Eight new books including a romcom and a war story of intrigue

FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Edenhope
Louise Le Nay, Text, $34.99

Strict laws curtail media reporting on child protection cases in the Children’s Court, and the public isn’t as aware as it should be of the stark realities facing families before it. Fiction is one road to empathy, and Louise Le Nay’s Edenhope offers unblinkered clarity. At 63, Marnie has fallen on hard times. She’s blessed compared to her daughter Lenny, who arrives with raging drug addiction intact and a repellent boyfriend in tow. Marnie loves her daughter without reservation, but with two young grandchildren obviously at risk, she must take risks of her own to keep them safe. Le Nay doesn’t shy from realistic depictions of mental ill-health, addiction, or homelessness, nor the challenges facing (and posed by) social workers and lawyers in a radically underfunded system. It isn’t misery porn at all, though, with overheard dialogue, sharply realised characters, and an imaginative grasp as informed as Caroline Overington’s novels about neglected children.

The Lantern of Lost Memories
Sanaka Hiiragi, Picador, $19.99

This limpid Japanese novel involves a psychopomp, Hirasaka, who oversees a photography studio in the mountains. Each guest who arrives has died. Hirasaka must help them to choose one photo as an epitome of each year of their lives, which is then spun into a beguiling lantern. The memory they gaze upon the most fades with time, and Hirasaka transports them back to the day in question, before guiding them onwards and upwards. A child fighting for survival, a Yakuza hardman, an old woman rebuilding after catastrophe – all must refocus moments from their lives that made or touched or changed them. Sanaka Hiiragi’s The Lantern of Lost Memories draws an unassuming wisdom from artfully structured and distilled vignettes, each with a playful yet meditative quality.

The Wedding Forecast
Nina Kenwood, Text, $34.99

Nina Kenwood’s dizzy romcom The Wedding Forecast is her first novel for adults, and brims with a charm familiar to readers of her YA fiction. Thirty-year-old debut novelist Anna is maid of honour at her best friend Hayley’s wedding. Preparations are tense – her ex, Joel, is the best man, and unlike Anna, he has a new partner. Distracting herself from the awkwardness is easy enough. Hayley’s nuptials have love interests at the ready, including the wedding photographer and an actor, Mac, with a fear of commitment. Add in some meddlesome mums, and an unexpected announcement from Joel, and the stage is set for a romantic comedy that dwells, rather sweetly, as much on female friendship and finding your path in life as it does on finding love. Character does bend to plot convention, though Kenwood has a genuine gift for comedy, and the book bubbles along.

Anomaly
Emma Lord, Affirm Press, $22.99

Fuelled by a trope popular from dystopian survival stories such as 28 Days Later, Emma Lord’s Anomaly sees Piper wake as the lone survivor of a virus that’s wiped out most of humanity. There, the similarities end as she (accompanied by her dog Griff) scrambles to find food and shelter, all the while developing a mysterious power she must fight to control. Encountering the wounded Seth, close to death after being attacked by mind-devouring beings called Reapers, the traumas of the past are woven into imminent horrors beyond comprehension. Intended as the first in a trilogy, Lord’s assured world-building creates a devastated Australia, through which the brave and vulnerable teen heroes make their way. Featuring relatable adolescent characters in a horrifying future, Anomaly builds towards epic intimations that should have younger readers hanging out for the next volume.

NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Kingmaker
Sonia Purnell, Virago, $34.99

In 1940, 20-year-old Pamela Churchill – armed with evident seductive powers as well as an astutely perceptive intelligence, was mobilised by the British government and sent to war. She was daughter-in-law of Winston, and her brief was to win the Americans over to the war effort. First was a charm job on FDR’s confidante Harry Hopkins, which helped considerably in producing the Lend-Lease program. Her seduction of US special envoy in London, Averell Harriman (whom she later married), went beyond charm and was, as the phrase went, “thorough going”. Purnell’s argument is that she has either been forgotten or spitefully remembered as a gold-digging “tart”. Her influence (taking in JFK et al) covered five decades, and her story, often told with a kind of breathless confidentiality, makes fascinating reading.

Frank Knopfelmacher: Selected Writings
Edited by Andrew Knopfelmacher, Connor Court $34.95

Vienna born Frank Knopfelmacher (1923-1995) – who, during WWII, worked on an Israeli kibbutz and fought with the English Eighth Army, before fleeing Czechoslovakia after the communists came to power, eventually fetching up at Melbourne University in 1955 – was a bete-noire of the left when I was at uni in the early 1970s, largely because of his pro-Vietnam war stance. It’s a fair bet, he still would be. These essays, edited by his son, run from 1958 to 1993 and cover a wide variety of topics (including an astute defence of Hannah Arendt), all united by a defining hatred of totalitarianism, that often translated into contempt for most of the left. The key essay is My Political Education, an intriguing autobiographical piece, that charts his progression from Marx to Muggeridge. By turns passionate, self-opinionated and uncompromising.

Race Mathews: A Life in Politics
Iola Mathews, Monash University Publishing, $39.99

When former federal and Victorian MP Race Mathews was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2022, he was four chapters into his autobiography. The completed work is what you might call an unintended collaboration between Race and his wife Iola. The story, drawing on his own writing, shifts from first person to third from chapter five on. As is often the case with political tales, this one is a portrait of the man and his times – charting the influence of his parents (political and literary), Melbourne Grammar, the Fabian Society, becoming Whitlam’s private secretary and an MP. It also provides a first-hand account of what it was like to ride the Whitlam wave to power in 1972 and experience the dumper of dismissal in 1975. A portrait of decency and idealism tempered by realism, that has the immediacy of those who were there.

The Bravest Scout at Gallipoli
Ryan Butta, Affirm Press, $34.99

When Sergeant Harry Freame, DCM, disembarked in Sydney in 1916, he was the “Marvel of Gallipoli”, hailed in the newspapers for his exploits as a scout, entering no man’s land to gather intelligence and often posing as a Turkish officer behind the lines. But by the end of WWII, he was virtually forgotten. Ryan Butta’s thoroughly researched, engaging study delves into the enigma of Harry: a Japanese-Australian, born in Japan, with an adoptive father who trained him in the Bushido code, who, after a colourful seafaring life, arrived in Australia in 1913 where he enlisted a year later. In 1940 he was recruited as a spy and sent to Tokyo where the secret police attempted to garrotte him in the street; Freame died soon after. An intriguingly complex tale that examines the racial and cultural implications of Harry’s fall into obscurity.