After by Nikki Gemmell (4th Estate)
In October 2015, Nikki Gemmell received the worst kind of phone call: her elderly mother, Elayn, was dead, and she appeared to have taken her own life. After is the story of what happened next: of the turmoil that follows the loss of a loved one made even more painful by the knowledge of how much they had been struggling.
Brigid Delaney wrote for Guardian Australia earlier this month: “If this were just a book about the treacherous and tender currents that run between mothers and daughters, it would be enough. Instead, After also explores euthanasia, the police investigation that followed Elayn’s death, and the increasing problem of elder opioid abuse. How does a woman with no history of drug use suddenly spend weeks blissed and – as she tells her daughter – ‘bombed out on drugs’? And how did she access the pills?”
Available now.
The Silent Invasion by James Bradley (Pan Australia)
James Bradley first began to think he might write something about climate change for younger readers while he was working on his previous novel, Clade.
“I found myself imagining a different kind of book, one in which the worst had already happened,” he wrote for Guardian Australia recently. “As I followed my characters deeper into the altered world of the novel, I began to understand the decision to write for younger readers also mattered because it is younger people who will inherit the world we are making.”
The result is The Silent Invasion – the first of a trilogy that explores these themes in Bradley’s singular style. Callie’s little sister, Gracie, is Changing – like so many people they have known in their short lives – infected by an alien element that will alter the very structure of her DNA. Callie’s only hope is to get Gracie to the Zone before Quarantine finds them both. But what is really happening in the Zone – and what will going there mean for them both?
Available now.
The Attachment: Letters from a Most Unlikely Friendship by Ailsa Piper and Tony Doherty (Allen & Unwin)
Letter writing is a subtle – and dwindling – art. So it’s lovely to settle into this book and feel the clock slowing down as two new friends talk over the big questions of life as they get to know each other and develop an unexpected friendship.
An 82-year-old priest, Tony Doherty, wrote to an 57-year-old writer, Ailsa Piper, to praise her book, and thus began a long letter-writing relationship. Here the letters are collected and appraised, and take the reader on the gentle pathway of their connection. It is a lovely homage to friendship.
Available now.
A Hundred Small Lessons by Ashley Hay (Allen & Unwin)
Elsie Gormley, 90-odd years old, has a fall and needs to move into a nursing home. Her house – the place that was her home for over 60 years – is sold and a young family moves in. The new owners, Lucy and Ben, are grappling with the challenges of new parenthood, with all the promise and pain that can bring.
But the house is not a passive bystander, and as Lucy settles in to her new home, Elsie’s long history under that same roof starts to reveal itself to her. An emotive portrait of the way lives intertwine from the author of the acclaimed novel, The Railwayman’s Wife.
Available now.
See What I Have Done by Sarah Schmidt (Hachette Australia)
Melbourne-based author Sarah Schmidt’s first novel was 10 years in the making and it’s a cracker: Schmidt takes as her subject the famous Lizzie Borden axe murders. Her Lizzie is irrational, infuriating and infantile – but was she really responsible for the murder of her father and stepmother?
Schmidt’s version of the story is told from four perspectives: that of Lizzie and her sister, Emma; their maid, Bridget; and a creepy and potentially dangerous stranger, Benjamin. With smart pacing and grisly detail, See What I Have Done takes the reader deep into the psyche of the Bordens, painting a portrait of the subtle, wicked ways in which families can destroy themselves.
Available now.
The Honest History Book edited by David Stephens and Alison Broinowski (New South)
As the Griffith Review editor, Julianne Schultz, writes in her foreword to this collection of essays, interrogating the past “honestly, critically, avoiding the traps of ahistoricism and sentimentality” is essential. Particularly in Australia.
The Honest History group was formed in 2013 to challenge the dominance of the Anzac legend with the motto, “not only Anzac, but also”. This diverse collection of writing not only interrogates Anzackery and military history, but gives it context and expands on the idea of history itself. Writers include Larissa Behrendt, Paul Daley, Mark Dapin, Carmen Lawrence and Mark McKenna.
Available now.
A Writing Life: Helen Garner and Her Work by Bernadette Brennan (Text)
Helen Garner’s work can’t be neatly categorised and that is much of her appeal. Her nonfiction is literary, her novels veer close to memoir: she is, as contemporary literature academic Bernadette Brennan points out, a boundary crosser, a polariser. She is never afraid to write herself into her stories, to use the word “I”.
Brennan has made a study of Garner’s impressive body of work from her 40 years of writing, gaining unprecedented access to papers and also to Garner herself, as she seeks to answer the question: who is the “I” in Helen Garner’s work?
Available now.
The Accusation by Bandi, translated by Deborah Smith (Serpents Tail)
This collection of short stories is all the more remarkable for its origins: the manuscript was smuggled out of North Korea; its writer still lives there. Bandi is a pseudonym for the writer who, for years, composed the novellas contained in The Accusation in that country in secret.
“In story after story, industrious North Koreans, ‘innocent people whose lives consisted of doing as they were told’, accidentally run afoul of the state and lose their last political illusions,” writes RO Kwan for the Guardian. “They then get jailed, escape, die, or go mad, but the real culmination of each story occurs in that instant of revelation, when they realise that, despite everything they have always been told, the state is malign ...
“Bandi’s prose style is rough, jagged with exclamation marks and anguished rhetorical questions: this, too, could be said to fit the exigencies of his book. If poetry, as Wordsworth said, can be glossed as powerful emotion recollected in tranquillity, The Accusation reads like powerful emotion felt right now, in a condition of ongoing crisis.”
Available now.
The Shadow Land by Elizabeth Kostova (Text)
Elizabeth Kostova sold 3m copies of her debut novel, The Historian, and her fans will keep coming back for her authentic detail, her scope, and her sense of suspense.
This is her third novel and it takes her to Bulgaria, where Alexandra Boyd has gone travelling after the loss of her brother. In a luggage mix-up she finds herself stuck with an urn of human ashes and her mission to return it to its owner takes her on a journey through the country’s haunted past.
Available 18 April.
American War by Omar El Akkad (Picador)
Egyptian-born US resident Omar El Akkad may be an award-winning journalist and war reporter, but American War is not a work of journalism. Rather, this novel fast-forwards us to 2074: a dystopia, a world where oil is outlawed everywhere but the South and America is about to wage war on itself – again.
The second American Civil War is a conflict of drones, of plagues and – as with all wars – death on an astronomical scale. And Sarat, who was only a little girl when the war began, will become a critical part of the decades of conflict that follow.
“This isn’t a story about war,” the prologue reads. “It’s about ruin.”
Available now.
The Destruction of Hillary Clinton by Susan Bordo (Text)
Her last book was about Anne Boleyn, so writer and feminist scholar Susan Bordo knows all about the brutal bringing-down of public women. It was clearly a wealth of knowledge to draw on for her next book: about the treatment of the former Democratic presidential candidate.
Bordo’s alignment with Clinton is made clear from the start when Bordo talks about the trauma of writing about Clinton losing the seemingly unloseable election – she is obviously a fan and she’s already taking flak for being an apologist. Bordo outlines Clinton’s creds while examining how she came to be seen as a tool of the establishment and what part the media played in her downfall.
Available now.
Carnivalesque by Neil Jordan (Bloomsbury)
Andy and his parents think the carnival they are attending is just like any other, but then Andy gets trapped inside a mirror and a reflection of himself escapes into the real world, taking over his life. When the carnies release him from the mirror, he becomes part of their world – a topsy-turvy, inside-out version of the one he knew.
Jem Poster writes for Guardian UK: “Complex, varied and not entirely coherent, Carnivalesque will challenge readers who value order and internal consistency in their fantasy worlds. But the novel’s unruliness is part of its strength: inescapably possessed by the spirit it describes, it must to some extent mirror the discourse of the carnies, who deal in ‘evasions, diversions’, in stories where ‘the enchantment took over and the point, if point there was, was never arrived at, let alone explained’.”
Available now.
