Here are 10 new books to add to your must-read list

Sydney Morning Herald

6 days ago

From a comic satire on the world of professional AFL to queer romances; from a study of the creative chemistry between John Lennon and Paul McCartney to a memoir of life as an elite policeman, this week's books cover wide ground.
Pissants
Brandon Jack
Summit Books, $34.99
Former Sydney Swans player Brandon Jack penned an acclaimed memoir, 28, which exposed life in the AFL machine. Some truths can't be fully imagined in non-fiction, a defect colourfully remedied in his debut novel. Pissants is a super-sweary inside job on the world of professional football, a pitch-black comic satire that takes in rivalry and camaraderie and misdeeds. There's locker room goss, sports psychology and the creeping derangements of being steeped in a culture of toxic pressures – from ultra-competitiveness to the psychotic hypermasculinity of bonding and hazing rituals. There are plenty of jaw-dropping shenanigans tinged with narcissism, and the sense of impunity that attends fame on the field, but there's also a fair whack of misery and unacknowledged woundedness. Jack incorporates bingo cards and WhatsApp chats into more conventional narrative modes, as all the dirty laundry gets an airing. AFL fans should enjoy the fly-on-the-wall-of-the-locker-room vibe, and Jack draws out the attractions of elite team sport – and much that's repugnant about how it operates behind the scenes – with brutality and hilarity.
Taylor Jenkins Reid became a global publishing phenomenon with the rise of BookTok during the pandemic. Her previous bestsellers have included Daisy Jones & The Six (loosely inspired by the story behind Fleetwood Mac) and The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo (a romantic mystery following a glamorous Hollywood star of yesteryear). Her ninth novel combines romance with adventure and disaster in space. Astrophysicist Joan Goodwin joins the NASA space program in the early 1980s. Training as an astronaut with a team of brilliant, big personalities, she must navigate institutional sexism, a growing bond with colleagues on a dangerous mission, and budding romance. Catastrophe looms, and the action and suspense of the emergency frames a love story that delves deeply into the rigours and routines of life as an astronaut, and how trailblazing women resisted the male-dominated atmosphere of NASA in the 1980s. It's a page-turner with high emotional stakes; Reid's fans are probably producing tear-streaked TikTok vids already.
Author of Ghost Wall, Summerwater and The Fell, Sarah Moss is, among other things, an expert excavator of the effects of post-Brexit politics on the British psyche. In Ripeness, the politics turn to reproductive rights, migrant identities and the rights of refugees. Edith is the daughter of a French Jewish Holocaust survivor who escaped being murdered by the Nazis when she was granted asylum in the UK in 1941. Now over 70, comfortable, living in western Ireland, Edith is troubled by her friend Méabh's attitude to African refugees (and notes it doesn't apply to displaced Ukrainians), though she's drawn into her friend's family mystery. Méabh discovers she has an unknown brother, adopted by an American family, who wants to connect with his biological relatives and find out more about his roots. The novel's action flits between this contemporary strand and a trip to Italy in the 1960s, when Edith was a nerdy 17-year-old accompanying her older sister, who is enduring an unwanted pregnancy. Moss crafts a fine balance of sympathy in her portrayal of Edith, contrasting first-person and third-person narration to interrogate how social identities are forged, how rights must be fought for, and the growing cost of complacency.
Ordinary Love
Marie Rutkoski
Virago, $34.99
Queer romance reignites in Marie Rutkoski's Ordinary Love when teenage sweethearts Emily and Gen reunite as 30-somethings. Their lives have taken different paths since their schooldays. Emily suffers through an abusive marriage to the wealthy Jack and leaves him after a frightening episode of domestic violence at the book's outset. Gen meanwhile becomes an Olympic athlete, aggressively embracing her sexuality through a string of affairs and hook-ups with other women. The story of their adolescent courtship and the homophobia it ran up against is told in flashback, revealing Emily and Gen to be old flames with old wounds that have shaped the courses of their adult lives. Rutkovski is sharp on just how difficult it can be to leave an abusive relationship, especially when the abuser seeks to isolate the victim from support networks. A subplot involving friends of Emily fighting to help her overcome Jack's influence is so full-blooded it almost becomes the main event. Yet the intimacy and vividness Rutkoski brings to her characters' sexual life is unusual – sex writing so often goes awry – and this is a romance novel that feels refreshingly grounded, written for adults.
Big Feelings
Amy Lovat
Macmillan, $34.99
Another queer romance from Newcastle-based Amy Lovat, returning with a second novel following her debut, Mistakes and Other Lovers. This one's billed as an 'anti-romantic comedy', and it takes place in the shadow of an idealised relationship. Sadie's obsession with finding the perfect partner comes from witnessing the passion and devotion of her parents' marriage – complete with Insta-love tropes and mad romantic pursuits and the happily-ever-after that spawned her. When she meets Chase, Sadie falls wildly in love and thinks she's found the ideal woman, but it isn't long before cynicism, neurosis and self-sabotage rear their heads, and Sadie comes to question what she really desires. Big Feelings captures the relaxed flavour of its setting on the NSW North Coast, while the somewhat unreliable narrator ties herself in comic knots over a relationship we know will break up from the beginning. The mystery is how and why, and Lovat's chaotic ride into the messiness of romance should attract lovebirds of a more sardonic and streetwise disposition, fans of Fleabag or High Fidelity among them.
The key contention in this absorbing study of the creative chemistry that existed between Lennon and McCartney, is that we get them 'so wrong', largely because 'we have trouble thinking about intimate male friendships.' But, do we get them so wrong? Much of what Ian Leslie documents – the intensity of the relationship, the shared early deaths of their mothers, the immediate recognition of being soulmates when they first met at the Woolton Church fete (with Paul's flawless rendition of Eddie Cochrane's Twenty Flight Rock), the competitiveness, the bitterness and the love that bound them – is common knowledge to many. Indeed, there were few times when he told me anything I didn't already know. All the same, in its comprehensiveness, the authority with which he details the collaboration (especially contested territory of who did what, Lennon claiming much of Eleanor Rigby, McCartney likewise with In My Life), and the poise and compassion with which he brings his two magicians to life, it's a compelling dissection of the repercussions of that day in 1957 when two 'damaged romantics' met and the culture of the western world shifted.
This guide to how to live a more satisfying life is, at least, more informed than most. Fabian, an Associate Professor at Warwick University, begins by distinguishing between the pursuit of happiness and the more complex and fulfilling notion of wellbeing – which embraces life, existential warts and all and a more nuanced sense of self: the good, the bad and the ugly. It's divided into three parts. A Pleasant Life, in which he delves into the wisdom of the Stoics (who seem to be roaring back into public popularity), the Fulfilling Life, about self-realisation and the idea of authenticity, and the Valuable Life, about overcoming modern nihilism. Woven into this are aspects of his own story (early depression and release through rock-climbing) and, more broadly, the positives of living in a pluralistic society as apart from religious orthodoxy. Deliberately 'popular' and, like all of these guides, reads like a talk.
Few sportspeople enter the playing field facing the possibility of death like Formula One drivers. In fact, in the 1958 season four drivers died. But it's not the death-defying stunts of the drivers that Reid and Sylt are concerned with here, it's the astonishing money that goes into this international business – these days generating revenue of $3.4 billion and valued at $20 billion, the top drivers receiving around $60 million in wages. The driver's seats are individually designed and the steering wheels cost $75,000. And that's just scratching the surface. In order to trace how this came about, the authors take us back to the leisurely hobbyhorse days of the 1950s when princes and barons drove their Maseratis in competitions. That didn't last long, thanks in large part to a colourful Englishman, Bernie Ecclestone, whose name is now synonymous with Formula One. The drivers and their vehicles might capture the limelight, but this takes us into the billion-dollar industry under the bonnet.
When writer/journalist Daniela Torsh's father died in 1958, she was 11 years old and believed she was Christian. What she discovered in the days following his death– she writes warmly about her father, but honestly as well in detailing the fraught nature of the relationship – was the depth of her Jewish ancestry. Her parents had met in Theresienstadt, a concentration camp just north of Prague, in the 1940s. They survived, had Daniela, and eventually immigrated to Sydney in the early 1950s. Her parents were determined that the horrors they had experienced during the war would not be passed on to their child, so they kept her Jewish ancestry a secret. Torsh's tale, told simply but effectively and frequently jumping time frames, is, among other things, a record of intergenerational trauma, of how growing up in the shadow of the Holocaust played out in her life in ways she didn't understand until she put together the pieces of her family's history. A calm retrospective voice, but one that inevitably contains tragedy, anger and deep sadness.
Through Fear and Fire
John Taylor (with Heath O'Loughlin)
Pan Macmillan, $36.99
When John Taylor was growing up in the south-east suburbs of Melbourne he was frequently in schoolyard fights, always outraged by the injustice of the actions of school bullies. It led to joining the Victoria Police Force in 1987, then the Special Operations Group (SOG) two years later, and in 2003, the Bomb Response Unit (BRU). In many ways this is a portrait of a driven individual – his description of the physical training required to get into the SOG is exhausting just to read. And while he might be matter-of-fact in his description of defusing, say, a bomb left in a bus shelter (at the same time dismissing Hollywood myths about the process), you are always in no doubt that it is a highly dangerous occupation. Likewise, his account of his first operation with SOG. At the same time, he also goes into the effect of the job on his family: Taylor, at times, while walking with his wife, imagining threats that aren't there. If you've ever wondered what kind of person is drawn to join an elite force, this will give you a good idea.