Bryce Courtenay, conspiracies and campfire cooking: the best Australian books out in August

The Guardian

a day ago

Biography, HarperCollins, $49.99
Part two of David Day's biography of Bob Hawke, chronicling his years as Labor's longest-serving prime minister, is no less forensic and revealing than the first instalment which traced him from birth to the precipice of the top job.
Hawke, given all the reform that he and his long-serving (and -suffering) treasurer Paul Keating oversaw is rightly remembered as a 'great' prime minister – a 'legend', as Day puts it. He quit the grog. And apparently gave up the women. But Day reveals a PM beset by familial turmoil while presenting a newly curated public persona. This is a must if you read the compelling first volume. – Paul Daley
Nonfiction, Allen & Unwin, $34.99
Shark. Camera. Action! Decades before the fin‑flashing brilliance of Jaws, pulp novelist Zane Grey sailed into Australia chasing a great white for his ill‑fated 1936 film White Death. In The Last Days of Zane Grey, the acclaimed nature writer Vicki Hastrich charts the arc of that quest – the role Australia played in Grey's restless final chapter, and the unlikely mark he left on the national imagination.
This swashbuckling tale has it all: encrypted letters, love quadrangles, high‑society hi-jinks, very big fish, cinematic fiascos and a man in a duel with death itself. Proof that sometimes the wildest thing in the water is the human ego. – Beejay Silcox
Fiction, Allen & Unwin, $32.99
Rebecca Starford is rapidly becoming one of our most gripping writers: first there was Bad Behaviour, her memoir of bullying at an elite country boarding school, then her second world war thriller The Imitator, about a female MI5 spy tasked with infiltrating a Nazi ring in London.
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Her third book, The Visitor, is quieter but just as riveting: Laura, an Australian living in the UK, returns home to Brisbane to sell her parents' house after they mysteriously die in the outback. That mystery is part of the appeal but its gothic quality, its spooky sense of the uncanny, are what sets The Visitor apart – and the ending is a cracker. – Sian Cain
Biography, Hachette, $32.99
The late Bryce Courtenay was a mainstay in Australian publishing: every 18 months or so he would release a new novel and dads everywhere would reliably buy his latest doorstopper about brave young men navigating wartime or the winds of history, making him one of the country's bestselling authors.
But the version of his life that he shared with the public was largely untrue, according to his son Adam, who reveals that his father was a fabulist who lied about being an orphan, that he escaped orphanages by winning a prestigious scholarship, that his lawyer father had fought apartheid in South Africa and that he himself had to flee the country due to his activism. This is a truly revelatory biography, unflinching and unsentimental, which shows how Bryce became a man who wouldn't let truth ruin a good story. – SC
Fiction, Ultimo, $34.99
Zaid is a prospective barrister who has broken through the glass ceiling, as a Muslim man from western Sydney. He's well-travelled, owns a luxury car, and attends swanky soirees with wealthy colleagues. But when he is pulled into a murky murder committed by his now-dead best friend, he's forced to reckon with his choices and the way they have shaped his life.
Zaynab Gamieldien's second novel is a subtle social commentary about belonging and social mobility. Compelling and pacy, it demonstrates an acute awareness of experiences of privilege and subordination, without being preachy. – Sarah Ayoub
Fiction, UQP, $34.99
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Natalia Figueroa Barroso's debut, Hailstones Fell Without Rain – the first published novel by a Uruguayan-Australian author – follows the unforgettable Graciela: a single mother who's late on rent, struggling to hold her family together and hiding a new couch she can't afford. As her bonds with her daughter Rita and her Aunt Chula stretch, fray, and threaten to snap, she grasps for connections that might still be mended.
Moving between Uruguay and western Sydney, this bold and compassionate novel celebrates matrilineal connection and cultural inheritance with humour and tenderness. – Seren Heyman-Griffiths
Fiction, Summit Books, $34.99
There's a crime, but it's not a crime novel as such; the pace is thrilling, but it's not a thriller … as such. Paul Daley's fine literary sensibilities foreground his genre-defying third novel about a stranger in a strange land. Ben Fotheringham-Gaskill, a British diplomat who has had his fair share of traumatic postings, believes his move to Canberra with his family will be a late-career cruise. But when his boss sends him to the outback town The Leap, things take a dangerous turn as he wrestles with a dilemma involving the possible murder of one of the town's favourite daughters.
With echoes of the Kenneth Cook classic Wake in Fright, Daley renders the picaresque with precision and humour, steadily building mood and menace as Australia's bloody black/white history comes into play. – Lucy Clark
Short stories, Pink Shorts Press, $32.99
Alex Cothren teaches creative writing at Flinders University, with a research focus on satire – and his debut collection of short stories is so assured, bleak and uncannily prescient that they could have been written tomorrow. In one, a headhunter for an Australian football league drafts refugees at offshore processing camps to play brutally – often murderously ('six points for knocking a bloke unconscious' – for the ultimate prize: citizenship). In another, which I read in June as mass protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement were making headlines in the US, undocumented migrants in a single file are forced into a small construction trailer, which flashes in an 'instant e-deportation', disappearing them for ever.
But the one that's stuck with me for the longest is, happily, the funniest. It's called Where's a Good Place for an Adult to Hide? I won't tell you anything more about it. – Steph Harmon
Cookbook, Pantera Press, $36.99
The internet's favouritegrandson-grandfather duo have arrived in paperback form to share their tasty and easy-to-follow collection of bush-style recipes. Good food is simple food (most of the time), says Outback Tom, a Yorta Yorta man who grew up in the east Kimberley region of Western Australia. It is there we learn how to cook Australian staples including damper, spring rolls and loaded snags.
Outback Tom and Grandad also share tips on the logistics of cooking in the bush. Learn how to make a bush stove and what native ingredients to keep an eye out for, courtesy of the duo's wealth of experience living off the land. Make sure this is in your bag on your next adventure. – Isabella Lee
Nonfiction, Simon & Schuster, $36.99
Grant Dooley and his wife, Kristan, had a ringside seat to a tumultuous time in Australia's most populous neighbour, Indonesia. Both were stationed in Jakarta as diplomats during a period of frequent terrorist activity, including the 2004 bombing of the Australian embassy, which killed 11 people and injured 200; the Dooleys were in the building at the time.
Dooley's workmanlike memoir of this early 2000s period reads as a journal of the daily life and career ambitions of a bureaucrat abroad. It is an insightful glimpse into the thoughts and experiences of the Australians who represent the rest of us to the world. – Celina Ribeiro
Nonfiction, Ultimo, $36.99
Guardian Australia's Ariel Bogle and Crikey's Cam Wilson have spent years reporting on the follies and foibles of the internet. In that time both have witnessed first-hand the increasingly siloed – and increasingly dangerous – tenor of online life.
'We've watched closely as once-fringe ideas and the language of conspiracy have become part of [the] Australian public,' the pair write in the introduction to their new book: a series of investigations into the rhizomic subcultures and panics buried just beneath the nation's psyche, from Port Arthur 'truthers' to Pete Evans. – Michael Sun