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Daily Mail
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Fatherhood by Augustine Sedgewick: Daddies not so cool...
Fatherhood by Augustine Sedgewick (Picador £20, 320pp) This is the first time, in a longish reviewing career, that I have been given a book to review on the same subject as a book I have written myself, and what's more, with the same title as the one I had written myself. My own Fatherhood: The Truth, a guide to early childcare with jokes, came out in 2005, has sold 80,000 copies (my biggest seller) and is still in print. This Fatherhood is an altogether more serious volume. Augustine Sedgewick, with a name like that, could only be a historian, and he has delved into the distant past to write about how the great and the good related to fatherhood, from ancient times to (nearly) the present day, from Aristotle and St Augustine to Thomas Jefferson, Sigmund Freud and Bob Dylan. No one in this book has changed a nappy, or cooked a disgusting dinner of pasta shapes, as we mere mortals had to. (My own children are now 25 and 23, so those days are very much gone.) Sedgewick begins with the American artist Norman Rockwell, who painted all those cosily domestic covers for the Saturday Evening Post. In real life, of course, his second wife was an alcoholic who killed herself, his first wife having divorced him, and nor was he much of a dad. He 'hid his private conflicts behind public images of fatherhood and family he could never live up to'. Sedgewick thinks we 'need better shared stories about fatherhood', for 'without a deeper and more humane understanding of the role of men in the world, we will continue to struggle to know ourselves, one another, and the richest parts of our lives. The goal of this book is to find just that.' For all these fine sentiments, I'm not sure Sedgewick's book is really about fatherhood at all. It seems to me more a history of patriarchy, although maybe that's not a word that sells books these days. It's about how men came to be in charge, and how they came to stay in charge. In Plato's Athens, for instance, women were not eligible to govern. They were there to have babies. At a marriage ceremony, the father of the bride would announce to the groom, 'I give you my daughter for the ploughing of legitimate children.' This represented a commonplace view that 'women were essentially soil in which men planted seed and cultivated produce'. Most of Sedgewick's men seem to think the same way. Sedgewick is, happily, an indefatigable researcher, who has unearthed many stories about these often terrible men, some of whose connections with fatherhood were at best peripheral. Both Plato and John Locke fathered no children at all, but that didn't stop them both becoming widely read authorities on the whole business. And the philosopher Rousseau and his partner conceived five children, all of whom he persuaded her to abandon at the door to a home for foundlings in Paris after their birth. Years later he tried to track them down but no trace of any could be found. I think he rather deserved that.
TimesLIVE
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- TimesLIVE
Kaveh Akbar's debut novel asks impossible questions about death
Martyr! Kaveh Akbar Pan Macmillan (Picador) Have you ever been suicidally sad, but don't want to waste your suicide? Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar reads like that. It's an account of unprecedented experiences, a reckoning with life, grief, addiction and what art is supposed to do. We meet Cyrus Shams, an Iranian-born American poet: nearly 30, sexually ambiguous, a recovering addict, a so-called 'good' immigrant. He rarely writes but constantly aches. He is self-pitying, orphaned and profoundly sad. Once, alcohol was a kind of soulmate — faithful, omnipresent, dependable. 'Alcohol didn't demand monogamy like opiates or meth. Alcohol demanded only that you came back home to it at the end of the night.' That relationship is over. The drink that once fixed things can no longer fix anything. The deepest wound in Cyrus' life is his mother Roya's 'unspeakable' death. Months after his birth, she boarded a flight from Tehran to Dubai, hoping to reconnect with her brother Arash, a man shattered by his service in the Iran-Iraq war. That flight — real-life Iran Air Flight 655 — was shot down by a US navy warship, killing everyone on board. Akbar doesn't fictionalise the violence; he places it plainly, implicating history in Cyrus' grief. That loss fractures the Shams family. Arash unravels. Cyrus' father, Ali, moves to America with his son, trying to outrun memory and make a life again. He works a thankless job at an industrial poultry plant. He lives only for Cyrus, though the two are largely unable to connect. Nearing 30, Cyrus is trying to make sense of his life. He becomes obsessed with martyrdom — what it means to die for something, to make your death mean something. He wants to write a book about it. He tells people this. He means it. That project, that impulse, echoes back on itself: Martyr! is both Cyrus' project and Akbar's. The novel becomes its own recursive artefact. A conversation with his roommate and sometimes lover Zee sends Cyrus to Brooklyn to meet Orkideh, a terminally ill Iranian artist spending her final days in the Brooklyn Museum, speaking with strangers about death. She sits silently, listening, day after day. The set-up nods to Marina Abramović's The Artist is Present — an art-as-presence piece about vulnerability, endurance and witness. Orkideh isn't only talking about death, she's performing it. Her death is meaningful, deliberate. Cyrus is magnetised. He wants to write about her. He wants, maybe, to be her. The novel is structurally chaotic on purpose. It's schizophrenic and manic. Perspectives shift constantly: Cyrus, his father, his mother, his uncle, friends, lovers, ghosts. The timeline loops and fractures. In the early pages, the fragmentation is intoxicating, propulsive, even. But sometimes it bogs down. The energy stalls under the weight of its own philosophical density. However, Akbar's language dazzles. The poetry is unmistakable, even in prose. There are throwaway lines about death that lodge in the throat. A quiet, sly humour threads itself through even the bleakest scenes. That's the novel's deepest power — its humanity. Akbar doesn't only write about people, he builds them. Every character pulses. Every moment is lived. Martyr! is a debut novel, but it reads like it will stand the test of time, feeling, failing, and reaching. It's flawed, sure. The structure is, at times, a mess. But the mess feels earned. This is a novel about being alive in all its shapeless weight. It reads like Hozier and Florence + the Machine blended into a single, howling voice, an introspective smoothie about art, immigration, addiction, and death. A novel not afraid to ask impossible questions and live inside them.
The Guardian
03-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Literary scandal', ‘joke-a-minute', ‘captivating': the best Australian books out in May
Fiction, Simon & Schuster, $34.99 This debut novel luxuriates in the lies it weaves. Dominic Amerena is a confident storyteller, jumping between the novel's two narrators with ease. One, a down-on-his-luck writer searching for a story. The other, a reclusive Australian novelist who disappeared from the public eye at the height of her career. When he recognises her at a local pool, he knows that if he can convince her to tell him the story of her brilliant, controversial work, it will be his one-way ticket to success. Literary scandal, feminist fury, love, betrayal – I Want Everything has it all and then some. – Bec Kavanagh Memoir, Picador, $17.99 Hannah Kent's newest work of memoir charts her Adelaide childhood, her first trip to Iceland as a 17-year-old Rotary exchange student, and her ensuing enchantment with the country, inseparable from her own artistic blossoming. The behind-the-scenes view of the creative processes that led to her award-winning 2013 novel, Burial Rites, is interesting reading in its own right, but especially moving is Kent's palpable tenderness towards the novel's subject – Agnes Magnúsdóttir, the last person to be executed in Iceland. As with Agnes' voice in Burial Rites, Kent's narration is immediate, intimate, and never less than captivating. – Adele Dumont Fiction, UQP, $32.99 It's 1910: Florence Nightingale is 90 years old and on her deathbed, restlessly floating through dreams and memories. A mysterious young man, Silas Bradley, arrives at her bedside, claiming that they have met many times – in Crimea, Turkey and Scutari. But he's too young to have been there half a century ago, and a fearful Nightingale suspects he's hiding his true purpose. What follows is historical fiction that draws on the details of Nightingale's life both before and after she became the founder of modern nursing. Laura Elvery writes with a lyrical and elegiac voice, lovely and elegant in its restraint; a very atmospheric read. – Sian Cain Memoir, Allen & Unwin, $34.99 Food journalist Candice Chung's debut begins with a prologue that's more like a poem: 'What can I get you? And is everything OK? … Here – let me take these things away. At the restaurant, we hear all the things we want our lovers to say.' After Chung's 13-year relationship ends, she starts dating again – not just men but also her Cantonese parents, whom she reconnects with after a 'decade-long rupture', bringing them along to the restaurants she critiques. A thoughtful and compelling pastiche of fragments, lists, and literary reflections, Chung's memoir revolves around her personal history with food, family and culture, but also around writing: Deborah Levy, Nora Ephron, Helen Garner and Craig Claiborne are all name-checked, and their influence is felt throughout. – Steph Harmon Non-fiction, ABC Books, $34.99 This is not the war book John Lyons and Sophie de Clezio expected to write. On two trips to Ukraine as the ABC's global affairs editor, Lyons – the author of Balcony over Jerusalem – serviced the grind of breaking news. On his third trip – taken during his holidays with his photographer partner, de Clezio – there was time to find the real Ukraine at war, via its citizens. In this way, A Bunker in Kyiv is a tribute to the millions of Ukrainians who, as Lyons writes, wake each day with the credo: 'What can I do for the war effort today?' While it still maps the geopolitical elements of the three-year-old war – and the introduction of the new X factor, Trump - this story belongs to the extraordinary people of Ukraine, standing strong against an uncertain future. - Lucy Clark Non-fiction, Penguin, $36.99 Both authors of Broken Brains – who were my colleagues at Mamamia 12 years ago – have lived through incredibly difficult illnesses. This can make for tough reading at times, but Jamila Rizvi and Rosie Waterland's accounts of sickness, physical and mental, serve a purpose beyond gawking. The book contrasts Rizvi's experience with a rare brain tumour to Waterland's complex mental health issues to argue that the body-mind distinction is neither fair nor accurate. Waterland no more chose her traumatic childhood than Rizvi did her tumour. Mixing memoir with reporting, the book highlights gaps in Australia's healthcare system and offers patients and their carers new possibilities for navigating illness. – Alyx Gorman Fiction, Ultimo, $34.99 Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion I just loved Cadance Bell's memoir The All of It: A Bogan Rhapsody when it was released back in 2022; a humorous and moving account of growing up trans in rural New South Wales. 'I suspect we'll read a lot more from her,' I wrote then – and here is some more: an impressively ambitious left turn into science fiction. This heartfelt novel opens as a robot, Arto, wakes to find himself alone in a desolate future Australia, humanity seemingly long gone. He sets out to discover what has happened, his only company a cat and a certain movie star called 'Huge Jacked Man' whose adverts are still playing in the empty streets. Arto eventually stumbles on another robot, Indi, who may be his sister – and the reason Earth has been obliterated. - SC Fiction, Macmillan, $34.99 A group holiday goes terribly awry when an adult man is accused of groping a teenage girl. While this premise might sound a bit like The Slap, He Would Never is as much a bad man thriller as it is a multi-family drama. Wainwright's fifth novel centres on five women who met at a mother's group 14 years earlier, for whom camping has become an annual tradition. The book jumps between perspectives and time periods at a page-turning pace, and as the dynamics leading up to the incident unfold, the stakes of its aftermath get higher. That the book scored an endorsement from Liane Moriarty is fitting – it mines similar veins to Moriarty's work, with an echoing dramatic conclusion. – AG Fiction, Allen & Unwin, $34.99 Better known for his work on TV and main stages, Toby Schmitz's witty and fast-paced debut novel is tricky to summarise. A social satire set in the roaring 20s, a murder mystery on board a luxury ocean liner, and a book partly narrated by a fairly smug boat. On board is a smorgasbord of upper-class caricatures, which Schmitz absolutely revels in: landed gentry, socialites and social climbers, drowning in cognac, snappy retorts and horrifying racism. They're too caught up in themselves to much mind about the gruesome death of a Bengali deckhand – but the ship's detective is useless, and more bodies are piling up… – SH Memoir, UNSW, $34.99 In the opening chapters of this lyrical, trans-generational memoir, Micaela Sahhar poses a question: 'How do you tell a story you are reaching to understand?' The dilemma animates the rest of the book about her family, who were displaced by the Nakba in 1948 and resettled in far-flung corners of the world, including Melbourne and Adelaide. In dense but beautiful prose, Sahhar pulls together a story, full of gaps and questions, about her Palestinian family, their memories and their connection to home. – Celina Ribeiro Fiction, Pantera, $34.99 We open on a great misfortune. Ellie has just won a major painting prize, which means two things: more eyes than ever are fixed on her career, and she now has to carry a giant novelty check all night. The art world feels increasingly vampiric, her agent is breathing down her neck, and everything feels too much. Can you blame her for embarking on the deranged project that gives this book its title? In his hilarious debut, occasional Guardian contributor Joseph Earp (who moonlights as a painter himself) probes the pains of love and art. It's a joke-a-minute novel that captures the mannered rituals of any inner-city creative scene with stunning wit – and scathing accuracy. – Michael Sun Cookbook, Murdoch Books, $55 Chef Thi Le named her first cookbook after a term that refers to the Vietnamese diaspora. For Le, who was born in a Malaysian refugee camp and grew up in western Sydney, she is leaning into the experience of living between worlds by sharing 100-plus recipes that explore Vietnamese flavours and techniques. She celebrates Australian produce and US and Cajun influences in a spicy seafood boil-up; Cambodian rice noodles in her Phnom Penh egg noodles recipe; and French colonial history in her coconut flan. She wrote the book with her partner, Jia-Yen Lee, who also co-owns Le's celebrated Melbourne venues Anchovy, Ca Com and Jeow. – Emma Joyce
The Guardian
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Question 7 by Richard Flanagan audiobook review – a bold memoir of life and near-death
At the start of this boldly experimental memoir, the Booker prize-winning author Richard Flanagan visits the site of a Japanese labour camp where his late father was interned during the second world war and where he ends up awkwardly having his photo taken with a former guard, Mr Sato. The war ended weeks after the US launched an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, killing 60,000 people in less than a minute. That bomb also led to Flanagan's father, then days from death, being freed, which in turn allowed him to father a child who would grow up to become a writer. 'How many people need to die in order that you might read this book?' Flanagan asks. Question 7, named after a riddle posed by Chekhov, is a book about the connections and choices that shape our lives, for better or worse. Flanagan is the narrator, his reading by turns mournful, reflective and quizzical as he plots a path through the lives of his parents, the writer HG Wells, Wells's sometime inamorata, Rebecca West, and the physicist Leo Szilard, who masterminded the nuclear chain reaction that was instrumental in the creation of the bomb. These historical vignettes are intertwined with Flanagan's own childhood memories of life in Tasmania, an island with a troubled history, and culminate in his account of a near-death experience at the age of 21, when his kayak became wedged underwater. As he assesses his own complex heritage and those of pivotal figures from the past, Flanagan reflects that 'there is no memory without shame'. Available via Penguin Audio, 7hr 47min FreeAmanda Knox, Headline, 10hr 17min Knox narrates her memoir detailing her struggles to adapt to a normal life after her wrongful imprisonment in Italy. Our EveningsAlan Hollinghurst, Picador, 16hr 36minThe Line of Beauty author's latest novel about the diverging lives of two public schoolboys is read by Prasanna Puwanarajah.
Yahoo
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Page-turners: best books to buy this week
Looking for your next page-turner? Here's our guide to the best books to read. It's 1938 and on a windswept island off the coast of Wales a young girl is pondering her choices: to stay in her father's house or marry and leave. Two anthropologists turn up … are they a ticket to the mainland? And what are we meant to make of the stranded whale? A remarkably assured debut novel. Picador, £9.99 The title says it all: Anne Applebaum (formerly of this parish) identifies the crucial aspect of contemporary autocracies, viz, their mastery of contemporary technologies and kleptocratic financial structures to manipulate opinion and fund elites. Salutary and depressing. Penguin, £10.99 Which of us on the wrong side of the fat divide hasn't toyed with the idea of Ozempic? Johann Hari, three stone overweight, tried it; this is his exploration of the territory. Hari has form in making up quotes, but it's a readable account of a social as well as medical phenomenon. Bloomsbury, £10.99 Virago is publishing new editions of Rumer Godden's most captivating novels. Among the first batch from this unmatched storyteller is The Dark Horse, a 1981 novel set in Calcutta about a disgraced racehorse, a horsetrainer, an Irish nun who loves horses and the mystery of how the dark horse of the title vanishes three days before the Viceroy Cup. A terrific read. Virago Modern Classics, £10.99 This polemic by George Monbiot and Peter Hutchinson is premised on the notion that the belief in globalisation, deregulation and free markets is orthodoxy now. But I wonder how that squares with Trumpian protectionism, tariffs and America First? Whatever. It's combative stuff. Penguin, £10.99
