Searching for your next read? Here are 10 new books

The Age

27-05-2025

From medieval world-building and early 2000s nostalgia to a seminal study of Palestine and the cultural significance of one of our great rivers, this week's books traverse time, subject and genre.
FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
The Pretender
Jo Harkin
Bloomsbury, $32.99
The Pretender takes us into a late medieval England dominated by violence and political intrigue. As the dynastic bloodbath of the Wars of the Roses draws to a close, Henry Tudor snatches the crown from the corpse of Richard III on Bosworth Field. Meanwhile, a farm-boy is groomed for power – yet another pretender to the throne. Raised John Collan, the lad is told he is not in fact a commoner but Edward Plantagenet, Earl of Warwick. For his own safety, he must assume a third persona – that of Lambert Simnel – as he is shunted between unscrupulous powerbrokers jockeying for position in, and plotting to overthrow, the court of Henry VII. Jo Harkin reaches deeply into medieval (and classical) literature, language and thought in this rich novel that follows the fortunes of a character forced into three layers of identity. It's an unusually granular and imaginative act of historical world-building, attentive to the fabulism and flaw of history itself, and should appeal to fans of medieval fantasy as much as those who devoured Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall.
A classic love triangle morphs into more multidimensional, non-Euclidian emotional geometry as Erich Puchner's Dream State unfolds. It opens with preparations for matrimony underway. Cece is to be wed to a brilliant young doctor, Charlie. She travels to her in-laws' majestic lake house in Montana to finalise details, together with Charlie's best friend (and best man) Garrett, whose own prospects as a baggage handler at a provincial airport can't compare to the bright future Charlie has mapped out for himself. From there, the course of their lives unfurls over decades. They have children whose lives will be marked in enigmatic, fateful ways by their parents' decisions, and against the family saga, told with winning humour and poignancy, the world around them runs not just to the present day but into a starkly imagined future. Destiny and human agency, a progression from innocence to experience, and the grim fate of the natural environment haunt this expansive and engaging work, which has the scope of a Victorian novel while remaining breezily contemporary in tone and style.
Daughter to two Afghan doctors who fled to Germany before she was a thing, Nila is seized by a perverse desire to ruin her life. Sex, drugs and hedonism beckon her to the nightclubs of Berlin. Nila begins a romance with a celebrated American author, Marlowe Woods, that was always bound to exoticise her, even as it nurtures her desire for artistic expression (for which Marlowe, predictably, takes too much credit). She becomes a photographer, as acute at capturing the contradictions and piercing moments of life as it's experienced through images as the novel's author – clearly a poet – is through words. Good Girl might be slightly over-realised, tying up too many loose ends and drumming home answers to thematic questions, but only after it has seduced and shocked with its delirious honesty, its refusal to succumb to received ideas about race and racism, say, or to reduce the countershading and complexity of characters usually portrayed as either good or bad. A coming-of-age novel thrumming with the complications and ironies of desire, from a writer to watch.
The Book of Guilt
Catherine Chidgey
Penguin, $34.99
New Zealand novelist Catherine Chidgey has penned a diverse corpus of fiction – everything from Holocaust novels to a book featuring a magpie narrator – and her ninth novel consciously echoes Kazuo Ishiguro's most renowned work, Never Let Me Go. Like that book, it's set in an institution for children, and follows three of them – teenage triplets Vincent, Lawrence and William – as the institution they live in is mothballed by guilt-ridden bureaucrats. Released into the community, they meet another child cut off from the world outside and discover sinister truths unknown to them. The Book of Guilt departs from Ishiguro in more fully articulating a dystopian vision. The history of this alternate, Thatcher-era England includes the successful assassination of Hitler in 1943, a rapidly negotiated conclusion to the war, and the global embrace of unethical medical experimentation. Chidgey is also more overtly political in her approach, incorporating other voices such as that of a government minister. It isn't a terrible book, but no one who's read the Ishiguro will be able to resist unfortunate comparison. The length of the literary shadow is too long.
Deep Cuts
Holly Brickley
The Borough Press, $32.99
An homage to indie music of the early 2000s wrapped in a romance, Holly Brickley's Deep Cuts sees two young characters enmeshed in a fruitful creative embrace long before love takes over. Joe and Percy meet at Berkeley – the former is an emerging singer/songwriter, the latter is, well, a critic, among other things. Percy recognises Joe's talent and collaborates with him to develop it, although she refuses credit on the album when it is released and Joe's career takes off. When Joe's girlfriend Zoe announces she's gay, the space opens for Percy to make a move. A simmering attraction is placed on the backburner, however, as Joe values their creative bond and friendship too much to risk a relationship. Brickley immerses the reader in period pop-cultural references, as the world turns from 9/11 to the election of President Obama. Her book should find a ready audience in Millennials with a taste for having their nostalgia buttons pressed, even if the romance plot itself is less exciting than the period colour, or Percy discovering her own voice in the face of frustrated love.
NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Trails to Freedom
Simon Tancred
Hardie Grant, $39.99
On September 3, 1943 Italy signed an armistice with the Allies, effectively ending its involvement in the war. Prison guards in the north of Italy released their captives, drinking and celebrating with them. Among them were four Australian POWs, who, a few weeks later, walked into neutral Switzerland along medieval paths – the eponymous trails to freedom. It was no stroll in the park, the Germans weren't happy, and they had to be guided by brave partisans. Tancred, who first heard of the Australians' escape from a friend, was inspired to walk the same trails, and as he follows in their footsteps he skilfully incorporates the tales of the partisans, German atrocities and the story of his uncle, a POW who drowned in the Mediterranean after his transport was torpedoed by an English sub, Tancred granting him another fate and imagining he too took that walk to freedom. It's a fascinating account of dangerously topsy-turvy times in one corner of Italy, Tancred vividly evoking the countryside as he completes the walk, topping it with a rolled ciggie in his uncle's honour.
The Question of Palestine
Edward W. Said
Text, $36.99
With the slaughter in Gaza going on and on, the re-publication of this seminal 1979 study couldn't have come at a more critical moment. What distinguished it 45 years ago, among other things, was the fact that for the first time a lauded Palestinian writer, writing in English, presented the Palestinian story to the West to widespread acclaim. It was not so much a history of the country, as an attempt to convey the Palestinian experience to a largely ignorant world. Said, who died in 2003, was a towering figure in critical theory, his landmark work Orientalism essentially putting post-colonial studies on the map. And that whole notion of the oriental Other underpins his thinking here, for it is the Orientalist lens that frames Western and Zionist thinking about Palestinians, ultimately 'de-humanising' them. Not an easy book for him to write, he covers a highly complex situation from 1948 (the establishment of Israel, and the displacement of Palestinians) up to Camp David – also including the reasons for his shift from favouring a two-State solution to a bi-national Israeli-Palestinian one-state solution. The writing, fired by passion yet calmly stated, is masterly.
The River
Chris Hammer
MUP, $36.99
In the summer of 2008-09, when journalist and author Chris Hammer embarked on a series of journeys through the Murray-Darling Basin, a 10-year drought had dried up many of its waterways – and the 'mighty' Murray didn't have the oomph to flow into the sea. As he observes in this up-dated version of his 2010 publication, 'The dams are (now) full, the rivers are flowing', but it's largely due to the luck of the weather and will only take the pendulum to swing back and Australia's largest, most vital river system will once again be in dire straits. And although some things have changed politically, not enough has. The River, a compelling record of those drought days that seemed to bring the apocalypse with them, is just the antidote for the 'complacency' that has since set in. It's a highly evocative catalogue of mud-baked rivers, tragically laughable signs indicating mooring sites and properties going bust (he interviewed numerous farmers), which also incorporates the cultural significance of the river system. A literary warning bell, often very moving and still resonant.
Sarah Arachchi's memoir about becoming a paediatrician is as much a migrant tale as a first-hand account of the varied experience of being a female doctor of colour in Australia. Born in Kandy, Sri Lanka, her parents (in response to the dangers of civil war) immigrated to Australia, fetching up in Melbourne. It was the start of a protracted tug-of-war between one home and another, often played out in a number of schools both state and private (courtesy of scholarships she won), where she was bullied – the recurring question being 'Where are you really from?' Added to this is the gender prejudice she's continually faced as a woman doctor. But what really comes through is the complexity, the juggling act of coming from two cultures, both of which she embraces – fiercely proud of her Sri Lankan heritage, and an Aussie girl who played cricket against the boys and had, it seems, a particularly fine sweep shot as well as a crush on Shane Warne. A plain speaking but emotionally charged rites-of-passage portrait.
Unveiled
Vincent Fantauzzo
Penguin, $36.99
This memoir, by portrait painter Vincent Fantauzzo, recalls among other things his time growing up in the tough environment of the Broadmeadows/Glenroy area in the late 1970s and '80s. Fights were an everyday occurrence, not to mention the violence and neglect of his father (a troubled relationship reflected in the son's ambivalent feelings on his death). He is also dyslexic and was written off as a lost cause in all the schools he attended. But he could draw and paint, and at 16, painted Albert Einstein, for whom he developed an affinity because Einstein emphasised imagination over knowledge. The story ranges from Broady to Britain and New York (where he had the dubious distinction of meeting Donald Trump), back to Melbourne, marriage and children. There are some pretty grim scenes here – brawls, drugs and the occasional creative use of a baseball bat – but it's also a classic tale of a seemingly lost soul finding his life-saving métier.