Our reviewers consider recently released fiction and non-fiction titles.
When New York bookseller Cassie Andrews receives a small leather-bound book from a favourite customer, it begins a magical thriller that will propel her and her flatmate Izzy into a dangerous game of cat and mouse.
Her new book is no ordinary one. It’s, a mysterious artefact that can turn any door into every door, teleporting the owner to desired destinations. Alas, tomes of untold power tend to attract unwanted attention, and Cassie and Izzy are soon hunted by forces determined to take the book for themselves. With the discovery of other magical volumes no one wants falling into the wrong hands, they team up with Drummond Fox, tormented custodian of a secret library, to survive. With its tense, intricately constructed plot and charming world-building, Gareth Brown’s bookish thriller with fantasy elements should prove a beguiling page-turner for bibliophiles.This collection of speculative short fiction won the David Unaipon prize, awarded to an unpublished manuscript from an emerging Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander writer., for instance, offers a vision of Goori people from the Tweed area confiscating all the clocks in the area. Even time perception has a colonial legacy, and the Goori want to re-establish a conception of time as cyclical rather than linear, a source of cosmic belonging rather than a tool for exploitation. Saunders’ collection probes the future of Indigenous cultural knowledge and sovereignty; it speaks to the lived experience of cultural survival and reinvention in the face of destruction and dispossession. It’s also vivid and inventive fiction, full of thought-provoking contests of ideas and values, that expands possibilities for First Nations literature.is perhaps the most famous nude in Melbourne. Hanging upstairs at Young and Jackson pub opposite Flinders St Station, Jules Lefebvre’s painting has witnessed generations of Australians at work, at play, at war. Now, academic and author Katrina Kell has tracked down the woman she thinks may have been the model behind the iconic image. Her patient research and educated speculation serve her novel well. In this fictional retelling, Marie Peregrine lives a defiant life on the margins. Drawn to the studios of Montmartre in the 1870s, not to mention the tumult of the Paris Commune, she is a woman striving to make her mark, to resist convention and to live free from judgment. Kell has taken a subject many Melburnians will have wondered about – the enigmatic allure of the painting remains undimmed by time – and fleshed out from scant detail the remarkable woman it may depict.A fatal family curse haunts this standalone dark fantasy. Violet Everly knows she will in time be sacrificed to the mysterious Penelope. Each generation of the Everlys must pay a blood price for events long ago. No one quite remembers what happened. The story goes that the curse is fallout from star-crossed love . When Violet was a girl, her mother Marianne left to seek a way to lift the curse, never to return. Despite her protective uncles, it’s clear Violet will follow in Marianne’s footsteps. Anything is better than sitting around waiting for inevitable doom. Georgia Summers’ fantasy world could be more elaborate, though fantasy fans will admire its originality when the lore does fully emerge. As Violet’s quest unfolds, the book rises above standard YA fantasy, and Summers is acute on the cultural collision between humans and otherworldly, angel-like beings.It was scary. It was glary. It was stressful. But as David Goodwin tells it in these tales about working the graveyard shift at a service station, it was also grimly entertaining.This journey into the “servoverse” is full of wild and sometimes poignant characters from the tattooed Goliath who makes his entrance growling, “Who says crime doesn’t fucking pay, HEY BUDDY?” and the drivers of VN Commodores who invariably fill up and take off, to the harassed taxi drivers and exhausted fluoro people running on sugar and stimulants to get through hard yakka shift work. While world weariness and cynicism are hazards of the job, Goodwin finds himself practising “servo karma”, gifting “sincere pinch of passing kindness” when the moment demands. It’s this mix of fellow-feeling, social commentary and black humour that makesThe rise and fall of Brian Houston, creator of the megachurch Hillsong, is a morality tale for our age in which unbridled neoliberalism finds its ultimate justification in the word of God. Houston recognised early in his career, says David Hardaker, that “there was a market for soul-saving in the arid suburbs of Australia” and turned it into a glitzy global business. An evangelist for wealth who had the ear of Scott Morrison while he was prime minister, his early manifesto was titled,. But no amount of money was enough to save Houston from the entanglement in his preacher father’s dark secrets, even though he was exonerated of alleged concealment. Revelations about his father’s paedophilia and his own use of alcohol and pills saw him lose his leadership.also sheds light on the influence of Pentecostalism on Morrison’s decision-making as PM and his disregard for secular accountability.You may have to be a New Zealander to truly get how the feijoa could become a personal obsession and a nationally treasured fruit. But Kiwi Kate Evans does a fine job of conveying her passion for this produce and tracing its botanical history, as well as exploring why the feijoa was a hit in some places and not others. The fruit hails from Brazil and was introduced to New Zealand by the country’s “greatest plantsman”, Hayward Wright, who also developed the kiwifruit cultivar that launched the modern kiwifruit industry. Despite the name, however, kiwifruit does not hold the same place in the hearts of New Zealanders as the bounteous backyard feijoa tree. Evans travels the world in pursuit of the feijoa’s story and the nostalgia it inspires, comparing it to Proust’s madeleine as a “portal into lost time; an evocative enkindling of childhood, wellbeing and home”.The “nuclear family” is no longer the blueprint for the average domestic unit, but it remains a powerful trope, especially when politicians hoist the flag for “family values”.Marina Kamenev looks at the many permutations and combinations that now comprise the modern family: the childless and childfree, the single mothers by choice, the rainbow families, the platonic parents and the families built on surrogacy and foreign adoption, as well as the history behind these new incarnations. She is particularly interested in the technological developments that have “allowed us to sculpt our families”: sperm banks, IVF, online mating, gene editing. What will it mean for children conceived through these methods? It’s a massive and constantly morphing subject. What needs to be grappled with, says Kamenev, is whether “the family you have is more important than the one you think you want”.
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