The best new books released in July, from Amy Bloom, Katherine Brabon and more

Australia Broadcast Center

30-07-2025

Welcome to the ABC Arts wrap of the best new releases.
This month, we bring you two works of translated fiction, including the latest offering from a French literary sensation that our critic Declan Fry declares is "rip-your-hair-out brilliant".
Also in the mix are a blackly comic debut about a queer woman's dissolute return to her hometown in New Zealand and a doorstopper exploring the fascinating phenomenon of postwar amnesia inspired by real-life cases of soldiers who lost their memories on the battlefields of World War I.
Winter is the perfect time to hunker down with a good book — happy reading.
Granta
There's a particular pleasure in picking up a new novel by Amy Bloom, an author who writes love stories like no one else. I was a huge fan of her 2018 novel White Houses, a swoony yet clear-eyed fictionalisation of a romance between first lady Eleanor Roosevelt and journalist Lorena Hickok. In I'll Be Right Here, Bloom widens her scope, focusing on three generations of an unconventional family in a story that roams from wartime Paris to modern-day New York.
At the centre of the story is Gazala, an orphaned Algerian girl who works as a maid and masseuse for the real-life French writer Colette during World War II. Gazala is quiet and loyal, but her gentle visage hides a ferocity and passion that presents itself in surprising ways.
After the war, Gazala makes her way to New York, where she is reunited with her beloved adopted brother Samir and finds two new 'sisters' in Anne and Alma Cohen. The bond between these four people, and their various lovers, children, and grandchildren, will remain unbreakable for life.
This is a novel that doesn't let the reader settle. Bloom changes time periods, introduces new characters, and drops shocking twists without fanfare or hand-holding. It's not always easy to keep track of who's who, but what emerges is a glorious tapestry celebrating the love found in a chosen family.
At a launch event for I'll Be Right Here, Bloom joked that all her books are about the same four topics: family, love, sex, and death. To which I say: why would I want to read about anything else?
— Claire Nichols
Ultimo Press
Thea is 16 and holidaying in Italy with her mother, who hopes to cure her daughter's chronic illness by visiting a renowned healer living in the Umbrian countryside. Sheltered and unworldly, Thea connects her physical condition to her actions, looking for things she can control. She is making sense of herself and her experience, feeling her way toward the contours of adulthood.
Her mother, Vera, has also lived with chronic pain for most of her life. Wellness bloggers and health influencers offer Vera solace where doctors and rationalist thinking fail to. Vera knows force of will alone cannot change the body, but the possibility remains tantalising; the idea of release can be dreamt so often it begins to feel real.
Is pain singular, isolating, or is it something that can be shared? Playing with ideas of subjectivity and identity, Katherine Brabon moves between Vera, Thea, and a third authorial voice, one that both addresses the reader in the second person and doubles as the characters' own self-address. Brabon is examining how people change in relation to each other — after marriage, after becoming parents — and the nature of the stories we project upon ourselves and others.
As you reach the end and Brabon draws the threads together, a wise, tender portrait of the relationship between a mother and daughter emerges.
Cure is a beguiling and resonant novel, in which the process of belief and the difficulty of integrating the experience of illness into self-identity is revealed to be extraordinarily fraught.
— Declan Fry
Bloomsbury
American football is as foreign to me as the college and health systems that dominate not just US social and public policy, but an awful lot of fiction as well.
Sameer Pandya's Our Beautiful Boys manages to make two out of three of these social systems fascinating and almost explicable: football and college.
The story focuses on three teenage boys in their final year of high school, at that cusp between ambition and expectation. Vikram, Diego, and MJ are the beautiful boys of the title; they are smart, athletic, and full of promise. To succeed, they need to show social, academic, and athletic prowess, as part of the performance required to get them into the university of their choice.
But the world doesn't operate in the same way for each of them, which they and their families are aware of to different degrees. Vikram's cultural background is Indian, Diego's is Hispanic, and MJ's is as WASP as can be. MJ is the only one with the cultural capital that allows him to walk around shoeless, with an air of disaffection, and the complicated racial dynamics of America play out differently for Vikram and Diego, too.
Why does this matter? Because after a triumphant Friday night school football game — where the guts-and-glory and sheer beauty of bodies flashing down a field is depicted with exhilaration — the three boys head off to a party. They meet up with another kid, an annoying bully, Stanley, and the four of them enter a nearby cave. When they leave, Stanley is badly injured. Something has happened — but who did what to whom, and with what consequences?
— Kate Evans
UQP
Nell Jenkins — queer, brash, and prone to bad decisions — escaped her hometown in New Zealand as a teenager after the death of her best friend, April. Now, 15 years later, she's back home to look after her mother, Leigh, who has had a stroke.
Caring doesn't come naturally to Nell, who has only returned because she has nowhere else to go. She abandoned her life in Sydney after filing an HR complaint about her boss when their romantic relationship ended. She has no job, no money, and nowhere to live.
Her hometown is now a popular weekend getaway spot, but for Nell, it remains a place of casual racism, homophobia, misogyny, and bad memories. For a queer teenager like Nell, home was a place where you could never be yourself.
Chapters set in the past reveal more about their friendship and how April died. Nell's unwilling return painfully illustrates how stuck she is in her grief. It's "the centrifugal force … moving me from one dead end to the next".
Now 33, Nell's life is a wreck; she's drinking too much, sleeping with the wrong people, and borrowing money she can't hope to repay. "I'm a user and a grifter. A drifter. A down-and-out country song," is how she describes it.
Against her better judgement, she's drawn into the world of aging television psychic Petronella Bush, who is in town to revive her ailing career. She claims to hear multitudes of ghostly voices, the murdered girls who become "cautionary tales" for others.
Blackly comic, Dead Ends is a book not about closure but the difficult process of rebuilding after loss. Nell, for all her flaws, possesses a crude and mordant wit that will have you guffawing aloud.
— Nicola Heath
Tuskar Rock
Constance Debré's 2022 novel Love Me Tender was revelatory. But Name, her new novel, is perhaps her finest work to date.
It concludes an auto-fictional trilogy Debré began in 2018, but you don't need to read the other two novels to fall in love with this one.
Name opens as the narrator, having watched over her ailing father for weeks, confronts his death. An avatar of Debré, she is a former (disillusioned) lawyer, born into an illustrious Parisian family trying to maintain "their illusions about nobility, family, France, with their alcoholism, which they pretend not to notice".
We delve into Debré's upbringing during the 1970s and 80s. She is ferocious toward the bourgeoisie, castigating a world of children who live with nannies before being shipped off to boarding school. By the time we reach the present day and her life as a lawyer for whom "justice is pointless", Debré has transformed into a woman in radical pursuit of her own story, happily disposing of everything superfluous ("family, marriage, work, apartments, belongings, people").
Debré's prose is a rush. Her voice grabs you by the lapels, hauls you up, and makes you do a double and then a triple-take. Alert, jagged, deadpan, she wakes you.
Debré writes with the kind of immediacy you find in authors like Helen Garner, Édouard Louis and Chris Kraus. A paean to the joys of refusal, of realising and accepting there are no gods and no masters, Name is rip-your-hair-out brilliant.
— Declan Fry
Brazen (Hachette Australia)
Maggie; Or, A Man and a Woman Walk into a Bar, is a deeply funny little novel that tells the story of what happens after the set-up to so many jokes.
An unnamed narrator begins the story facing two things that threaten to change her life: her husband is having an affair with a woman named Maggie, and she's just found a lump in her breast.
She hides her anguish in humour. As she recounts how her husband revealed his affair at an Indian restaurant, she glibly notes it was "a total naan-sequitur". Being playful and flippant is her way of processing the hurt.
She becomes obsessed with Maggie, and with her tumour (which she also names Maggie), and starts to think of them in tandem — both cancers, eating away at her sense of normality. When she's lonely or bored or angry or sad, she tells "my Maggie" (the tumour) about it.
As a stay-at-home mum, she feels she has built her life around her husband and children, and it's all about to crumble away. She seeks comfort in storytelling, retelling the Chinese folklore she was raised with to her children, desperate to find a message of solace or purpose.
Yee's book is weird, poetic, and meandering. The reader is lulled in with humour and domestic intimacy but encounters accounts of grief and mortality along the way.
— Rosie Ofori Ward
Scribe Publications
Why do stories of World War I still hold such resonance? It's something to do with the industrialised death, the iconic images of trenches, and the poetic howls of resistance. But there remains plenty of space for retelling, nuance, and new perspectives, which is what Dutch writer Anjet Daanje delivers in this novel.
Daanje begins with a soldier whose backstory has completely disappeared, erased by trauma. Found on a battlefield in Belgium in 1917, wearing a hodgepodge of cast-off uniforms, he cannot remember his name and has no identification. He was discovered at midday, renamed Noon Merckem, and sent to an asylum in Ghent, where he stayed for four years.
There he lives a cloistered life, surrounded by other lost soldiers. But the outside world intrudes when his story and photograph are published in the newspaper, and several women turn up in the hope that he might be their missing husband, brother, or son.
This experience of amnesia by trauma really happened, as did fraught battles over the 'ownership' and identity of these men. In The Remembered Soldier, a woman named Julienne turns up and says Noon is her husband, Amand — a photographer — and that she's taking him home.
All of this happens early in this 560-page novel. What unfolds is a story of memory and its slips; of doubt and survival; of families being remade and poverty in Europe. Cleverly, it's the work of photography that fades in and out of the story, as both a practical skill and as an occasionally manipulated memento, that situates the story in the darkroom of history and literature.
— Kate Evans
Tune in to ABC Radio National at 10am Mondays for The Book Show and 10am Fridays for The Bookshelf.