives. The emphasis is on the familial, social and cultural forces that shape us and how each person might find their own path through this maze of pressures and expectations. The authors, experts in human behaviour and other well-known contributors such as Jane Fonda and Cheryl Strayed, offer their insights into what has got them through all manner of dark nights of the soul. Interestingly, when addressing the final question, 'What's the point?', Glennon Doyle turns the whole enterprise on its head. It's OK, she concludes, to unfurrow the brow and say 'I don't know'.