Trust us, you should read these books this month
It’s been a fantastic month for new books, with a host of gripping new releases and even a couple of Aussie authors in the mix.
• Ten books to make you smarter (and they’re not boring!)
• If famous books were rewritten from another perspective
So as the weather continues its resolute march towards winter, we pick a handful of our favourites.
Almost Sincerely by Zoë Norton Lodge
According to the hilariously razor-witted and potty-mouthed Zoë Norton Lodge, a writer and presenter on both The Checkout and The Chaser’s Media Circus, she was flipping the bird and gangsta cussing before most of us could string a sentence together.
An unreliably narrated piece of delirious magical realism, a pre-school yarn, a gloriously madcap collection of personal histories with a filthy twist, sees the native of Sydney’s Annandale explaining to her Yia Yia (Greek for Grandma) that the rigmarole of day care is getting her down: “You come, you eat some Playdoh, you take a nap, you sh*t your pants. Day in, day out.”
You get the distinct impression, as Lodge lays bare the warts and all madness of her clan and co-conspirators, that most of these manically relayed tales stick far closer to the truth than might otherwise seem plausible.
From her mother’s playground vigilantism to her father’s surreal shrine to millinery worship and a midnight attack by sugar-coked possums, this is the kind of book that will have you accidentally spitting at strangers on the train as you force-cry with laughter.
In amongst it all, there’s a nostalgic glory for lazy 80s days growing up in suburban Australia and an abiding love for her brood, no matter how communally insane they may all be. A riot from start to finish, Lodge’s genius demands to be devoured whole.
Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel
A line taken from sci-fi TV series Star Trek: Voyager provides the unlikely source for the key theme of Emily St John Mandel’s flabbergastingly good fourth novel.
“Survival is insufficient,” is the guiding motto of a caravan of travelling performers who cling to culture, bringing both Shakespeare’s plays and classical music to the disparate communities of an unrecognisable world 20 years after an airborne plague wiped out the majority of the population.
Mandel’s stunning work breathes new life into the crowded dystopian genre. Starting with the (literal) collapse of faded Hollywood star Arthur Leander while performing King Lear, the sudden arrival of the pandemic comes as a dizzying assault on the senses that will set your pulse racing.
Initially seen through the eyes of ex-paparazzi photographer Jeevan, there are no action-movie heroics or government scrabbling as the world falls down; instead, Mandel zooms in on the emotional aftermath of a disparate group of characters stranded far apart, with only the most subtle of links between them.
Most of the chaos of the dying days is left unspoken, appearing in jagged flashes as Mandel dances nimbly from years before to decades after the disaster in non-linear fashion.
A powerhouse exploration of human nature and need, Station Eleven will leave you breathless, emotionally bruised and yet high on love and hope. Magnificent.
Leap by Myfanwy Jones
Another novel likely to leave you feeling a little emotionally delicate, Myfanwy Jones’ Melbourne-set Leap also divides its time between characters. While there’s no apocalypse to contend with, both protagonists are haunted by dark moments from their past.
Twenty-something Joe, a parkour fanatic staying in a shambolic but welcoming share-house, throws himself into two hospitality jobs, resigned to letting life pass him by while obsessively returning to the Facebook page of his dead girlfriend.This tactic serves him well until a transient nurse takes up the spare room.
Across town, Elise attempts to distract herself from the slow collapse of a loveless marriage by sketching the tigers at Melbourne Zoo.
Reminiscent of Christos Tsiolkas’ tortured protagonists, there’s a visceral quality to Jones’ poetic handle on the rocky emotional landscape these two souls stumble across.
Joe’s muscularly athletic feats, as he channels impotent rage into physical endurance, strangely reflect Elise’s sleepwalking towards the caged fury of the big cats, with an almost symbiotic connection between the pair that draws you inexorably towards their deeply personal resolutions.
The Horses by William Lane
William Lane’s debut novel Over The Water, released last spring, loosely drew on his own experiences teaching in the Javanese city of Bandung as well as engaging local mythology.
Luckily we haven’t had to wait long for his sophomore effort The Horses which, though set worlds apart in a fictional Sydney boys private school, shares a certain thematic similarity.
Again we have a new teacher as our eyes and ears in the somewhat out-of-his-depth Gregory, and we also have a new student, the working-class David who, as a non-boarder on a scholarship, is automatically marked out as different and less than desirable.
Whereas Over The Water was largely based in reality, the world we encounter here is quite maniacal, a sort of class war Lord of the Flies. Half-feral students don polished armour and their schoolmasters are clearly more invested in the upkeep of their prized horses than with actually imparting any knowledge.
When a biblical flood begins to wash away the school buildings, the horses run wild.
Wickedly observed satire, Lane has an uncanny knack for flipping the boys’ own adventure on its head and then trumping reader expectation too. Hopefully his alarmingly fast writing ability will keep us furnished with many more riveting novels at a similar breakneck pace.
Muse by Jonathan Galassi
Talk about putting yourself out on a limb.
Poet and head of American publishing house Farrar, Straus & Giroux Jonathan Galassi has penned his debut novel, Muse, not only setting it in the publishing world, but also hanging it on an editor, Paul Dukach, who is obsessed with the work of a world-famous rock-star poet Ida Perkins.
Lord help the poor editors who had to give critical feedback, but Muse, if not perfect, is actually a pretty interesting first stab.
There’s a rich sense of place, as Galassi clearly draws on personal experience, lightly fictionalised. You can practically smell the mustiness of the shabby chic offices of Purcell & Stern, supposedly the most punk of New York’s publishing houses.
A little over-concerned with world-building, it takes a bit too long to get to the crux of the story and its characters, with Ida in particular a faintly ridiculous type who’s supposedly dined with the Kennedys and inspired Carly Simon to song, but there is a lot of fun to be had in the petty publishing rivalries at play here.
The interjections of the specially crafted poetry assigned to Ida breaks up the flow in intriguing ways and here’s also a salacious fun to be had in trying to spot who might be who in the real world.
