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Sylvester Stallone's memoir arrives this month alongside new books from Hernan Diaz, Min Jin Lee, Michael Robotham, Magda Szubanski, Pip Williams and others.
Sylvester Stallone has a memoir out this month, and it returns to where it all began. Fifty years after Rocky Balboa charged up those Philadelphia museum steps, the actor and writer looks back on his early years.
The memoir focuses largely on his arrival in New York in 1969 through to Rocky winning best picture at the 1977 Oscars. In between came very little money and a lot of rejection. This is Stallone before Stallone, and yes, those famous steps get their moment too. The book lover's favourite season continues into October.
Christmas is looming, which means publishers are bringing out the big guns: door-stoppers, page-turners and enough literary catnip to see us through to summer. There are heavy hitters making much-anticipated returns and a few unexpected turns from local favourites. Let us take our reading inspiration from Rocky Balboa, whose creator has a memoir out this month, and remember his words: Nobody owes nobody nothing. You owe yourself.
To the bookshop, then. Hernan Diaz has decided to jump a few centuries into the future. So, a slight change of scenery. An orphan grows up in a city where the state has disappeared, and becomes a pincher, someone who steals electricity from the grid to power underground concerts.
New Novels To Read This Christmas Season
She then gets caught in a scientific experiment that could change reality itself. Diaz is thinking about technology and capitalism in this, his third novel, with a rather wild adventure to carry us through. Simon and Schuster, 37 dollars. Most people know Mick Fanning as a three-time world surfing champion.
Or, thanks to one extraordinary day in 2015, the guy who punched a shark, a difficult thing to leave off any CV. His book also deals with the terrible loss of his three brothers and his father. Our reviewer Malcolm Knox was deeply moved. Fanning's story can be an inspiration and a model for every man and for every person, he wrote.
Summit Books, 35 dollars. Chris Hammer leaves behind the characters from his two crime series for this standalone thriller. Travis Somerland arrives at Montechino, the secluded estate of the extremely wealthy Clapton family, and finds himself caught in a dynastic power struggle where money has a rather loose relationship with morality. There are murders too, naturally.
Think Succession. After Scrublands and the Ivan Lucic and Nell Buchanan books, it is a chance for Hammer to go somewhere new, and very affluent. Min Jin Lee is back. And she has not, it must be said, gone small.
At more than 650 pages, American Hagwon follows John and Helen Koh and their children after the Asian financial crisis of 1997 turned their lives upside down. The family leaves Seoul for Sydney, then ends up in California. Lee is once again interested in what happens when a family crosses borders and tries to make somewhere new feel like home. Former lawyer-turned-writer Suzie Miller is heading back to court.
Suzie Miller Returns To Courtroom Drama
Jessica is a newly appointed London judge, very good at dealing with swaggering barristers and taking on old legal prejudices. The robes, unfortunately, do not get her out of the domestic juggle.
Then her 18-year-old son is accused of a crime. The neat line between work and family vanishes in Miller's second novel, which continues many of the interests she explored in her debut. Hachette, 35 dollars. Michael Robotham has written 20 novels, which feels like reason enough for a small celebration.
For number 20, he is finally coming home. The book was inspired by the first manuscript he attempted, written in his 20s while he was living in London and missing Australia. It is his first novel set in his homeland. Arlo Hackett emerges from 12 years in prison and heads home to Yulara hoping to put the past behind him.
This is a Michael Robotham novel, so we can probably guess how well that goes. Seven Dials, 35 dollars. Magda Szubanski's new book is a very personal affair. At its centre is her relationship with her mother and the experience of caring for her as she was dying.
Szubanski also returns to 2017, when she became one of the most recognisable campaigners for marriage equality in Australia. There is a lot here we have not seen from her before, which is saying something for someone who has been famous in Australia for more than 30 years. This is Szubanski away from the punchlines. Affirm Press, 35 dollars.
Pip Williams Writes Secret World War One Love Story
Pip Williams says this novel is a love story she had no intention of writing. Lucky for us, she did. In France during World War I, English suffragette and actress Tilda Taylor is working as a nurse when she begins a secret affair with a German doctor held as a prisoner of war. Obviously, this is not ideal wartime nursing protocol.
Their relationship is captured in drawings by artist Iso Rae, who is based on a real Australian figure, which resurface years later. Williams has gone digging through history again. Giramondo, 32.95 dollars, October 1. The human tongue is useful for talking, eating and building an entire book around.
Australian poet and scholar Kathryn Crowcroft's genre-bending non-fiction debut follows a young researcher into a university archive as she investigates the rather strange cultural history of the organ. Gradually, all that research starts bumping up against her own life, particularly the silences between her and her mother. Mixing personal writing with archival material and images, this is one to get your tongue around. Exploded View, from 2019, is a little one with a fairly devastating premise.
Loosely inspired by the final months of her mother and stepfather's lives, it follows an elderly woman with Alzheimer's who finally gets the dog she has always wanted. As familiar things begin slipping away, the dog stays close. With illustrations by Noel McKenna and Chekhov's famous story hovering in the background, prepare the tissues. After Mao's Last Dancer became a publishing phenomenon, Li Cunxin is finally telling us what happened next.
After leaving China, he became an international ballet star and settled in Australia. One successful career was not enough. Li became a principal artist, corporate speaker and stockbroker before eventually spending more than a decade running the Queensland Ballet. The book also takes him back to the family he left behind.
Li's mother called him her lucky son, and here he considers what that luck meant. A piano prodigy and a torrid affair are at the heart of Barbara Kingsolver's first novel since the Pulitzer Prize-winning Demon Copperhead. After Livia's older brother takes his own life, she throws herself into music.
brisbanetimes 
smh:Sylvester Stallone has a memoir out this month – and yes, those famous steps get their momentThis story was compiled and edited by the HeadTopics newsroom and HT AI from the reports above.
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