What should I read next? April's best books include exciting new work by Kate Grenville and Andrea Goldsmith

Australia Broadcast Center

27-04-2025

Consider that unpleasant feeling of not knowing what to read next fully remedied: in this month's Best Books column, ABC Arts critics recommend their favourite April reads — and there are some rippers.
You'll find a love story with a twist, new works from Australian literary heavyweights, a gruesome thriller, and a crime novel where climate change plays a leading role.
Unsettled by Kate Grenville
Black Inc
Grenville won the 2006 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for her novel The Secret River.
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Supplied: Black Inc
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The colony will fall. Have you heard this phrase recently? It came to mind as I read Kate Grenville's latest work of non-fiction. Grenville has previously written several books that take the theft of this continent as their subject. Her most well-known, The Secret River, was a bestseller inspired by an ancestor who settled on the Hawkesbury River. In Unsettled, Grenville confronts, more directly than before, what it means to live on stolen country.
She follows her family's stories to the places where they happened, "the sharp edge of the moving blade that was colonisation". Rather than assuming what she should look for, Grenville decides to take things as they come. She will be open, she decides: learning to see patterns does not mean solving a single crime but confronting a series of them.
Sometimes, she finds silence. Sometimes, the loss of things that can never be recovered. Intellectual curiosity alone cannot make sense of everything. It cannot account for what to do with the unalterable truth of the violence committed. When you claim land was "taken up", do you deny the theft? Is it a weasel word, an attempt to domesticate all of the violence involved? As Grenville writes, "Now that we know how the taking was done, what do we do with that knowledge?"
Elegantly and simply, Grenville lays out the contours of Australia's theft from her perspective as a descendant of one of the many involved. She practices ways of thinking and living that can make sense, not only of what has been taken, but of what may still be possible. In a continent that often delays confrontation with its colonial history, what happens after the fall?
Responsibility for history, Grenville writes, is not always a matter of direct connection or participation: sometimes, one's responsibility is as simple as having benefited from the crime.
— Declan Fry
Landfall by James Bradley
Penguin
Landfall is Bradley's eighth work of fiction.
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A missing child, a noble cop and a race against time: at first glance, Australian writer James Bradley's latest book seems like a bog-standard crime novel.
But there's a lot more going on here. Landfall is set in a near-future Sydney where rising sea levels have swallowed parts of the coast. In an area known as the 'Floodline', disadvantaged people live in the top stories of abandoned apartment buildings, improvised jetties providing access in and out.
It's from this dystopian nightmare that a six-year-old child, Casey, has disappeared.
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Sadiya Azad is the detective on the case. A climate refugee herself, Sadiya is determined to find the missing child before a massive cyclone hits the coast. And the odds are stacked against her — she has enemies within the police, her father is ill and a corporation with links to the Floodline is not answering questions.
Bradley has done something very clever with Landfall. He entices us in with all the bells and whistles of an unputdownable crime thriller, but then demands that we pay attention and imagine what our country could look like as climate change takes hold.
— Claire Nichols
The Buried Life by Andrea Goldsmith
Transit Lounge
Goldsmith's novels include The Prosperous Thief, shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2003.
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Adrian Moore is an academic who works on the cultural practices of death — the rituals, the poetry, the gestures and more. And this has nothing, he assures us, to do with the heartbreaking death of his mother when he was very young or the devastating death by suicide of his father a few years later. Nothing. At. All. Nothing to do with his failed relationships or cobwebby house, nothing to do with a certain dissatisfaction or a lack of revelation to his friends.
But he is just one character in this novel of delicately interwoven lives. There's also Adrian's friend, Kezi, an artist in her late 20s who has escaped her evangelical family, and longs for some reconnection but has no need to repent or be forgiven.
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Two women with dark hair smiling; one in a pink shirt and gold earrings, with her arm around the other, in a floral shirt
Poet Dorothy Porter could take a handful of words and do extraordinary things with them. Her sister celebrates her work in a new memoir.
And then, part way through, we encounter a third major character, Laura — a striking, confident, competent town planner, whose verve she somehow ascribes to someone else. We're taken into her worldview, but are also invited to doubt it, at least when it comes to her sense of herself.
This spoiler alert is for her, not for the readers: Laura, your husband is awful.
As these three characters meet and change each other, we can read their buried and revealed lives on multiple levels at once, which is of course the pleasure of complex fiction.
— Kate Evans
Consider Yourself Kissed by Jessica Stanley
Text Publishing
Consider Yourself Kissed is a literary love story set in East London.
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Coralie Bower, 29, is a copywriter in a London creative agency but dreams of being a writer. She left Sydney in a cloud of shame and relishes, with a sense of masochism, the anonymity the new city offers her.
That is, until she meets Adam, a 37-year-old political journalist and father of one. The meet-cute is dispensed with expeditiously: Coralie fishes Adam's five-year-old daughter, Zora, out of a freezing duck pond in the first chapter. They quickly become an item and when her lease runs out, it makes perfect sense for her to move in with him.
They are perfect together — someone even stops them in the street to tell them so. But being perfect together isn't enough.
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Close up photo of Saman Shad in floral jacket with red slipstick and brown hair to the side, smiling slightly with closed mouth.
When Saman Shad sat down to write her latest novel, she came up against the challenges of how to find time to write with three small children.
Despite her youth and inexperience with children, Coralie quickly takes on a large share of caring for Zora, who she loves. We see Coralie assume more and more of the mental load of their domestic lives, a disparity that grows even larger when she and Adam have two children. Coralie's writing aspirations become a distant memory as Adam's professional life takes precedence. Many readers will find Coralie's struggle to juggle her career with caring responsibilities deeply familiar as she's passed over for a promotion, deemed not committed enough to the job because she leaves early to pick up her children.
Australian author Jessica Stanley's 2022 debut novel, A Great Hope, featured a fictitious Labor politician at its centre and her interest in politics is evident here too as general elections and Brexit form a backdrop to Coralie and Adam's everyday lives. A clever and funny rom-com in the vein of Dolly Alderton's Good Material, Consider Yourself Kissed shows how relationships have to change to find an equitable balance for both partners.
— Nicola Heath
Orpheus Nine by Chris Flynn
Hachette Australia
Flynn says the premise for Orpheus Nine came to him in a dream.
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Supplied: Hachette Australia
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Brace yourself: this supernatural thriller starts with one of the most shocking scenes I've read in a long time.
At an under-10s soccer game in regional Victoria, the kids on the field suddenly stop playing. The children seem stuck to the spot, unable to move, before they all start singing in Latin, in high clear voices. Then — and this is where it gets really awful — their bodies start swelling, filling with salt. Moments later, they're all dead.
It turns out this hasn't just happened here. All around the world, every nine-year-old has died in the same gruesome way. And from here on in, it will continue, with every child destined to die the day they turn nine.
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Is it a virus? Alien invasion? Terrorism? It doesn't really matter. What Belfast-born, Australian-based author Chris Flynn (who says the opening of this book came to him in a dream) is interested in is the impact of this event, known as Orpheus Nine, on the parents left in this small country town.
Those who have lost their children are angry and ready to take action. Those whose children survived — because they were 10 or older — feel fated for greatness. And the parents of children about to turn nine are desperate to save them from disaster. Cue the rise of "saltfluencers" — Instagram mums promoting the potentially life-saving benefits of a salt-free diet.
Orpheus Nine is bizarre, funny, horrifying and tender. Take a deep breath and read it — you'll be glad you did.
— Claire Nichols
Good Girl by Aria Aber
Bloomsbury Publishing
Good Girl is shortlisted for the 2025 Women's Prize for Fiction.
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Good Girl is a gritty, dark and rich coming-of-age story. Born and raised in the "ghetto-heart" of Berlin, our protagonist Nila feels adrift, unfixed and burdened by shame.
When we meet her, Nila is a party girl. Her life is "purgatorial and meaningless": she goes out, drinks, takes drugs and avoids her father.
Nila is Afghan yet denies this at every opportunity, claiming, if asked, an ancestry she considers more palatable: Greek or Italian. Her family's experience of trauma, Islamophobia and racism have left Nila fearful and averse to her own identity.
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A young white woman with chin-length red hair wearing black stands side on against a backdrop of green leafy plants
The sad girl novel maps the emotional landscape of a generation.
When Nila meets Marlowe, an older American writer, and falls in with his friends, she begins to drift even further from herself. Nila calls herself "his loyal stray" and willingly submits to Marlowe both sexually and socially. Fearing that her new friends will smell "the whiff of my poverty and family history" she lies and lies again, forgoing anything left of her Afghan identity.
Aria Aber's prose is lush and unflinching, with the visceral descriptions of sweaty clubs and devastating come-downs highlighting her background as a poet.
In a literary trope repeated in recent years — younger waifish woman falls for older and richer man — Aber notably brings a new perspective.
She unpacks what it means for Nila to be a "good girl". Is it a submissive partner to Marlowe? A pure and honourable Afghan girl for her family? Or the creative and independent artist that she imagines for herself?
— Rosie Ofori Ward
I Ate the Whole World to Find You by Rachel Ang
Scribe Publications
Ang is an artist and writer whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Age and Meanjin.
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The art leaps out from the first page: in the foreground, a fish head, menacing and skeletal. In the background, shadows hover around a family seated at a table. In Rachel Ang's graphic novel debut, the unsaid, the implicit, the suggested and the hidden all loom as large, if not larger, than what is visible.
The book's five stories follow Jenny, a woman stumbling through her late 20s. In the opening story, 'Hunger', Jenny and a co-worker converse. It is clear they are talking around things, that there is something between them. (Playfully, Ang makes this obscurity explicit by drawing obscured speech bubbles.) Their burgeoning romance grows complicated when he reveals a sexual kink to her.
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Jenny is someone who knows but does not know, or perhaps does not want to. Seemingly banal conversations and ordinary events often reveal aspects of the characters they might otherwise wish to conceal.
In 'The Passenger', Jenny's self-absorption allows her to conceal jealousy toward a defensive ex, both former partners variously ignoring and embarrassing the ex's new one. In the harrowing 'Your Shadow in the Dark', a cousin's trauma manifests in ways that cause Jenny to miss an opportunity to commiserate with her, then finally learn how to begin to.
Such ambiguities and suggestive evocations make each narrative more layered than their surfaces may suggest. The final story offers hope for Jenny, as both language and self split and disintegrate in order to create something new.
There is movement and dimension to the contours of Ang's black-and-white line art. Their ability to evoke night scenes and darkness is tactile: check out the beautiful rendering of Melbourne's Peel Street in the opening story. Working into each colour's gradations with subtlety and depth, Ang suggests a place where even the shadows have shadows.
— Declan Fry
Out of the Woods by Gretchen Shirm
Transit Lounge
Shirm is the author of Having Cried Wolf, Where the Light Falls and The Crying Room.
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Supplied: Transit Lounge
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Out of the Woods makes a powerful statement about bones: the bones of men and boys killed in the 1995 genocide at Srebrenica, during the Bosnian War. The bones of children and husbands and brothers and friends; the bones of memory, rendered bare by time and memory and scrutiny or lack of it. Bones unearthed, in part, by the UN's International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in 2006.
Australian novelist, critic and lawyer Gretchen Shirm draws us into the process of bearing witness, through the character of Jess, a woman who has left Sydney behind to work as a judge's assistant at the tribunal. Through this woman's experience, we are given a delicate and thoughtful entrée into important stories of war, into The Hague, and into one woman's life and history, as she becomes more than a conduit for words and translations.
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What does it mean that she watches the main defendant and feels some sympathy for his sadness, his sore leg, what she thinks are his kind eyes? What does it mean to make eye contact with this man, who denied holding guns but was part of the bigger-picture organisation?
The deeper the story develops, the more we enter into Jess's own life and history: her childhood of poverty and trauma, her love for her son, her tentative relationship with a tall Dutch security guard, with his sweet punning jokes.
In between Jess's work and life, there are patches of other text — in a thinner font, stark — of witness testimony, drawn from actual evidence statements from the Tribunal (Shirm herself worked there as a legal intern in 2006). This is a difficult balance, full of ethical and moral decisions — both for the world and for a novelist, an artist — and Shirm handles it beautifully.
— Kate Evans
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