18 books we’re excited to read in November

And so we come to the big final month of the bumper Christmas publication season. November really is a cracker, with big-name authors producing essay collections, some terrific local fiction, short stories on the theme of mortality from Salman Rushdie, some fascinating histories and so much more.

The Underworld, Sofie Laguna, Penguin, $34.99

The Miles Franklin Award-winning novelist is back with a coming-of-age story about 14-year-old Martha Mullins, unhappy with her nouveau riche family but relishing her tight circle of friends at boarding school. Martha is entranced by Latin, the classical world and its myths, and the underworld of Pluto, Proserpina et al becomes a private realm for her in which she explores her emotions and sexuality, her need for escape, and the imaginative power of her unconscious.

Gough Whitlam, Troy Bramston, HarperCollins, $55

Troy Bramston has already written one account of Gough Whitlam but now, as the 50th anniversary of the Dismissal comes around, he has assembled a huge new one based on unseen material from the archives and a host of new interviews. According to Bramston, Whitlam had a defining flaw that informed his approach to political leadership while in government and contributed spectacularly to his downfall.

Chosen Family, Madeleine Gray, Summit, $34.99

Fresh from the success of her debut novel Green Dot, Madeleine Gray brings us the story of Nell Argall and Eve Bowman, who meet in 2006 in their first year of high school. Like the characters in Sofie Laguna’s The Underworld, we follow their intense friendship through the school years but then into the tangles and betrayals of adult life and the complications of motherhood. Gray says her “lesbian love story” deals with the complexity of queer relationships.

The Courageous Life of Weary Dunlop, Peter FitzSimons, Hachette, $49.99

It seems only appropriate that one former Wallaby should write the life of another. But Weary Dunlop was so much more, as anyone with only the vaguest notion of Australian history would appreciate. He is the perfect subject for the somewhat rip-roaring narrative style FitzSimons brings to biography writing, but the Herald columnist does Dunlop justice, devoting the bulk of the book to his astonishing bravery, medical skill and selfless leadership while a prisoner of the Japanese.

Wild for Austen, Devoney Looser, Ultimo Press, $36.99

December brings the 250th anniversary of her birth, so there has to be a Jane Austen-adjacent book, doesn’t there? This one by an American academic and expert focuses on “tussles over whether Austen was mild or wild” that have apparently been fought since her death in 1817. Looser assesses all Austen’s novels, her life and how her reputation and image have changed. For Austen, she says the word “wild” might characterise someone who wouldn’t submit to control.

The Transformations, Andrew Pippos, Picador, $34.99

I’m a sucker for newspaper yarns − think Michael Frayn’s Towards the End of the Morning or Andrew Martin’s Bilton − so Andrew Pippos’ novel set in the newsroom of The National is a must. George Desoulis is a subeditor, self-contained and sensitive; life is smooth if not exciting. But things are about to change: a daughter reappears in his life, and after a production error he fears the sack, only to be reassured by reporter Cassandra Gwan, with whom he has a tumultuous relationship, that “everyone likes you”. He is discombobulated.

Crimson Velvet Heart, Carmel Bird, Transit Lounge, $34.99

In 17th-century France 11-year-old Princess Marie-Adelaide of Savoy arrives at the college of Saint-Cyr to be educated in all things French so she can marry Louis XIV’s grandson. There she befriends Clothilde, who later becomes Sister Clare, a nun. After Marie-Adelaide’s death from measles at the age of 27, Sister Clare finds herself charged with telling the true story of the life of a woman who “was a superb actress and her acting became in time her truth”. But Sister Clare also has secrets to relate.

Looking from the North, Henry Reynolds, NewSouth, $34.99

When Henry Reynolds started teaching in Townsville in 1965 he realised “there never had been a white Australia that far north”. As he points out, in the 19th century it was the local Indigenous people, Pacific Islanders and Asian migrants who “contributed most fully to what development there was North of Capricorn”. What he gives us in his latest book is a new perspective on Australian history.

Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts, Margaret Atwood, Chatto & Windus, $69.99

The great Canadian author says that as soon as she started writing she acquired a body double, the one who does the writing as opposed to the daily Atwood: “The one doing the living might have some idea of what the writing self has been up to, but less than you’d think.” In this substantial memoir Atwood ranges across her “daily” life with husband Graeme Gibson, their travels and bird watching, and tells us much more about the writing life of her novels. This is a fascinating read.

The Shortest History of Australia, Mark McKenna, Black Inc, $39.99

Mark McKenna is the perfect writer to capture Australia in 300 short pages. He’s won umpteen awards for his histories and says that “more than any other issue … it is history itself and how the nation’s story is told that has divided Australians since 1788”. This is a sensitive and scrupulous account that says the cliches about Australian history are failures of imagination − “much of the continent’s 65,000 years of human habitation is yet to be understood”.

Not Quite White in the Head, Melissa Lucashenko, UQP, $39.99

The Miles Franklin Award-winning novelist has always had strong views about plenty of subjects and at last we get a collection of her “personal essays”, on topics ranging from the prison system to abortion, reading writers she admires and writers she finds less impressive, and a lovely encounter with Maori novelist Keri Hulme. As Lucashenko points out, “modern Australian literature is struggling, as the nation is struggling, to come to terms with its place in an Aboriginal land”.

Murder in the Cathedral, Kerry Greenwood, Allen & Unwin, $34.99

There’s a sadness to this 23rd novel about Phryne Fisher as the death of the irrepressible Kerry Greenwood in March means this is her final outing. Phryne’s heading north for the consecration of her friend Lionel Watkins as Bishop of Bendigo. She’s a bit puzzled by his rapid rise in the church and why he wants her there. But as one character tells her, trouble follows her around “like cats tracking a fishmonger’s dray”. And as Phryne knows, country towns incubate secrets.

Dead and Alive: Essays, Zadie Smith, Hamish Hamilton, $36.99
Attention, Anne Enright, Jonathan Cape, $36.99

From either side of the Irish Sea come essay collections by two great writers, Zadie Smith and Anne Enright. Smith touches on a wide range of topics, such as artist Celia Paul, novelist Martin Amis and her delight in Willesden, her area of London. Enright’s collection is more focused on writing and art, including a wonderful review of Helen Garner’s diaries, and a travel diary with her husband: “The man I married lives in a benign universe. I do not.”

The Eleventh Hour, Salman Rushdie, Jonathan Cape, $34.99

It’s perhaps unsurprising that Salman Rushdie’s latest collection of short stories is focused on mortality − he had a close brush with death when attacked three years ago by a would-be assassin. He wrote a striking memoir, Knife, about the assault, about which he said recently, “I’m over it.” These stories vary in length and location but are imbued with the awareness, as one character puts it, that “death and life were just adjacent verandas”. It’s good to have fiction from Rushdie again.

The Mushroom Tapes, Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein, Text, $36.99, November 11

What’s better than having one great author writing on the trial of Erin Patterson? Having three. Garner, Hooper and Krasnostein decided to pool their intellectual and creative resources for an unlikely and unique account of the legal proceedings in Morwell across a large chunk of the past winter. They recorded their conversations about the case, and what emerges is insightful commentary on murder, true crime, women, small-town life, victims, ageing, religion and more.

The Shortest History of the United States of America, Don Watson, Black Inc, $39.99, November 18

Perhaps an advance copy of this got into the PM’s hand luggage for his recent trip to Washington. Don Watson, who has written extensively on the US, provides an insightful and clear account of the country, its founding ideas and the people who have tested “the truth of those ideas”. Next year, Watson notes, the US will celebrate its 250th anniversary under a “big-city conman” president who has recently acquired newly reinforced “kingly powers of the office”.

The Slicks: On Sylvia Plath and Taylor Swift, Maggie Nelson, Fern Press, $19.99, November 18

Maggie Nelson’s 80-page essay links the cultural force of these two significant feminist figures. Its title refers to Plath’s desire to be in the pages of glossy magazines and examines the ambitions of the two women in the shadow of the patriarchy. But as Nelson has said, “I go through [Plath’s] vast ambitions and other things and go on to Swift, who also started very young, wanting people to mouth her and yet … Plath didn’t survive to see her fame, but Swift is living it.”

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