Wry humour, an underdog tale and banned novels: 10 new books

Sydney Morning Herald

14-05-2025

This week's book reviews traverse the genres, from a First Nations romcom to a dystopian vision, a guide to having an open marriage, a history of Scandinavia (those last two are not related) and some radical second-wave feminism.
FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
The Sun Was Electric Light
Rachel Morton
UQP, $34.99
Rachel Morton's The Sun Was Electric Light won the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript, and it's easy to see why. The deceptive austerity of Morton's writing rewards the reader with a richness of thought and feeling. The novel probes belonging and authenticity in the face of disillusionment, and follows Ruth – a New Yorker who decamps to a small lake town in Guatemala, where she had been happy many years before. Ruth strikes up two relationships with different women – the pragmatic, emotionally reserved Emilie becomes her lover, while the unreliable, intense and precarious Carmen provokes a fascination, and a sense of caring, that goes deeper than the erotic. The Sun Was Electric Light achieves unexpected profundity through condensation and contradiction. Ruth's musings – largely riven by futility and doubt – eschew obvious epiphany in favour of something like negative theology. Fleeting insights into belonging are often signalled through a poetic appreciation of its opposite, and wry humour ripples through the narrator's familiar, yet strikingly particular and perverse trains of thought.
Commercial fiction from First Nations authors isn't entirely novel – there's been some deadly talent in the YA and Oz Gothic genres in recent years – though it does lag the literary world in attracting widespread attention. In Red Dust Running, Wiradjuri author Anita Heiss has produced an Indigenous romcom that should have broad appeal. Annabelle is a curator at a city gallery with a passion for art and activism – a passion that seems less complicated than her love life, which is still recovering from disaster. Luckily, her close bond with her tiddas – besties CJ and MJ and Angel – keeps her real, even when her heart leads her astray. When a smouldering attraction to Dusty, a smoking hot cowboy Annabelle meets at a rodeo, results in romance, Annabelle is the last to see what everyone else in her life intuits immediately – they don't have much in common. Will it last? Or will her friendship with a neighbour, Michael, kindle into something more than a slow burn? Red Dust Running is a relaxing read, but perhaps with too predictable an arc. The female characters are especially lively and warmly drawn, though the plot needs a few twists, and more humour, to make the com as good as the rom.
Sea Change
Jenny Pattrick
Bateman Books, $37.99
A community of underdogs takes a stand against the conniving corporate baddie in Jenny Pattrick's Sea Change, set in a small coastal town on the South Island of Aotearoa-New Zealand. Disaster strikes when a massive earthquake triggers a tsunami, devastating the town. The survivors are being compelled to relocate by government fiat, but some defy the order and seek to rebuild, knowing that the government's decision has been manipulated by a property developer, Adrian Stokes, who wants to buy the whole place for a song and build a resort. The motley collection of holdouts includes the elderly Lorna, her blind neighbour Toddy, and Eru, a traumatised boy from a troubled home, and the plucky residents soon rustle up the know-how – from electricians to doctors – to revive and sustain their community without outside support. A bestselling author in her homeland, Pattrick's latest novel is a rather formulaic and unsubtle tale of good versus evil, but her characters are a diverse and charming bunch, and the survival story should appeal to the Australian love of the underdog too.
Saturation
William Lane
Transit Lounge, $32.99
This dystopian novel from William Lane is set in a world where birth rates have plummeted after an enigmatic and unrevealed catastrophe, although ecocide and overpopulation seem to have played a role. Ursula and Ambrose are librarians. They're trying for a baby – a rare sight in a world hostile not only to children, but to the past these aspiring parents seek to preserve through books. A sinister entity named Yoremind directs and informs the populace, encouraging them to witness or participate in acts of brutality and dehumanisation. When a fascist demagogue seeks dictatorial powers, the persecution of librarians and the burning of books begins. Will Ursula and Ambrose survive? Lane writes risky fiction, and although Saturation builds sinister atmospherics, neither world-building nor social critique feel sharp enough to emerge from the shadow of influential fiction that has gone before. It's unfortunate, as current trends in the dance between society and technology – from the rise of AI and social media to the climate crisis and the psychological impact of information overload – are begging for incisive, dark sci-fi treatment.
Called by police to discuss his sister's suicide nine years earlier, introverted public servant James Harper is compelled to reveal that he was abused by his stepfather. It's 1999, and the 27-year-old is busy losing himself in the adrenaline of competitive bike racing (moderated by hanging with stoner mates and playing video games). Revisiting the past is the last thing he wants or expects, but as coming-of-age story merges with crime drama, James finds himself drawn to discover whether his own experience and his sister's death were related, and to seek justice for what he has suffered. The grim legacy of child sexual abuse and the shortcomings of the legal system in addressing it have become painfully clear this century, and Daniel Oakman puts readers in the shoes of a victim-survivor navigating the hard road to restitution, while trying to avoid being retraumatised. Stylistically and structurally, this debut novel has flaws – from jagged pacing to overuse of the first-person pronoun at the start of sentences – though Oakman's portrait of growing up in the 1990s can be vivid.
NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Inconvenient Women: Australian Radical Writers 1900-1970
Jacqueline Kent
NewSouth, $34.99
When New Zealand born Jean Devanny published her debut novel in 1926 about a woman having an extra-marital affair, she was reviled as 'disgusting, indecent and communistic'. The book went on to be Australia's first banned novel. Not bad for a first go! She's just one of the formidable figures in this study of the women writers who prepared the ground for the second-wave feminism of the 1970s. Some are not so well known now, but it's also a glittering gallery that includes Miles Franklin, Eleanor Dark, Christina Stead and so many more. They were resolute and brave – not just in what they wrote but how they lived and loved, as in Lesbia Harford's concentrated 36 years. They were also defined by generally radical political views, usually Marxist and varying shades of socialist. Highly informed, engaging, often wittily observed, this is also an impressively orchestrated study of groundbreaking writers and the tumultuous times they mirrored and interpreted.
The Next Day
Melinda French Gates
Macmillan, $36.99
Melinda French Gates acknowledges at the start of this combination of memoir and meditation that she's had a privileged life, but she's also taken in a number of life's lessons. The key to her thinking is recognising that transitions in life are precisely that: both end and beginning, closure and opening. In seven chapters she covers such things as landing extremely supportive parents – while also learning that nobody is a perfect parent. As much as she might have aspired to perfection when she first gave birth, in that transition period between being what she was and becoming a mother, she learnt to let go of the self-imposed shame of being a working mother and being a 'good enough' parent instead. The writing is especially strong when addressing her decision to leave her husband, Bill Gates. Here she incorporates the importance of Zen teachings, mindfulness and learning to listen to the inner voice of the authentic self. There are times when the philosophising can veer on the side of a motivational speech, but, overall, it's a poised reflection on her first 60 years.
There are times when this memoir, charting the author's path to an open marriage, reads like a first-person novel. Deepa Paul, a TV scriptwriter among other things, looks back on her Catholic youth in Manila with detached irony, describing how she met her husband, moved to Singapore and then Amsterdam, where they still live with their daughter. In the liberating atmosphere of Amsterdam, she realised she wanted more than the traditional marriage and experimented with online dating in secret, was found out, and over a lengthy period of time, at one point consulting a therapist, renegotiated the marriage. After various affairs (which she details, sometimes displaying a strange naivety, along with a combination of strength and fragility), she now describes herself as polyamorous, having both a husband and a lover. As well as being a mother. In writing that is vivid, sad and funny, she takes the reader into the world she and her husband have created, answering all sorts of questions with engaging, candid openness.
The Shortest History of Scandinavia
Mart Kuldkepp
Black Inc, $35
Mart Kuldkepp's bracing short history of Scandinavia – the region being comprised of not just Sweden, Norway and Denmark, but Finland and Iceland as well – is an admirably condensed study. Naturally, the Vikings – who for most of the time were farmers and peaceful traders, until business got difficult and the swords came out – loom large. But it also charts the rise and fall of absolutism, regional wars, the conversion of the pagans to Christianity and the emergence of the modern welfare states Scandinavia is synonymous with, along with populations that are often referred to as the happiest in the world. It is, after all, the region that gave us ABBA and Hans Christian Andersen. But there's also a Nordic-noir dark side to the story, especially some dubious wartime alliances and misplaced ideas about eugenics resulting in forced sterilisations (an estimated 30,000) which went on into the 1970s. Popular, accessible history by a Nordic specialist.
It was German philosopher Martin Heidegger who, more or less, first spoke of authentic and inauthentic living in his 1927 book Being and Time – later taken up by Sartre. But I doubt either of them could have envisaged the emergence of these terms in many of today's popular guidebooks to better living. Motivational speaker Sheila Vijeyarasa, for example, urges her readers to be brave in embracing change when embarking on what she calls their 'journey to a more authentic life'. It's a journey that involves a series of crucial steps, often small ones, which are all detailed in her 'roadmap guide through this dance with change'. She not only draws on her own story, the 'miracle' of her IVF baby (filmed for TV), but also the stories of her clients. Incorporating ways of dealing with, for example, shame (in cases that involve divorce and separation), as well as the importance of self-love and being open to life's possibilities, she is by turns realistic and thoughtful, sometimes with a telling image, but there's also a certain pervasive happy-clappy positivity that you either go with or don't.