‘Taut', ‘extraordinary delight', ‘absolutely bonkers': the best Australian books out in March

The Guardian

07-03-2025

Fiction, Ultimo, $34.99
Diana Reid's breakout debut, Love and Virtue, tapped the millennial zeitgeist from all angles: a campus novel exploring class, power and rape culture. Her fast follow-up, Seeing Other People, dealt in similar grey areas, starring two sisters in their 20s, both drawn to the same women.
Signs of Damage is something of a departure: a thriller set in Europe across two time periods, as a family reckons with unknown trauma. It starts in 2008 in the south of France, where the Kelly family are holidaying when 13-year-old Cass goes missing. Something happens to her, but we don't know what. Sixteen years later, in Europe again for a friend's wedding, Cass is on a balcony when someone else tumbles off and dies – but she can't remember anything at all. The writing is taut, the mysteries abundant, and the trauma plot deftly handled and subtly subverted, in a book whose pages turn themselves. – Steph Harmon
Fiction, Text, $36.99
Memoir and nonfiction writer Robert Dessaix offers a window into his life in his new book, Chameleon. The author of Twilight of Love, A Mother's Disgrace and Night Letters, Dessaix writes with beauty, wit and infectious energy about his early experiences, particularly in Morocco, where he discovered and uncovered his homosexual masculinity.
Chameleon is an education on the role travel and literature can have in shaping our identities and imaginations; Dessaix delves into his long life to tease out the key moments, and books, that have made him the man and the writer that he is. – Joseph Cummins
Fiction, Ultimo, $34.99
Madeleine Watts' stunning second novel is about a young couple who go on a road trip through the American south-west, as the calamitous California wildfires rage across it. She's there as an academic obsessively researching the Colorado River: colonised, diverted and destroyed. He's there in his capacity at a land art organisation, surveying giant works as they take (or remove) shape across the desert. (The thrill of a novelist who can invent conceptual art you actually want to look at!)
Those who have road-tripped in America will be delighted to revisit some of these spots, rendered here vividly and with love. But as the climate crisis clouds their windscreen, grief ruptures the pair's relationship – and a mysterious, unfathomable loss unfolds in the rear view. – SH
Fiction, Ultimo, $34.99
The Theory of Everything is a frustrating, extraordinary delight. Frustrating because of how resolutely it defies convention: a short story told in fragments might make way for a poem, or a list, or a manifesto. There's no 'easy' narrative to settle into here; the story itself is elusive, seemingly one thing before becoming another. That's why it's extraordinary too.
Yumna Kassab, author of The Lovers and Politica, makes the reader work hard for the rewards. They're to be found in the book's form – experimental in the truest, most liberating sense – and in its incisive interrogation of the central themes (power, race, gender, wealth, freedom) delivered as sharp little punches to the gut. Kassab has written fireworks into these pages. – Bec Kavanagh
Cookbook, Hardie Grant, $60
When Melbourne chef Helly Raichura opened a restaurant inside her home in 2018, she named it Enter Via Laundry. Diners did precisely that, before sitting down to eat regional Indian dishes like the ones she'd known growing up in India..
Raichura has now poured her knowledge of India's long culinary history into a beautiful tome of 68 recipes structured into key historical periods, starting with pre-Vedic (before 1500BC). They include a cheat's guide to ghee, recipes for lentil fritters and samosa warqi (pastries stuffed with smoked lamb) and Enter Via Laundry's ever-popular khandavi (ribbons of chickpea flour in coconut sauce). – Emma Joyce
Nonfiction, HarperCollins, $35.99
Full disclosure: Alyx Gorman is Guardian Australia's lifestyle editor. But we must shout out this impressive work of journalism, which saw Gorman interview more than 130 people to explore 'the orgasm gap': the discrepancy between how often straight women orgasm during sex when compared with straight men. In Australia, the orgasm gap sits at about 26% for straight women – far higher than women who have sex with women, and men who have sex with men.
So why is this? Gorman not only interviews regular people about their sex lives, but also sex workers, sex therapists, scientists and academics, to unpick why straight women can be unsatisfied by the sex they're having – and what men can do to improve things. Men, buy this book. – Sian Cain
Fiction, UQP, $32.99
When Steve MinOn won the emerging category at the 2023 Queensland Literary awards, judges praised his manuscript for 'offering a fresh cultural perspective and challenging conventional notions of our national literature'. That's all well and good but it sort of glides over the absolutely bonkers main character: a dead man named Stephen Bolin (an anglicised almagamation of two Chinese first names, inspired by MinOn's own second name), who escapes from the morgue to walk his decomposing body to Far North Queensland, the town of his birth.
Accompanying these gruesome and occasionally very funny passages is the story of where Bolin came from: four generations of migrant families – from China to Scotland to the UK to Australia – brought to life in a truely original debut. – SH
Fiction, Penguin, $36.99
Few authors would admit to using a ghost writer. But portrait artist Vincent Fantauzzo has been open about enlisting Craig Henderson for his memoir, and with good reason: Fantauzzo is dyslexic, so he told his life story to Henderson in a series of difficult, emotional phone calls.
And what a story it is. Unveiled tracks Fantauzzo's life, from growing up with an abusive father in Melbourne's public housing system through to his current glittering career as one of Australia's most commercially successful artists. It's an underdog success story you can't help but root for, and a peer behind the curtain at Fantauzzo's most famous works – like the haunting portrait of Heath Ledger he completed one day before the actor's death. – Katie Cunningham