Heartbreak, vampires and the ‘nudge effect’: This week’s new books

From Kiwi crime, a moving account of dementia and a guide to resisting the siren call of your attention-sapping smartphone, here are eight new books to read this week.

FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK

Old Soul
Susan Barker
Fig Tree, $34.99

Susan Barker’s enigmatic twist on vampire fiction, Old Soul, imagines a beguiling and dangerous creature – a charismatic mystery woman who, we know from the start, steers victims toward an ecstatic and lethal fate to ensure her immortality. On her trail is Jake, who has lost a loved one to her, and the narrative unfolds through testimonies of other secondary victims, beginning with Mariko, a rigid and unassuming Japanese woman Jake meets by chance, gets drunk with, and discovers has lost a twin brother, Hiroji. Curiously, Hiroji’s corpse, when it was autopsied, displayed bizarre and unexplained features Jake has seen before. Meanwhile, the villain is at it again, luring a teenage wannabe influencer into the badlands of New Mexico, on the pretext of a film shoot to aid her career. Barker writes with intensity and imagination, investing the narrative with a full measure of sympathy for the devil. Old Soul is classic literary horror. Engrossing, fable-like, fringed with eerie profundity, it reminded me most strongly of Michel Faber’s Under the Skin.

You Must Remember This
Sean Wilson
Affirm Press, $24.99

The chapters of this short book are numbered as if by the whim of the gods. It starts with Chapter 10 and bounces around from there. The effect may be disorienting to readers, though it’s a cue to a more profound confusion. Sean Wilson has written a literary novel about dementia, and for the central character Grace, life is an elision of past and present, a chaotic reordering of time. She often experiences the resurfacing of memories as though they were events unfolding now. There’s beauty and terror and pathos in the attempt to capture this unmoored internal state, and families with experience will recognise the frustrations of Grace’s daughter, Liz. Dementia does hold the key to past mysteries – readers will puzzle out an abusive parent and ponder the legacy of that abuse – but more is lost than found. Some readers will find this a gruelling, almost unbearable subject. While Wilson is unflinching on dementia’s daily realities, this is a balanced, philosophical portrayal, sensitively handled.

Instructions for Heartbreak
Sarah Handyside
Macmillan, $34.99

Thirty-somethings Dee, Liv, Rosa and Katie have been close friends since university. Three of them live in a share-flat in South London; Katie did live nearby with her boyfriend of nine years, but when the relationship implodes in savage fashion, she’s thrown onto her friends’ doorstep, homeless and heartbroken. After a few well-made martinis, Katie’s friends hit upon the idea of writing a manual to help her recover. Hot tips on everything from hangovers to the elation of singledom make it into the guide, and although they’re an optimistic, emotionally aware and supportive bunch, the narrative never stays cloying. For one thing, the characters are funny and relatable; for another, they’re all plausibly flawed. Some nurse heartbreak of their own, some have doubts about whether they made the rights choices in love, and each will find, in the process of dispensing life advice to a friend, a lesson for their own circumstances. A sharply observed, heartwarming take on female friendship.

When the Deep Dark Bush Swallows You Whole
Geoff Parkes
Penguin, $34.99

Sports writer Geoff Parkes has turned a hand to Kiwi noir. When the Deep Dark Bush Swallows You Whole is period crime set in rural New Zealand in the early 1980s. Circling around the disappearance of Sanna, a young Finnish tourist who vanishes one night from a pub car park, the book opens with her sister Emilia arriving to give the local cops a piece of her mind. There have been no leads on what’s now a cold case, despite the frenzy of initial media coverage and a long list of suspects. Sanna was working as part of a shearing gang and struck up a romance with Ryan, a law student, but she was an independent, confident person and seemed to take to the hard-drinking world of itinerant shearers. This milieu is deftly evoked, through rather vivid dialogue and a colourful cast of characters, and if the world-building overburdens the technical demands of genre – which twists into serial killer territory – it’s an atmospheric crime debut.

NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK

The Sirens’ Call
Chris Hayes
Scribe, $39.99

Jump on any tram, any time, and 99 per cent of commuters will be glued to their phones. As much as we might imagine this has always been the case (think of commuters buried behind their newspapers), US author and broadcaster Chris Hayes argues that what is different in the modern, high-tech age is the vastness of the transformation (in so short a space of time) and the ubiquity of sirens vying for our attention on smartphones to the extent that we routinely find ourselves, as T.S. Eliot wrote in 1940, “distracted from distraction by distraction”. In short, attention is now a commodity to be appropriated – with dire implications for our private and political lives – and the smartphone is the facilitator, allowing Orwellian Trump-speak to go largely unchecked. Apart from wax, Hayes posits different ways of resisting the siren’s relentless call.

It’s in the Genes
Des Tobin
Killaghy Publishing, $55.95

The title of Des Tobin’s study of dynastic and intergenerational family representation in VFL/AFL/AFLW football may emphasise DNA, but he’s also aware that genes are no guarantee. When Ron Barassi (who wore his father’s No.31 for the Demons), for example, addressed North Melbourne players in 1973, he said “natural ability” was nothing to be proud of, it’s what you did with it that mattered. All the same, this is an informed, entertaining documentation of the ribbon of DNA that has run through footy for more than 100 years – covering, among others, the Colliers and Coventrys at Collingwood, the Danihers and Watsons at Essendon, and the Cordners at Melbourne, who are sufficient in numbers to make up their own virtual team. As a new AFL season looms, this is also a timely history of one of our great cultural innovations.

Nellie Melba
Richard Davis
Wakefield Press, $49.95

Richard Davis readily admits that by writing another biography of Melba he is entering a crowded market; there are already 14 published. His contribution, he says, distinguishes itself by not so much concentrating on the diva’s rich, often turbulent personal life, but on her art and the discipline required to make the best of the gift of a golden voice. But, of course, her private life does come into this comprehensive portrait, if only because it helped shape her art: her unhappy marriage to an abusive husband, the love of her life (a French duke) and her love affair with her home town all feature. Davis also incorporates Melba’s own words from her ghost-written autobiography, describing, for example, her meetings with the Italian composer Verdi, who, when he bowed to her, she likened to a tree trying to bend. An engaging account of a truly operatic life.

The Housefly Effect
Eva van den Broek & Tim den Heijer
Bedford Square Publishers, $34.99

The eponymous housefly – in this playfully written examination of the sometimes minute factors that influence human behaviour – is a catchy metaphor that has its origins in an Amsterdam toilet where a fly is painted at the back of the bowl to help chaps with their aim, reduce “splashback” and lower cleaning costs. And it works. Van den Broek (a behavioural scientist) and den Heijer (20 years in advertising), take this as their starting point in looking at the “nudge” effect and manipulation. Take Las Vegas. You buy chips and this affects your betting because chips don’t feel like money. Which, combined with a deliberately created sense of timelessness, leads you to linger longer. So, and this is the key issue, to what extent can the housefly be mobilised to change things for the better? A popular scientific primer in the manner of a Ted Talk.

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