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This month's featured books include Emily St John Mandel's Exit Party, which imagines two parallel dystopian Americas, RF Kuang's Taipei Story exploring cultural identity, Caitlin Moran's joyful memoir, and a gripping new novel on coercive control.
Bestselling Canadian author Emily St John Mandel has conceived not one but two alarmingly plausible dystopian near futures in her latest novel, Exit Party. In Taipei Story, a Chinese American woman travels to Taiwan to complete an intensive language course in a quiet story exploring cultural identity and the diasporic experience by Yellowface author RF Kuang.
Also on the list this month are a Booker longlisted novel from an exciting young American novelist, British wit Caitlin Moran's account of her year of living joyfully and a meticulously researched and gripping examination of coercive control across international borders by a local author , and Ari is living on the edge of criminality in a deconstructed America riven by civil war. We follow her as she negotiates a dangerous world of arms dealers, food insecurity and false passports, where cities shelter under domes from the weather and protesters rail against the domes. But there's something else going on: those doppelgangers slip in and out of the plot.
Then the book turns inside out, through a portal, and we meet another Ari, one who has a different relationship to the state and legality, surveillance and secrets. Mandel is a writer who knows how to re-imagine the world in highly inventive ways, with subtle politics and immersive plots.
She did it with her 2014 post-apocalyptic pandemic novel, Station Eleven, and she's done it here — in a story about art, love and family set in two conceivably dystopian future worlds. This wry and quietly affecting suspense thriller is set in the aftermath of World War II as Britain struggles to find the pluck and spirit that had inspired its victory against the most extreme odds.
It's hardly surprising morale is low: food is still rationed and the painful remnants of bombed buildings scar the landscape. So, in 1951, the government conjures a mood booster, a tonic to unite the people once more. The Festival of Britain will be a celebration of all that was and is still great in the country, shining a light on achievements in industry, agriculture and the arts.
This setting proves fertile ground for British novelist Kate Atkinson, author of Life After Life and Transcription , the latter sharing a similar backdrop of war and espionage. In her author's note, Atkinson says she often feels guilty making things up for her own creative ends in her historical novels but in the case of the Festival of Britain she "came across so much material that was strange and quirky that sometimes the things I was making up seemed quite dull in comparison".
She's wrong — there is nothing dull here. Atkinson's special sauce is finding unique moments in time to bring out the nuances of her characters, and this cast is colourful, comic and expertly drawn. Protagonist Harry Flynn's experiences as a war reporter who was captured by the Japanese in Singapore and put to work on the Burma Railway have left him with PTSD that he struggles to bury.
Back on home soil, he reconnects with a colleague who hires him to work on the festival compiling an anthology of poetry submitted by the public — mostly bad. In the eccentric festival office, back stories unfurl before Atkinson flips the narrative into a murder mystery complete with spies, fascism, collaborators and a twisty plot that at times confounds. Underpinned with a touching pathos, Our Nobles Selves is another triumph.
"You should always leave a party right when you think to yourself, I'm having such a good time at this party — because the night can only go downhill. " This advice, recalled by 70-something David Hastings, the protagonist of Emma Cline's novel Switzy, becomes an analogy for the end of his life. Accompanied by his assistant, Cody, he spends his last days travelling to Switzy, aka Switzerland, to an assisted dying clinic.
"Five thousand dollars to kill someone — nothingness," as David puts it. He has Alzheimer's and his recall and memory are tangled and eroding around him. The pacing in Switzy beautifully follows David's thoughts and emotions. Part observer, part muddled narrator, we drift through half-memories — frustration, confusion, past folding into present and back again — just as he weaves through hotels, planes, cars and a borrowed private jet, completing his last tasks before his final destination.
Once a high-achieving senior executive — he "made certain numbers swell up and other numbers recede" — he was unceremoniously fired when he made a serious financial error caused by his condition. David questions what his life has amounted to: career success and wealth, yet in his own words he has been "a support person, a man whose name would never be known".
His stops include a final meeting with his estranged daughter, Rebecca, in London and a visit to Tom, a long-lost childhood friend who weighs on his conscience as fragments of their friendship resurface. There are many touching moments throughout — in his final meeting with Rebecca, unbeknown to her, he strains to recall his grandson's name and offers reassuring, familiar words , all while thinking that neither of them could ever say how they really felt: "he wasn't that person, and neither was Rebecca".
Switzy marks a swing away from Cline's previous two novels, The Girls and The Guest, which largely inhabit the minds of young women. Here, we're with a stoic, wealthy older man grappling with death. The novel earned acclaim even before publication, longlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize. Cline renders memory and mortality with both levity and profundity — the kind of writing that will make the reader, even for a moment, contemplate their own end and, in essence, their life.
Limprecht's short fiction and essays have been published in Meanjin, Griffith Review, Kill Your Darlings and The Big Issue. When Jacquie Cassel arrives at Dallas airport with her two children, Maisie and Isaac, police officers whisk her into an office for questioning. Even though she tells the authorities that she is complying with return orders, they inform her that her husband can press criminal charges for child abduction.
From there, the convincingly detailed, tautly structured narrative of Eleanor Limprecht's fifth novel, Cul-de-Sac, loops back to Jacquie's meet cute with a holidaying American, Brandon, and their mostly happy, unremarkable early days. Years later, they've had two children and have relocated to an affluent but unfriendly enclave in Northern Virginia for his work. Jacquie feels isolated and adrift. She teaches at a neighbourhood centre, not because they need the money, but "in order to remember who she is.
Who she was before.
" Charming when he wants to be, Brandon is a skilful manipulator who subtly undermines Jacquie at every opportunity. Constant anger lurks beneath his calm exterior, and she worries about both the gun he keeps in the closet and his obsessive need to control everything she and the children do. While Cul-de-Sac offers an unsettling snapshot of coercive control, it also paints a vivid picture of how Jacquie's life could look away from Brandon's malignant influence.
When she takes the kids to her mother's farm on the South Coast of New South Wales for a Christmas holiday without him, she realises how much her personality has come to revolve around appeasing his paranoid whims. She reconnects with her brother Max, settles back into the different rhythms of her homeland and unexpectedly develops feelings for Andi, a local woman who works on local alpaca farms.
Informed by Limprecht's research observing Hague Child Convention Abduction cases, Cul-de-Sac offers an incisive look at an international legal system ill-equipped to assist a parent escaping an abusive spouse. Building tension as it glides along on frictionless prose, it's a gripping read. Many years in the making, Hell Days feels like a reckoning.
Laura Elizabeth Woollett, best known for fiction that draws upon true crime and the darker side of history, offers an intimate personal investigation into the source of her interest in the macabre and unusual: her own experience of a still little-understood condition, PMDD, or premenstrual dysphoric disorder. As Woollett explains, PMDD can involve symptoms including depression, anxiety and suicidal ideation.
What emerges in Woollett's compellingly researched book is a kind of genealogy of mood disorders and how they are viewed and treated. Woollett traces PMDD's history and the long battle — in courts, in the media and by those experiencing it — for it to be named, building upon a growing recognition of other phenomena ranging from schizophrenia to postpartum psychosis both in the present-day and, like PMS, historically.
Hell Days is also a fascinating meditation on the true crime genre and other forms of cultural fascination with morbidity and violence. Woollett explores whether and under what conditions an interest in things like true crime might constitute a serious or legitimate interest, as well as the risks of it becoming a kind of entertainment akin to gawking at car crashes, romanticising or substituting the horror for something more approachable and glorified.
Brave and compassionate, Hell Days combines Woollett's personal experience with the lives and histories of others. In providing both the language and context needed to discuss mood and hormonal disorders and their often-nebulous effects, Woollett lessens the isolation of those living with these conditions. In drab postwar England, Philip Deval — the narrator of Sebastian Faulks's latest novel, Farewell to Eden — is a former infantry officer floating from job to job.
His latest is teaching French at a girls' school, a role for which he feels no calling, and he gets through each lonely day with the help of George Orwell, André Gide and shots of whisky. Deval is a man afflicted by a deep unspoken sadness, as he and his fellow teachers — indeed, the world at large — reckon with the trauma and loss of innocence generated by large-scale industrial warfare.
He forms a connection with the school's music teacher, Frances Darwood, which provides them both with the emotional ballast required to keep on in the wake of extreme emotional hardship. The narrative shifts to the Holy Land in 1946, where Deval is deployed as a peacekeeper under the doomed British administration. The seeds of the current pernicious conflict are evident as Britain prepares to withdraw from the region, leaving behind an irreconcilable mess.
Deval is involved in the grisly clean-up following the King David Hotel bombing by Jewish terrorist group Irgun and later becomes drawn into political intrigue that follows him back to Britain — and propels the plot — after he returns to civilian life in London the following year. The novel also takes us back to before the war, when Deval falls in love with Alice, a fellow philosophy student.
The poignant story of their youthful relationship explains Deval's despondency just as much as his experiences in Normandy and Palestine. As the title suggests, questions of faith permeate Farewell to Eden, a novel that takes us into the darkest chapters of 20th century history, when human life was devalued to the point of worthlessness. As characters wrestle with moral quandaries with no easy answers, Faulks also allows room for renewal and hope.
British author and social commentator Caitlin Moran's wit is rapier sharp in this self-help manual tackling the ghastliness of the 21st century. As a self-confessed anxious menopausal privileged leftie, Moran begins the book teetering on a precipice of doom, overwhelmed by a world she sees rapidly collapsing. Bad news overload leaves her "hyperventilating on the bathroom floor at 3am".
She eulogises about the days when she consumed world news in a neat nightly TV package before The Two Ronnies, rather than the 24/7 horror clickbait she faces today. More than a decade ago, she would have turned to social media for her dopamine hit. Moran once wrote feverishly about Twitter being her "happy place", like chatting to mates down the pub or in a café.
Those friends have either deserted Musk's X or morphed into producers of bile with a "subhuman tone". The vibe now is "casual and brutal hate" or "visceral outrage", she writes.
"Society is under attack. " Aching for humanity, her escape plan is to follow the lead of the tech bros. She will buy her own apocalypse bunker, which for her is a remote cottage in Wales where she will live like a Hobbit fetching water from the stream, making pottery in an outhouse. Her family is less enamoured and the whole scheme falls in a heap when costs spiral.
Instead, Moran rediscovers hope through making small impactful changes in her own neighbourhood, and this is when the book takes off. The solutions of digital and headphones detoxes, collecting litter as an act of service, rewilding her garden to welcome back the bugs and swallows, and cold-water swimming may have a ring of annoying modern hippie about them, but in Moran's hands they become not just relatable but downright attractive.
The final coup de foudre of her year of living joyfully is buying a pooch, not a rescue hound, a fluffy bourgeois ball of unconditional love — a cockapoo! As a child, Neha Kale migrated from India to the shores of Boorloo/Perth. Combining memoir, essay and criticism, her debut grapples with what it means to write about art.
Often moving from one place to another, Kale understood intuitively what it meant to feel and to experience juxtaposition: to see and to be seen, to develop a point of view. She learns to make sense of herself and her new home on the west coast of Australia through the grotesque beauty of John Brack paintings.
She reflects upon her younger self and the culture industry she engages with in her teens and 20s — David Guetta, brunches, resorts, Monocle magazine — alongside the fact her home in India is both an ordinary village and synonymous with The Beatles and hippie pilgrimages. Kale puts herself into her writing on art and artists, using them to express her own sense of cultural and intellectual change over time.
A reflection on Melbourne photographer Carol Jerrems marvellously unfolds as a meditation on self-depiction and the way candid camerawork can be both meticulously staged and open to serendipitous moments of documentation, most famously captured in Vale Street, Jerrems's well-known 1975 photograph of three youths in a St Kilda backyard. Memories of seeing the work of Danie Mellor, with its complex overlays and multiple intersecting dimensions, show how life and creation are woven out of the materiality of place, culture, and environment.
Some of Kale's class politics arguments can feel strained. I raised an eyebrow at lines about how turning abandoned buildings into breweries or wine bars — rather than, say, spaces that offer alternatives to consumerism — might represent an "at best" scenario for the use of public space. But Kale, crucially, also frames her occasionally overfamiliar talking points as part of a journey.
The book depicts a gradual scepticism toward, if not a move away from, aspirational middle-class dreams — desires prompted partly by insecurity for escape toward the promises of urban cosmopolitanism — toward a more rounded, thoughtful trajectory. There's a scene in Irish writer Louise Kennedy's new novel, Stations, that, ostensibly at least, isn't central to the plot.
It's September 22, 1985, and the novel's protagonist, Roísín, meets an unnamed man at a London bus station who says he's on the way home to Ireland. He's been away since 1954, going home just once, for his mother's funeral in 1978. Now, it's his brother who's gone.
The man is drinking a black and tan because he "couldn't stomach what they did to the Guinness here" and Roísín, also on the way home, thinks she knows the type of man he is, how he thinks, what brand of melancholy drink he might imbibe. She recognises him. But he never gets on the bus, and Roísín watches as he turns his ticket to confetti that he scatters around him like regret.
We meet Roísín as a teenager. Originally from Belfast but now living in a southern town, she becomes friends with charismatic charmer Red, whose own undercurrents threaten to swamp him, if not for the friendship, desire, cigarettes, alcohol and some extremely grotty squats that keep him afloat.
Meanwhile, Roísín is raging: she's smart, sarcastic, furious at her father and exasperated by her mother's vulnerability. She's full of longing and regret at times, and she and Red take defensive cracks at the other, until they both leave Ireland for London. Tracking across decades, this is partly a novel of exile and return: all those Irish people who left and have to grapple with the lure of home, the question of who they are and how they're judged.
There is plenty of loss and longing, as well as love and sweetness, in there too. RF Kuang's seventh novel is her most personal yet. Regular readers of her work will not find the usual twisting plots or fantastical set-ups, but instead a much quieter, introspective story of diaspora. Taipei Story follows a young Chinese-American woman, Lily Chen, who goes to an intensive Chinese language course in Taipei to reconnect with the mother tongue she has lost over time.
Lily's story, although fictional, mirrors Kuang's own travels in 2023 with the same aim of linguistic reunion with her grandparents. Through Lily's story, Kuang fictionalises and interrogates her own feelings of identity and longing, familiar themes for any immigrants or their children who feel alienated in their ancestral culture. Lily is determined to return home from Taipei fluent and feeling wholly and authentically Chinese. For Lily, every mistake or misspeak is proof she is an outsider.
Wishing she had learnt Chinese as a child, she ruminates "I could have avoided the shameful diaspora adolescence — the nervous giggle, the "sorry my Chinese is very not good", the disappointed elders, the menus I couldn't read, the tattoos I couldn't translate". Kuang deftly shows the awkwardness and isolation of young adulthood. Among her fellow students, Lily feels lost, struggling with being a tourist in a city she feels she's supposed to connect to.
But even in going to Taiwan — a country she only visits because of the difficulty in travelling to China as an American citizen — Lily is an impostor. Taiwan itself has a complicated and contested history of overlapping cultural identity but Lily only sees it as a stand-in for China in her own personal journey — further proof of her disconnect.
Kuang has written before about race and cultural authenticity but in Taipei Story she takes a softer approach, depicting with deep honesty and frankness the conflict at the heart of the diasporic experience.
Please follow us on Google to support usEmily St John Mandel Exit Party RF Kuang Caitlin Moran Book Review
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