Cults, political thrills, ADHD and the Murdochs: 10 new books
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his week’s reviews cross countries, genres and literary styles, from the Philippines to Scotland in fiction and from Iran to the Central Kimberley in our non-fiction reviews.
FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Ruins, Child
Giada Scodellaro
Giramondo, $29.95
Winners of the Novel Prize have serious competition, given the breadth of the field. The biennial award is administered by independent publisher Giramondo and is open to published and unpublished novels internationally. All comers, pretty much. Giada Scodellaro’s Ruins, Child is a deserving victor, and the kind of literary fiction that pushes narrative form and technique in a way that makes comparisons – such as to Virginia Woolf’s The Waves – seem like bare approximations. Six women in a dilapidated apartment block lead lives most would call marginalised. Scodellaro caresses them into vividness by refocusing the camera and transforming it into a kaleidoscope. The novel begins with a smeary amateur clip of a woman tying her shoelaces and unfolds in fragmentary form. Each piece of the mosaic is laced with acerbic observation, flashes of insight and voyeuristically overheard speech. The author is particularly good at dramatising the gulf between people as they are and how they’re seen to be and subtly revealing the reader’s complicity in that process. It’s fiction of startling originality, precise intelligence and style.
Yñiga
Glenn Diaz
Pink Shorts Press, $32.99
Glenn Diaz has won the Philippines National Book Award twice, the second time for Yñiga, a novel set in the bustling metropolis of 21st-century Manila. The city is racked by political and social upheaval, though the protagonist Yñiga Calinauan, a former academic, just wants a quiet life. Coffee and cigarettes, horoscopes and a rescue cat, and she’s happy. Well, sort of … life in Manila is too precarious and in-your-face for happiness. Besides, Yñiga knows that ghost-writing academic papers for foreign students is a waste of her intellect. No one wants a desperate side hustle to become their main gig. Whatever fragile sense of tranquillity she had is soon obliterated when a biographer starts to dig into the life of her activist father, a former general is arrested nearby, and her neighbourhood is destroyed by fire. Quitting Manila for the fishing town she grew up in, Yñiga finds herself unable to escape the past, or its violent resurgence in the present. Diaz detonates the explosive history of the Philippines in a maximalist political thriller peppered with the shrapnel of satire.
In Bloom
Liz Allan
Sceptre, $34.99
The fierce and finely wrought In Bloom follows wannabe teenage rockers in the 1990s. Four schoolgirls form a punk band called The Bastards. They’re all from struggling families, and they’re dead keen to escape their dead-end town. Their ticket out? Winning The Battle of the Bands. As they point out, Joan Jett lived in LA as a kid. They live in Vincent: “the capital of teen pregnancies and absent fathers, and The Battle is our only way out of this shithole”. Their plan looks set to crash and burn when lead singer Lily quits, accusing their charismatic music teacher of sexual assault weeks out from the contest. How will they keep the dream alive in a world that seems bent on destroying them? Liz Allan employs an unusual device – a choric voice in the first-person plural. You might remember it from that prurient elegy for suburban youth, Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides. Here, its use is existential, too, but driven by female rage rather than the male gaze – not a collective imagining of adolescence dreamt up from middle-age, but one doomed, and doomed to be relived, even as it’s happening.
Two Islands
Ian Kemish
UQP, $34.99
After a high-flying career as a diplomat, Ian Kemish turns to fiction with Two Islands. A young man, Niko, arrives at a remote Scottish island, a refugee from the Balkan War. He’s seen the unspeakable, and part of the novel depicts his reception by a largely xenophobic community with little to say to outsiders. Niko’s dealings with his neighbour, a local recluse known as Slow Fergus, seem uncertain and untrusting, but the real threat comes from his homeland. There are those who want him silenced, permanently, so terrible truths won’t come to light. Meanwhile, Australian war crimes investigator Anita Costello must find, and act decisively to protect, a key witness to grave crimes against humanity. Two Islands draws on the author’s deep knowledge of international politics and law. It isn’t quite a thriller, choosing instead to dwell on the torment and divided loyalties of the reluctant witness at the heart of the book, and the strange bond he forms in an unwelcoming place, far from his native land.
Haze
Sam Elliott
Macmillan, $34.99
Author and podcaster Sam Elliott ignites a new crime series with a fiery premise. Constable Dahlia Turner returns to her coastal hometown – riddled with ice addiction, home to a strange cult – to help evacuate ahead of encroaching bushfires. As smoke casts a pall over the emptying streets, Dahlia discovers her best friend has been murdered, along with her husband, and their son Jude is nowhere to be found. The cult – calling itself People’s Cleansing Light – is not unknown to Dahlia, a cult survivor with a storied life after escaping its clutches. Are they responsible for the murders? Have they kidnapped Jude? Could they be behind the fires threatening the town? When a prominent businessperson accuses the cult of arson, there’s cause to believe the worst, and with her partner Florence, Dahlia must investigate in a thriller that flickers with sinister secrets. Even if the prose doesn’t set you on fire, this is a solidly plotted thriller – atmospheric and ready to deliver an incendiary twist.
NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Laila’s Story
Mij Tanith
Spinifex Press, $29.95
“Do not abandon me,” Laila pleaded of Mij Tanith. “Can I call you mum?” At the heart of this moving story is the ever-deepening relationship between Tanith, an Australian refugee advocate, and Laila, an Afghan living in Iran who is desperate to escape with her five daughters. As Tanith, her partner Sue and their team of friends and supporters work frantically to navigate the bureaucratic maze and raise money to sponsor Laila and her girls, they know that if the application fails, the family could be deported to Afghanistan and persecuted. Tanith writes candidly in honed prose and poetry of the fears and frustrations both women experience as the tension builds. And when the family arrives in Adelaide, there are even laugh-out-loud moments. “At the end of the first day [at school]/ the child who in the morning/ had no English/ wipes her brow/ flicks her hair and proclaims/ ‘My God, it’s so hot today’.”
The House of Blue Glass
Alan Atkinson
NewSouth, $39.99
More encompassing than a glass ceiling, a house of blue glass confines movement in every direction. One can see the sky but not experience the full freedom of it. This was the lot of women in the era of Penelope Lucas. While remembered as the governess to the children of John and Elizabeth Macarthur, Lucas was much more than this. The first well-educated woman to travel independently to the colony of Australia, she became a close friend of Elizabeth and her bookkeeping skills underpinned the Macarthurs’ business ventures. It’s not possible to do justice to the nuanced, polyphonic qualities of this biography in a short review. While little material evidence remains of Lucas’ life, Alan Atkinson conjures out of this silence a tantalising portrait of her life in London and later with the Macarthurs at Elizabeth Farm in Parramatta, extrapolating from the ideas in the air at the time – on philosophy, the power of reading and imagination, women’s potential – to create a fascinating evocation of the forces that shaped her inner world.
Wurnan
Willinggin Aboriginal Corporation
Magabala Books, $45
Looming out of the white pigment background on sandstone caves in the Central Kimberley are the haunting faces of Wandjina, the creator and sacred life force of the Ngarinyin people. He is the bringer of “everything fresh from the ground. Good yam coming up. Animals getting fat,” says Matthew Martin, one of the Ngarinyin Elders who have come together to safeguard their heritage and halt the erosion of their ancestral knowledge. This sharing is known as “Wurnan”, the traditional philosophy that is now driving cultural camps, bush trips and intergenerational learning programs. The glorious photographs in this book complement the words of the Elders as they speak of their bush crafts – making spears, clapping sticks, didgeridoos, coolamons – and the natural materials they use such as spinifex wax for adhesives, cypress pine for canoe paddles and corkwood for a baby’s cradles. All these objects and practices are infused with countless years of intimacy with Country, and their knowledge is a gift to us all.
Attention Seeker
Darcy Michael
DK, $34.99
Canadian comedian Darcy Michael’s career was in a downward spiral when he was asked by someone how long he’d had ADHD. Floored, he rang his parents. “We just thought you were an asshole – a busy asshole,” said his dad. It’s not hard to see where Michael got his brand of humour from, though he likes to up the ante with a queer spin. “Dad, I love you, but I am not and never will be ready to talk to you about how busy my asshole is.” In this upfront memoir-cum-survival guide, he riffs on the ways neurodiversity has shaped his life from coming out and falling in love to making it in show business and making peace with his body. In the process, he offers advice to those with the disorder as well as educating neurotypicals about ADHD. The “iceberg theory”, for instance, means “only 10 per cent of the mess is showing – the other 90 per cent is a panic party under the surface”. He wrote this book, he says, because he wanted to show the part of the iceberg most people don’t see.
Bonfire of the Murdochs
Gabriel Sherman
Simon & Schuster, $36.99
It’s not uncommon for Rupert Murdoch to be described as a Shakespearean character. But that’s to grant him a depth and dignity that he appears to lack. Gabriel Sherman says that while his late career arc has been compared to King Lear’s, the tale of King Midas is more accurate. His ability to turn everything he touches into gold, however, has proved to be a curse that tore apart his family and “stoked hatred and division on an industrial scale”. Sherman approaches Murdoch’s story through the frame of the latest and biggest family rift – the 2024 court case sparked by his attempt to make Lachlan his heir and successor to the media empire. Prudence, Elisabeth and James won the case against him only to settle a year later for one billion dollars each. What becomes brutally clear is that Murdoch’s idea of love is purely transactional – whether it be for his children, his loyal foot soldiers or his wives. What really matters to him is his legacy. “Cold” is Sherman’s recurring descriptor for his subject. “Morally bankrupt” could easily fit the bill.
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