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ABC News
30-05-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
The best new books released in May, from Hannah Kent, Ocean Vuong and more
The hunt for a good book never ends. Thankfully, our ABC Arts critics have been busy reading through piles of new releases to find their favourites to share with you. In this month's Best Books column, you'll find a poetic critique of inequality and exploitation in America, a revealing memoir from one of Australia's most beloved authors about her formative experience as an exchange student in Iceland, and an exciting and "ridiculously funny" debut about a literary fraudster in the tradition of Helen Demidenko. Jonathan Cape American poet and novelist Ocean Vuong was born in Vietnam and moved to the US as a refugee with his mother. She — or a version of her — is the focus of his acclaimed 2019 novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. There are mothers and mother figures, absent fathers and refugee histories in his new novel, too, but The Emperor of Gladness is no repeat of his earlier work. Instead, we're taken into the heart of Gladness — East Gladness, to be precise — which is a place, in Cincinnati, rather than a state of joy or happiness. There's Vuong's playfulness, right there, because this is a town verging on a hellscape: depressed, post-industrial, poor, almost falling into the river. The novel opens in 2009 as a young man, Hai, is walking in the rain by that river, crossing the bridge, seriously contemplating jumping off and ending it all. Instead, he's stopped by an interaction with an elderly Lithuanian woman, Grazina, who invites him into her house. He ends up acting as her informal carer: an odd-couple device that's charming and complicated. But this is also a story of living on the margins, trying to get by, of underclasses and drugs, Alzheimer's and despair — and of unlikely alliances that extend well beyond Hai and Grazina. Hai works in a fast food franchise, Home Market, that provides an ensemble cast of characters whose backstories and sweaty hard work come more and more to the fore. Dishwashers, managers, cooks and a foray into wrestling — this is a portrait of America's workforce that is truly diverse, vivid, ground down and not at all clichéed. It's a community to root for, with an unexpected road trip thrown into the mix, that remakes a poetic (but unsentimental) version of Gladness. — Kate Evans W&N The Original Daughter is the story of sisterhood and its precarious balance of rivalry and love. Protagonist Genevieve lives as an only child until she is eight when her sister arrives. She recalls, "Arin didn't appear the way regular sisters did. She was dropped into our lives, fully formed, at the age of seven." As an adult, she's estranged from Arin, and we spend the novel trying to determine what it is that broke them apart. As children, Genevieve and Arin fall easily into step as sisters, their relationship filled with joy and mutual admiration. But beneath this is the sting of jealousy. Genevieve is terrified that Arin will either steal her life or, worse, leave. She is torn between the love she feels for her sister and anger she feels when it seems that Arin might usurp her in their family hierarchy. Set against the vivid backdrop of working-class Singapore in the 2000s, Wei writes richly, skilfully and without hyperbole about what it means to be family and particularly what it means to be a 'Jie Jie' or sister. The Original Daughter asks with great care who we are if not amalgamations of the ones we love — mining unconsciously or consciously the mannerisms, behaviours and even lives of those we admire. — Rosie Ofori Ward Simon & Schuster/Summit Books Ern Malley. Helen Demidenko. Norma Khouri. Wanda Koolmatrie. Australia has a rich and storied tradition of fakers, forgers, frauds and fabricators. For his debut, Greece-based Dominic Amerena offers us a character who is a worthy addition to this gallery of fiasco-mongers: an insecure, craven, sickly and mercifully unnamed narrator. Peddling his blood and body as a clinical trial subject at the local hospital while attempting to succeed as a writer, his existence is dreary. He envies his "Melbourne-famous" writer partner, Ruth, who has found acclaim selling a story about her mother. Given the precarity of the artistic landscape, only a fool would refuse an opportunity for advancement, and the narrator is no fool. Swimming at the Victoria University pools, he encounters Brenda Shales. A Whitlam-era luminary — part Thea Astley, part Helen Garner — she wrote two novels, won a cult following and promptly vanished into the only dignified position available to a self-respecting literary author: obscurity. Who better to provide prestige than a recluse with some flesh to offer the biographical mill? It's not quite spotting Christ on the boulevard, but it will do. He sets about writing a tell-all account of what happened to the celebrated author. He will be her witness, her confidante. The Boswell to her Johnson. He will bask in the second-hand shadow of her literary light. He will build his fame upon hers. This is a ridiculously funny meditation on careerism and economic precarity. In I Want Everything, the opportunism of the present eclipses… well, everything. Where authors once sought time and space to write, now they seek time and space to better leverage their brand. You may want it all, Amerena suggests, but first you'll need to sell yourself out — along with your friends, enemies, colleagues, fans, associates, pets, peers and family. — Declan Fry Picador Edith — the central character of British author Sarah Moss's ninth novel, Ripeness — grew up as an outsider, the daughter of a Jewish refugee and a northern English farmer. Now 73, she has separated from her husband of 40 years and found a home in a village in County Clare in Ireland. As her four passports attest, she doesn't belong anywhere but it's here she intends to stay, on "the wet coast of a wet North Atlantic island off a bigger wet North Atlantic island". The narrative shifts in the second chapter. It's the mid-60s and Edith, 17, is about to embark on a gap year in Europe before she commences at Oxford University. At the last minute, however, her mother changes the plan — rather than travel to Florence, Edith is to go to her sister Lydia, eight months pregnant and ensconced in a villa on the shores of Lake Como. Once there, Edith is to care for Lydia, a professional ballerina, and call a number when the baby comes. Told in alternating chapters (shifting between first-person narration in Italy and third-person in Ireland), the story's two strands bookend Edith's adult life. In Italy, she is an innocent whose knowledge of childbirth and motherhood comes from books and tending stock on the family farm. In her 70s, her pared-back life reflects the wisdom she's acquired over the decades; her house is small and neat, and her life is one of simple pleasures: walking outdoors, ocean swims, cups of tea, friendship and, on Thursday nights, sleeping with a companionable German potter who lives in the village. That's not to say Edith doesn't feel regret: for the baby born in Italy, for the years she spent trying to please others, for not being a better mother to her son. In Ripeness, Moss considers what it is to belong, the tension between age-old tradition and new ways of living, and how waves of migration shape communities. Moss also explores the thornier sides of motherhood: the effects of trauma, the historic shame of unwanted pregnancy and the ambivalence some people feel at becoming mothers at all. But Ripeness is also a moving and nuanced celebration of life, however imperfect its beginnings, and the joy of saying yes. — Nicola Heath Picador Hannah Kent wrote her way into the international literary scene in 2013 with a surprise bestseller, Burial Rites. Surprising? Only that she was a debut author, writing historical fiction set in Iceland in 1830, based on the real story of Agnes Magnúsdóttir, the last woman executed in that country. Since then, Kent has continued to write, create and imagine her way into the past — with The Good People (2016) and Devotion (2021) — but something kept pulling her back to Iceland, 16,000 km away from her South Australian home. In her memoir, Kent explains her connection to Iceland and revisits her writing of Burial Rites, lyrically and thoughtfully examining ideas of home and how it is that this 'foreign' country has inhabited her and continues to haunt her dreams and imagination. When she was 17, Kent travelled to Iceland as a Rotary Exchange Student. This experience is told with compelling clarity — the adventure, the bewildering language, not being met at the airport, the both warm and mystifyingly cold hosts, the shift that accompanies making new friendships and the growing appreciation of the wild white landscape. But that's not all — because the place, the stories, the archive, the families all followed her home. Followed her creatively, into the writing of Burial Rites, but kept following her for years after. And as this memoir opens, at home with a new baby, feeling detached from her body and delirious with tiredness, she realises that her sense of home, longing, memory, place and language are intimately tied to this distant land. A long way from Adelaide's heat. And so with a true writer's heart, she takes us back there — revealing silences and white stretches of paper, alongside the hush of snowfall and the white stretches of landscape. What does it mean, to be always home and always homesick? There are answers here. — Kate Evans Black Inc. The body of a girl, said to be a saint, is transported from the Pacific to the Kimberley. We know little about her. Why is she nameless? How did she reach the Pacific? Why is she beatified? One thing we do know: before she was entrusted to the care of a woodworker named Orrin, she was assaulted and died at the age of 14. Desecrations and loss haunt the saint's passage through time and space. The reader is encouraged to play detective, piecing together contextual details of the story's little worlds. Throughout the book, an omniscient narrative voice offers a sly, critical commentary on the saint's treatment and the characters' actions, contradicting the idea that she is either nameless or beatified. Thematic and narrative links between the book's four sections gradually emerge. A running theme throughout is grace, especially as women are afforded or denied it. The saint's existence in the form of a girl whose life was tragic and short suggests an ironic, if not aggrieved, stance toward notions of the sacred. Violence and erasure occur here in both dramatic and quiet ways. If the characters' failings are tempered by a desire for sacredness, it is a sacredness that often masks devastation: the Pacific island that forms the background to the opening vignette, for example, is depicted as a place gouged for phosphate mining and ruled by various colonial administrations; the failure of the girl saint's body to register any trace of the violence done to it is not absolution but a 'betrayal'. Rowe's graceful prose offers a suggestive, elliptical, thoughtful exploration of the lives of women. The result is a book about the hypocrisy and moral duplicity of a world more accustomed to realise its future ideals than its present. — Declan Fry Tune in to ABC Radio National at 10am Mondays for The Book Show and 10am Fridays for The Bookshelf.
ABC News
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
Nam Le wins Book of the Year at 2025 NSW Literary Awards for 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem
Nam Le has won the top prize at the NSW Literary Awards for his debut collection of poetry — and his second book — 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem. It's his second Book of the Year win at the event formerly known as the NSW Premier's Literary Awards, after his short story collection The Boat won in 2009. At this year's event at the State Library of New South Wales in Sydney, the Vietnamese Australian author also won the $30,000 Multicultural NSW Award, taking his total winnings to $40,000. The judges described the collection as "damning, frank and unwavering … passionate and bold in its depiction of otherness, trauma and struggle". Le told ABC Arts he's "stoked" to have won at the NSW Literary Awards. Accepting the Multicultural NSW Award via video message, Le — who came to Australia as a refugee from Vietnam when he was less than a year old — dedicated the award to his dad, "whose whole life has been an engine of multiculturalism in this country". Le's publisher Ben Ball accepted Book of the Year on his behalf, reading a prepared speech from Le, in which he asked whether multiculturalism has become "complacent". "If we think about the horror in Gaza — and how can we not — and how it has affected us here, perhaps we need new questions like: should the goal of multiculturalism be co-existence or cohesion?" Le wrote. "What good is harmony if it only and always exists on terms dictated by power? … What good is diversity if it recognises every group's difference but not every group's dignity? "When [diversity] doesn't challenge or threaten power, then how is it more than mere colourwash?" Le told ABC Arts the response to his newest book has been "warming" — especially among other writers from marginalised backgrounds. Other winners at the 2025 NSW Literary Awards — worth a total of $360,000 — include Fiona McFarlane, who won the $40,000 Christina Stead Prize for Fiction for her novel of interconnected stories linked to a serial killer, Highway 13; James Bradley, who won the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-fiction for his ode to the ocean, Deep Water; and Lebanese Palestinian writer Hasib Hourani who won the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry for his debut book rock flight, about the displacement and dispossession of Palestinians. Accepting his award, Hourani described rock flight as a book "about protests, and one that acts as a protest for Palestinian liberation". "Narratives of occupation, grief and resistance are difficult to capture straightforwardly. I wrote rock flight in order to explore both historical and speculative acts of liberation in Palestine." In some ways, Le has been working on 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem since he first started writing, giving up his job as a corporate lawyer to attend the Iowa Writers' Workshop in the United States in 2004. But it was being asked to write a piece for the 25th anniversary reissue of Watermark, an anthology of Vietnamese American writing, in 2021 that spurred him to begin working seriously on the book-length poem. Le wanted the book to reflect his own "ambiguity and ambivalence" about the idea of a Vietnamese poem. In [2. Invocative / Apostrophic], he writes: "Whatever I write is Vietnamese. I can never not — You won't let me not — Lick the leash or bite it." Le explains: "If [the book] were to represent where I was at and what I was feeling about poetry and identity, culture and language, it would need to be something that was never fixed, always in flux, and always undermined and undermining other certainties. "What I feel is so contingent and so changeable, so I wanted a field of poems where the poems could actually exert pressure and counterpressure on each other." It gives his collection of poems a sense of energy and playfulness. It's also a reflection of Le's maturation as a writer — the collection coming 16 years after his highly praised debut, The Boat, which was released when he was just 29 years old. "As a younger writer, you're wanting to convey authority by having answers; by the carriage of certainty," Le says. "As you go on and get whacked around by life, you realise not knowing or not being sure of things is not a sign of lesser knowing. "In fact, asking questions and not being sure, and having the wherewithal to change your mind, or to hold contradictory things in your mind, is a more truthful way of representing what it actually feels like to be around." While his first taste of success was The Boat, Le's first literary love was poetry. He grew up reading Francis Turner Palgrave's anthology of English poetry, his Golden Treasury of English Songs and Lyrics, first published in 1861, and picking up books of classic poetry in second-hand bookstores. It doesn't matter if the poetry he reads was written today or centuries ago. "Good poetry, almost by definition, is alive," he says. "Whether it's written in really classical, metrical verse forms from hundreds of years ago, or whether it's written in the crucible of now, it speaks to what it sees, but it also speaks to the tradition that's around it." He describes Australian poetry today as "incredibly eclectic" and "draw[ing] from so many different traditions". In a country with such a strong migrant population, he says, "we each bring our own matrices of histories and stories and memories and cultural references". Lebanese Palestinian writer Hasib Hourani — who won the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry — finds reading Australian poetry "refreshing", because it speaks to "particular intricacies and nuances of certain movements and communities". He also appreciates the camaraderie among poets. "Because the Australian poetry landscape doesn't feel as saturated as other English language scenes, there ends up being a sense of community that translates on the page in a really beautiful and memorable way," he says. Hourani grew up between the Arab states of the Persian Gulf and Australia, reading the poetry of WB Yeats and later Carol Ann Duffy, the UK's poet laureate from 2009 to 2019. It was at university that he finally came across poetry similar to the kind he wanted to write. "I discovered that poetry didn't need to take itself so seriously, even if the subject matter itself was quite grave," he says. "[Rock flight] was an entertaining book to write because the way that I play with theme and language — while it's distressing and often so violent — it still is kind of tongue-in-cheek and playful." Hourani began writing his book-length poem rock flight during a COVID lockdown in Melbourne in 2020. In the book, he writes about visiting Palestine for the first time in 2019, when he was 22; and about historical and present-day injustices inflicted on Palestinian people. "I was figuring out what I could do from a distance," he says. "And what I could do is write and publish within this continent and hope that it will spread to different continents too." Like Le, Hourani reflects on the limitations of language in his poetry. "i go to palestine with a new journal thought i'd write some metaphors but return with scant pages of questions and fodder. the more time i spend with words the more i realise that they just won't do." The NSW Literary Awards judges described rock flight as a "rendering of crimes, a guide for survival, and a recognition of the disruptive potential of paper, voice and stone". Hourani made some of his last changes to the book in October 2023. Since then, more than 53,000 Palestinians — including at least 160 journalists — have been killed in the war in Gaza. "It feels really distressing to see that this book is being read and shared and even published, when journalists across Palestine and specifically in Gaza have been targeted and killed," he says. "It has been really confronting seeing that all of my references in the book predate 2023 and yet they still remain as relevant as they are." He says when he started writing the book he wanted to "advocate for Palestinian liberation to people who might not yet be convinced that's a just thing for us to ask for". It started as a work of non-fiction, tracing his family's history in the region, including his grandparents escaping war-torn Palestine in 1948. But he soon realised he could do more with poetry; he could make the book non-linear and tangential, and pepper it with recurring motifs like rocks, flight and contaminated water, all building to a picture of the history of Palestinian struggle. "It's felt a lot of the time like history has been repeating over again for the better part of a century," he says. "The long-form poem allows it to be one contained story, in the way that this history is one contained story." Hourani also wanted to write for other Palestinians and allies. "Palestinian writing in Australia, but also now globally, isn't being given that freedom of expression and that airtime that it deserves and needs," he says. "I really wanted to utilise the space as much as I could." He wants his readers to "feel like there is always something to be done, tangibly and materially, to contribute to the struggle". "A poet could dedicate this time to bearing witness to these atrocities, or they could dedicate the time to recoup and have readers feel re-energised to enter the struggle after a week of awful headlines. "There is no one answer to what a poet's duty is at a time like this." Book of the Year ($10,000) 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem by Nam Le (Scribner Australia) Christina Stead Prize for Fiction ($40,000) Highway 13 by Fiona McFarlane (Allen & Unwin) Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-fiction ($40,000) Deep Water by James Bradley (Hamish Hamilton Australia) Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry ($30,000) rock flight by Hasib Hourani (Giramondo Publishing) Patricia Wrightson Prize for Children's Literature ($30,000) Silver Linings by Katrina Nannestad (HarperCollins Publishers) Ethel Turner Prize for Young People's Literature ($30,000) Anomaly by Emma Lord (Affirm Press) Nick Enright Prize for Playwriting ($30,000) Three Magpies Perched in a Tree by Glenn Shea (Currency Press/La Mama Theatre) Betty Roland Prize for Scriptwriting ($30,000) Inside by Charles Williams (Simpatico Films, Macgowan Films, Never Sleep Pictures) Indigenous Writers' Prize ($30,000) When the World Was Soft by Juluwarlu Group Aboriginal Corporation (Allen & Unwin) Multicultural NSW Award ($30,000) 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem by Nam Le (Scribner Australia) UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing ($10,000) Jilya by Dr Tracy Westerman (UQP) Translation Prize ($30,000) The Trial of Anna Thalberg by Eduardo Sangarcía, translated from Spanish by Elizabeth Bryer (Restless Books) Special Award Liminal University of Sydney People's Choice Award ($5,000) The Lasting Harm by Lucia Osborne-Crowley (Allen & Unwin)
ABC News
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
Jessica Townsend's Silverborn sees fantasy meet cosy crime in her latest book of the bestselling YA Nevermoor series
Jessica Townsend remembers exactly where she was the moment she learned she was a New York Times-bestselling author. It was 2017. She had just published Nevermoor: The Trials of Morrigan Crow and she was in LA on the US leg of her book tour to meet with film executives. The Sunshine Coast local decided to visit Disneyland on her day off when her agent called with the news. "I was like … 'This is so silly' — you don't find out you've hit the New York Times bestseller list when you're walking down Main Street in Disneyland," Townsend tells ABC Arts. "The absurdity of the whole situation just really got to me. But it was a nice, magical way to find out that this totally ridiculous, very unexpected career milestone had happened." To the world, Townsend — then in her early 30s — appeared to be an overnight success. But the publication of her debut novel was the culmination of years of work. "It took me about 10 years to write the first Nevermoor book and, at the time, that was a great source of frustration for me," she says. "But in hindsight, it's the best possible thing that could have happened." The "long incubation process", as Townsend describes it, allowed her to build out the imaginary world of Nevermoor, a sprawling metropolis filled with magicians, fantastical creatures and enchanted architecture. "The challenge for me is not trying to come up with [ideas]. The challenge is how to switch off the tap," she says. That tap has poured forth enough material for Townsend to loosely plot out nine books. A musical film adaptation — currently in development with Drew Goddard (The Martian) as writer and producer, and Australian Michael Gracey (The Greatest Showman) as director — is another addition to the ever-expanding Nevermoor universe. And now Townsend has published its much-anticipated fourth novel, Silverborn: The Mystery of Morrigan Crow. The first three books — Nevermoor (2017), Wundersmith (2018) and Hollowpox (2020) — follow the fortunes of Morrigan Crow, a 10-year-old girl from the Wintersea Republic. Born under a curse, Morrigan is destined to die on Eventide (the last day of an age) until the mysterious Jupiter North turns up to save her from her unloving family and tragic fate. He spirits her away to the magical city of Nevermoor, home to the Wundrous Society, where Morrigan learns that she is a magician who can control a powerful substance called Wunder. The only problem is that such magicians have a bad reputation in Nevermoor, thanks to the last one, Ezra Squall, who used his gift to carry out a massacre of innocent civilians. Silverborn, a 660-page doorstopper, combines fantasy with "cosy crime" as Morrigan and her friends investigate a murder. Townsend introduces a raft of new characters and takes readers to previously unexplored corners of Nevermoor, including the wealthy Silver District, home to the privileged Darling family. While the book is still pitched to middle-grade readers, Townsend says a "slight tonal shift" sees Silverborn tackling darker and more grown-up themes. The novel explores the fraught territory between childhood and adolescence as Morrigan, now 13, and her patron, Jupiter, clash over boundaries. It also considers what constitutes home and family. "The whole series is about family, in a way," Townsend reflects. Woven through the Nevermoor series are references to Townsend's favourite books and films. In an early scene in the first book, Jupiter presents Morrigan with an umbrella on Morningtide so she can partake in a Nevermoor tradition celebrating the start of a new age: jumping off the roof of the Hotel Deucalion and floating 13 storeys to the ground. "That was a hat tip to two things: to Mary Poppins, which I've always loved, and also to my favourite movie, Practical Magic," Townsend says. She also drew inspiration from Gregory McGuire's 1995 novel, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, the basis for the musical and 2024 film. "It took this whimsical, absurd, silly children's story … and then treated it very, very seriously, and brought out the things about it that were sinister. That's what I love — having things side by side that are very silly and very sinister, and having them turn on a dime." She also acknowledges the influence of the Harry Potter series, which she describes as "a cultural touchstone". "It changed the landscape of children's publishing forever," she says. "For a lot of people, even for a lot of adults, it is often not just the only children's book they've ever read, it is the only book they've ever read … and so it holds this mythical place in the collective consciousness." But Townsend thinks it's time for the culture to move on. "I would love to think that we could de-centre the conversation in general in children's books from Harry Potter," she says. "I have no interest in thinking or talking about JK Rowling and her creations because as a queer woman, as a trans ally, I am just so gutted and so disappointed [by her anti-trans activism]." As a young reader, Townsend loved books like The Baby-Sitters Club, John Marsden's Tomorrow When the War Began series and Little Women. These stories exerted such a strong force on the author that when it came to writing her own books, she was naturally drawn to the world of children's literature. "Those are the stories that we hold tight … [and] stick with us in a real, emotional way," she says. Stories with that kind of power can reach readers of all ages — not just children. "I'm deliberately writing books that I hope are being enjoyed by children and adults," Townsend says. "I love the communal experience of adults and kids reading together, and it not being a total drag for the adult, so that they are enjoying it and getting something out of it themselves … on a slightly different level, like a Pixar film." Part of the thrill comes from becoming immersed in a timeless world removed from reality. "I love the idea of creating a place that people can come back to, that they can find in childhood and that they can come back to when they are teenagers and when they are adults, and that it will still have that nostalgic, joyful feeling for them." Melbourne Writers Festival is on from May 8-11. Sydney Writers Festival is on from May 20-25.
ABC News
27-04-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
What should I read next? April's best books include exciting new work by Kate Grenville and Andrea Goldsmith
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. ( Supplied: Black Inc ) 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. ( Supplied: Penguin Books Australia ) 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. Photo shows The Book Show Your favourite fiction authors share the story behind their latest books. 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. ( Supplied: Transit Lounge ) 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. Photo shows 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. ( Supplied: Text Publishing ) 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. Photo shows 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. ( Supplied: Hachette Australia ) 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. Photo shows A bald white man wearing a white collared shirt, pictured in front of a bookshelf 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. ( Supplied: Bloomsbury Publishing ) 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. Photo shows 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. ( Supplied: Scribe Publications ) 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. Photo shows An illustration of falling books on a beige background with the ABC logo and text reading The ABC Book Club The ABC's place for readers to talk books — with each other, with books specialists from across the ABC, and with your favourite authors. 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. ( Supplied: Transit Lounge ) 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. Photo shows The Bookshelf Podcast Image The latest and best fiction reviewed by a team of dedicated bibliophiles. 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 Tune in to ABC Radio National at 10am Mondays for and 10am Fridays for .
