Discover a world of captivating reads exploring love, loss, mental health, and the legacies of colonialism through eight new book releases.
From the lost worlds of old Shanghai to the very modern concerns of everyday anxiety, here are eight new books to get you reading this week.The epic, *Flowers from the Sea*, opens in Shanghai, 1947, where Haiwen and Suchi first meet and fall in love. Haiwen is a violin prodigy; Suchi dreams of becoming a chanteuse but is being pressured into running the family bookshop.
When a fortune-teller prophesies that the pair are destined to meet again and again, the teens cannot foresee how China’s civil war will drive them apart. Haiwen’s father is accused of consorting with communists; his son enlists with the Kuomintang and ends up in Taiwanese exile for decades. Meanwhile, Suchi is sent to Hong Kong for safety, her dreams of becoming a singer realised in a nightclub. Karissa Chen’s sweeping epic is deeply immersed in the travails and predicaments of the Chinese diaspora. It evokes the lost worlds of Old Hong Kong and Old Shanghai with immediacy and engrossing vividness and is as fine at painting the massive canvas of geopolitics and world history as it is on the intimate human scale of those subject to its forces.Food and drink are linked to big life questions in Japanese culture and contemporary fiction – think of the time-travelling cafe in Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s bestseller, which sends grieving patrons back to a significant memory with a lost loved one. The oneiric Japanese fantasy novel, *The Bird Collector*, begins with a similar premise. A cosy little ramen restaurant is, for some, a mystical pawn shop in which they can trade their biggest regret for forgetfulness, and the chance to move on. The story soon distinguishes itself. The shop’s new owner, Hana Ishikawa, is burgled, and a mysterious stranger arrives to help her retrieve a stolen treasure. Their quest will take them into a strange and disturbing underworld, and as Hana learns, each regret her customers exchange for amnesia transforms in this place into a bird. Here, people’s life choices are tattooed onto them, the terror enhanced by masked beings who police the fate of the populace without mercy. It’s imaginative and full-blooded fantasy, and a Studio Ghibli film waiting to happen.After her writing program at the Devonport Library in Tasmania’s north was delayed by the COVID pandemic, Esther Campion turned the idea into a novel. In it, the central figure, Vivian Molloy, is dragooned into teaching a writing class, even though her life has fallen apart. She retired early from teaching to spend more time with her husband, Dave, who then abandoned her without explanation after a weekend away. As she struggles to cope, Vivian throws herself into helping her students, each of whom has a traumatic backstory. Oscar must face career failure and childhood bullying. Young single mum Sienna barely managed to survive her violent partner; seemingly indomitable Marilyn, too, has survived an unsafe domestic environment … by escaping into books. Unlikely strangers who become friends through an amateur art program is a familiar trope – Annie Baker’s play, *The Flick*, is one example. Campion’s characters grow on you, but her efforts to be heartwarming may seem too deliberate to achieve genuine uplift. *The Upward Path*, by Jennifer Genova, takes on bipolar disorder. Life is hectic for Maddy Banks, an overworked student at a New York university still adjusting to a pace that outstrips anything she knew growing up among picket fences in Connecticut. When she suffers a devastating burnout, Maddy goes on antidepressants, which seem to cause an exhilarating (and then terrifying) mania. Diagnosed with bipolar disorder, she must navigate the complicated consequences for almost every aspect of her life. She runs a gauntlet on her odyssey – between the Scylla of manic and depressive symptoms, and the Charybdis of losing her identity to psychiatric imperatives, of succumbing to a disempowering sense of “normal” she can never achieve. Genova writes with deeply informed empathy about the complex experience of this mental illness.*The Last Kaiser*, by Philip Ziegler, delves into the tumultuous period of European monarchies after World War I. It poses a thought-provoking question: what would have happened if you told Kaiser Wilhelm that he needs to kill himself for the good of the German nation? It’s a question that preoccupied much of the German High Command in 1918 with the country’s defeat looming. All agreed, it was … tricky. In the end it was simply announced to the nation (without telling him) that Kaiser Bill’s reign was over and neutral Holland awaited. It’s just one of the tales in this study of the fates of European royal houses between the wars, one of its more tantalising ideas being that had the German monarchy been restored (it was still mooted in the 1930s), Nazism could have been avoided – a view held by Churchill and Lloyd George. Highly informed, but written with wit and relish, there are times when this telling of interwar dynastic implosion unfolds like a dark, Feydeau farce – which, in many ways, it was.*Colonial Adventure*, by Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver, explores the enduring power of colonial narratives. It argues that colonial adventure is one of the grand narratives of colonialism, shaping how we understand the relationship between colonizer and colonized. The book examines a range of texts, from classic novels to popular films, to investigate the ways in which colonial adventure has been constructed and consumed
NEW RELEASES LITERATURE ROMANCE FANTASY MENTAL HEALTH HISTORICAL FICTION COLONIALISM
Australia Latest News, Australia Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
These eight new books venture into worlds both deep and delightfulThis collection includes a moving supernatural romance, eye-opening historical accounts, a portrait of a poet and the intrigue of treasure found in the deep.
Read more »
These eight new books venture into worlds both deep and delightfulThis collection includes a moving supernatural romance, eye-opening historical accounts, a portrait of a poet and the intrigue of treasure found in the deep.
Read more »
Japanese fantasy, espionage and colonial adventure: eight new booksOur reviewers cast their eyes over recent fiction and non-fiction releases
Read more »
From bloody deeds to bold ideas, these eight books will quicken the pulseThese new releases will help you while away the holiday weekend.
Read more »
Helen Scheuerer broke through as a writer by self-publishing 14 romantasy books in eight yearsHelen Scheuerer could have traditionally published her debut novel, but she decided to self-publish instead. Months later, she quit her day job and never looked back.
Read more »
Eight New Reads to Devour This Long WeekendFrom chilling thrillers to heartwarming romances and insightful memoirs, these eight new releases offer something for every reader.
Read more »