What to read next: Striking Japanese stories and our submarines at war

FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Dead-End Memories
Banana Yoshimoto, Faber & Faber, $26.99

Japanese author Banana Yoshimoto is one of my favourite contemporary writers of short fiction. Dead-End Memories collects five stories about women coping with emotional fallout from their lives. It ripples with Yoshimoto’s characteristic warmth and melancholy and doesn’t shy from unsettling the reader. The title story concerns a woman who discovers her partner has been cheating on her, and the textured, if temporary, companionship she finds on the rebound. In House of Ghosts, a modern haunted house story gets upended by a love story that meanders smiling into age and wisdom, while Mama! sees a young woman who works in publishing poisoned by a colleague, undergoing a transformation as she convalesces. The briefest stories are much darker, probing the effects of severe trauma, though they’re every bit as accomplished as the rest of the collection.

Woo Woo
Ella Baxter, Allen & Unwin, $32.99

Ella Baxter’s Woo Woo is a novel about a stalker that the author has called a “scorched earth response” to being a victim of stalking herself. Melbourne-based conceptual artist Sabine is 38, successful, and stressing over the opening of her exhibition, entitled “F--- You, Help Me”. That public exposure is chosen, and Sabine often seeks validation and advancement through streaming her life online, even if disempowering forces seem to shape the choice. The man watching her, following her every move? Not chosen. Nobody seems to know what to do about the stalker – not Sabine’s unhelpful chef husband, not her gallerist, not her best friend, and true to form, not the police, either. How can Sabine cope with the fear the intrusion has caused, and regain her agency? The only retribution is creativity, in this edgy, unsettling, darkly satirical vision that doubles as an act of literary vengeance.

Oblivion
Patrick Holland, Transit Lounge, $32.99

With echoes of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, Patrick Holland’s Oblivion follows an unnamed narrator drifting unmoored through the interstices of East and Southeast Asian megacities. He could be a shadowy corporate fixer, or a diplomat engaged in light spy-craft. The narrator’s occupation and identity remain vague, and he transits through hotels and airports – places designed to discourage connection – in a heavily signposted state of detachment. Loneliness breaks when he meets a Vietnamese courtesan, Tien, a figure as alive and tethered to the idea of home as the narrator is dissociated from it, and the novel twists into romance and espionage fiction. Dialogue and plot are decidedly less satisfying than Holland’s many observations of place, delivered in a clipped and rhythmically assured prose style.

And So I Roar
Abi Daré, Sceptre, $32.99

Sequel to The Girl with the Louding Voice (2020), Abi Daré’s And So I Roar continues the story of Adunni, a 14-year-old Nigerian girl who grew up in a rural village and was sold into slavery, but overcomes hardship and exploitation to find opportunity and education in Lagos. Adunni wants to become a teacher, but her home village of Ikati has other plans. When Adunni is accused by a village chief of causing a young woman’s death, and the crippling drought that followed, she’s carted off to be sacrificed in a ritual to appease the gods and bring rain. Her wealthy and educated benefactor Tia – who has a disconcerting saviour complex – won’t let Adunni go alone, and determined to protect the girl, puts herself in grave danger. Unlike the novel that preceded it, And So I Roar feels threadbare as fiction, with longueurs that undermine pacing and themes baldly exposed, rather than integrated into character and narrative.

NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Dive!
Mike Carlton, Penguin, $45

Most of us are well versed in the military heroics of the Gallipoli landings and the fiasco that followed. Few are familiar with the exploits of Australian submarines in the same campaign and others. This study sets about redressing that across more than a century of wars. While carnage was taking place on land, an Australian sub did what the Turkish army thought was impossible and slipped through the entrance to the Dardanelles Strait, sank a cruiser and forced the Turkish to stop supplying their troops by sea. It’s just one of the unsung tales of the Secret Service explored by experienced military chronicler Mike Carlton. Like most popular military history, the battle scenes can tend toward melodrama, but in entertaining and informed writing he has retrieved an aspect of our history that, often as not, slips below the sonar.

Breaking the Boss Bias
Catherine Fox, NewSouth, $34.99

When Julia Gillard delivered the famous misogyny speech in 2012 she was addressing what Catherine Fox sees as one of the key barriers to workplace equity and stopping the advancement of women to leadership positions: pervasive sexism. But the central concern, Fox maintains, is what she calls the ″⁣progress narrative″⁣ – the mistaken notion that gender equity in private and public spheres has, more or less, been achieved. Not the case. A major problem here is the ″⁣Drop to the top″⁣ phenomenon, meaning the higher women go up the corporate ladder, the more they drop off in terms of securing top jobs. By turns angry (constructive channelling of anger is one way of challenging the boss bias), but circumspect, incorporating interviews with prominent and relevant players, this is a pretty plain speaking, sometimes witty call to arms.

Techno
Marcus Smith, UQP, $34.99

We are probably living through the most significant technological revolution in history, but too many of us are simply marvelling at our smart phones to contemplate the dangers, says Marcus Smith, teacher of technology law and regulation. The revolution’s guillotine effect, as it were. There are two phases, the revolution itself and what must follow – technological regulation. What is looming is what he calls a moment of ″⁣singularity″⁣: the emergence of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), autonomous intelligence with the ability to self-evolve, making decisions for us right across the social spectrum. Concentrating on the US, China, Europe and Australia, he goes into matters such as privacy and surveillance. While he can repeat his key points a bit frequently, this is a very accessible study of what is possibly the issue of our age.

Life & Crimes
Andrew Rule, Macmillan, $34.99

True crime may be a relatively recent publishing phenomenon, but veteran journalist Andrew Rule has been delving into the dark side of this moon for decades. His collection of 18 cameo case studies is a kind of distillation of his investigations. His account of the shocking and infamous Easy Street murders in 1977 is a dramatic case in point. It’s still chilling to read about the bodies of the two murdered women lying undiscovered in their rented house in Collingwood for two days, despite visits by concerned friends and relatives. And, as yet, no conviction, only on-going DNA testing. The other tales, of hit men and gangland killings – violent, brutal and sometimes disturbingly pre-meditated – are forensically documented, stark, vivid crime-scene shots, often written with deadpan wit and an occasional touch of Raymond Chandler.

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