Looking for something new to read? Here are 10 of the latest books

Sydney Morning Herald

5 days ago

This week's books include a story inspired by Slavic folktales, crime fiction from an Indigenous perspective, a trip back to 1950s Australia and an epic tale of trade between China and the West. Happy reading!
FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
The Unquiet Grave
Dervla McTiernan
HarperCollins, $34.99
Irish thriller doyenne Dervla McTiernan has relocated to Western Australia, but her imagination remains drawn to the mires and fens of her native land. Now on his fourth case of the series, her detective Cormac Reilly unearths a corpse in a bog in Galway. At first, he assumes he's stumbled across the mummified remains of a ritual human sacrifice. Prehistoric finds in the region are not uncommon, and such gruesome, millennia-old discoveries are of fascination to archaeologists. On closer inspection, Reilly assumed wrong. The mutilated remains are those of a high-school principal, Thaddeus Grey, who vanished two years before. Reilly thinks he knows what happened, but after he gets distracted by his ex, another mutilated corpse turns up halfway across the country. Suddenly, he seems to have been thrown into a high-profile serial killer investigation. If that's the case, it's only a matter of time before the murderer strikes again. McTiernan is a bestselling crime writer for good reason, and this is another brisk, moody police procedural with an effortless command of pace and suspense.
Florence Knapp's debut, The Names, hinges on a sliding-doors moment. It's 1987, in the aftermath of a terrible storm. Cora, with her seven-year-old daughter, Maia, in tow, is about to enter the name of her baby son in the birth registry. Will she name him Bear, as Maia has whimsically suggested? Or Julian, the name that most appealed to her from the books of baby names she consulted while pregnant? Or will she submit to her husband's demand that the boy be given the same name as him? She has never liked Gordon much as a name, but defying her husband – a doctor whose public virtue is shadowed by cruel abuse behind closed doors – could have terrifying consequences. We follow the family through three timelines – one each for Bear, Julian and Gordon – each chapter separated by a seven-year interval. This could easily have been too much scaffolding, but Knapp uses the architecture to sketch subtle contrasts between timelines. Characters develop distinctively in each thread, shaped by Cora's choices in a way that emphasises the invidious decisions facing those living through domestic violence, as well as a love that endures even the darkest hour.
When Beatrice goes blind in her 70s, her inner life turns to what can be seen without eyes, to all she has learned and felt, to a life devoted to cultivating her mind, and to memories of the family that has shaped and sustained her. Relic Light has a free-flowing, kaleidoscopic structure, and Beatrice's story emerges through brief, loosely connected musings, interleaving personal anecdotes with oddments collected from realms of literature and art. These roam from odd facts about poet John Milton (when the author of Paradise Lost lost his vision, he made two of his daughters read to him in Latin, Greek and Hebrew, apparently, while the third got off scot-free), to witticisms about Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway. That novel is one way into Relic Light 's experimental form, and it's interesting to speculate on what Woolf would have made of the cultivated female voice Brennen Wysong has crafted; I think she would have recognised it as a descendent of her own fiction. Wysong's background as a short story writer is evident: although linear narrative is abandoned, the darkness is lit by flashes of insight, distilled with a sculpted quality that beguiles the mind.
Crime fiction from Aboriginal perspectives has broken into the mainstream over the past decade, and Kooma-Kamilaroi author Angie Faye Martin adds to the depth of the field with Melaleuca. Our detective is Renee Taylor, an Aboriginal policewoman working in her remote home town for what she hopes will be a short and uneventful spell. Renee imagines issuing the odd speeding ticket and helping her mum out, mostly. Her life is in Meanjin/Brisbane now, and she's itching to get back to it. When a woman is found murdered at a nearby creek, Renee gets a chance to lead an investigation, and she soon finds a potential link to the disappearance at the same location of two young women decades before. An ugly suppressed history hovers under the town's sleepy surface, and Renee must confront intergenerational trauma and a dark legacy of racism to find the truth. Melaleuca is solid commercial crime fiction by any yardstick. Weaving a contemporary murder mystery into the grim reality of historical and continuing injustice faced by Aboriginal people, it's an unflinching addition to the growing corpus of outback noir.
The Lady, The Tiger and the Girl Who Loved Death
Helen Marshall
Titan Books, $27.99
Helen Marshall, a senior lecturer in creative writing at the University of Queensland, has penned a dark fantasy grand in ambition and steeped in lore, but you get the impression of an elaborate world only half-realised. Possibly influenced by Slavic folktales, it's set in a war-torn land under occupation. Sara Sidorova comes from proud stock. She has resisted the colonisers with violence and as she lays dying, an avatar of destruction offers her a glimpse of the future. There, her granddaughter Irenda bends herself to circus life – a training ground for her eventual quest to avenge her mother's death at the hands of the enemy. This is a fable-like fiction that invokes the carnivalesque, alongside hails of bullets, living gods, and references to seers and elf-children. It's a song of brutality and mystery and a fierce desire to be free, although its playfulness and sense of theatricality do come at the expense of narrative clarity and coherent exposition. I found it tough going, despite the author's obvious talents.
Lee Gordon Presents …
Jeff Apter
Echo Publishing, $34.99
'The past,' wrote L. P. Hartley, 'is a foreign country'. Jeff Apter's biography of legendary promotor Lee Gordon is a bit like a journey back into that foreign country of 1950s Australia, when big American acts were rarely seen on stage until the brash young Yank brought them here. Gordon's list of stars included Frank Sinatra (who was a friend of his), Bill Haley, Buddy Holly and many, many more. Along the way he also discovered local talent such as Johnny O'Keefe. But for all his chutzpah, this is also a portrait of an insecure, troubled dynamo. In 1958, after something of a rollercoaster ride of highs and lows, Gordon disappeared for nine months before fetching up in a sanatorium in Hawaii where was treated for a nervous breakdown. He was also a man of mystery, his years before coming to Australia (via Cuba and mixing with the Mob) uncertain, as are the circumstances of his death in a London hotel in 1963, aged 40.There's poignancy here, but what comes across is the sheer frantic pace of Gordon's short life. In that time, though, he helped turn the black and white of our 1950s life into colour.
You wouldn't think a Beretta could shoot down a Halifax bomber, but on the night of August 14, 1943, in southern France, that's what happened. In no time 11 people (crew and civilians) were dead. Only the pilot, Frank Griffiths, crawled away from the wreckage of the eponymous Operation Pimento. Adam Hart, his great-grandson, reconstructs that night and the escape over the Swiss border that followed, as well as Griffiths' life. The secret mission, part of Speical Operations Exectuive operations, was to drop explosives to a Resistance group in the area. Griffiths, badly injured, wound up in their care, and his escape – involving beaming maquisards, pleased to meet an RAF pilot; a madame and her brothel where he hid; and the inevitable blonde named Collette – is a gripping tale, told with poise and warmth. Hart also incorporates his own journey in the footsteps of 'Griff', meeting descendants of those who saved his life. I would not be surprised to see this pop up as a dramatised TV doco.
Silk Silver Opium
Michael Pembroke
Hardie Grant, $37.99
The title might be three little words, but Michael Pembroke's fascinating study shows how they came to loom so large in history, from the earliest Chinese dynasties and the Romans until now. It's an epic tale about the consequences of 2000 years of trade between China and the West, also incorporating recurring themes such as the imperial Chinese strategy of trying to make trading partners dependent on them – an early form of Belt and Road. Silk, for example, mesmerised the Romans. They couldn't get enough of it and paid a fortune for it, but were also just as mesmerised by the mystery of how it was made. Same with porcelain. But it was the opium trade, a source of massive quick profit to the British East India Company especially, that had the most the devastating effect. Mass addiction followed, along with a series of Opium Wars that culminated in the Boxer Rebellion of 1899 – murderously put down by a 19th-century version of the Coalition of the Willing, leaving a war bill that 'essentially bankrupted China'. Something the Chinese still haven't forgotten. An erudite, timely, entertaining rendition of a complex subject.
Uptown Girl
Christie Brinkley
Harper Influence, $36.99
Although it's impossible to read this without the Billy Joel song in the background, there was nothing upbeat in Brinkley's childhood in suburban California, where her biological father regularly whipped her with his belt. She writes about his violence and thuggery – when she developed a strong sense of deliverance through fantasy – with admirable restraint. But life picked up with her mother's second marriage to a Hollywood scriptwriter who encouraged her to write the script of her own life. Which, in many ways, she did. Fast-forward to Paris, 1974, where she'd gone to study art, but accidentally became one of the most famous models of her time after a photographer saw her in a post office. At 19, she was 'discovered', and quite suddenly, fantasy became reality. Inevitably, much of her story is about the fame that followed, along with love, four marriages, and what she calls the 'magic' of being alive – not to mention surviving a helicopter crash. High-flying life, down to earth memoir.
The Stress Recovery Effect
Dr Nick Hall and Dr Dick Tibbits (with Todd A. Hillard)
Signs Publishing, $32.95
According to the American Institute of Stress, 83 per cent of Americans suffer work-related stress. This self-help guide offers practical ways of turning it into a positive. The authors met when both were engaged in a scheme (partly funded by Disney) that aimed to turn a Florida hospital into an anxiety-reduced zone by taking a wholistic approach that included installing a surfboard in an imaging machine. But their plans were drastically affected by the Pulse nightclub shootings in 2016, with some survivors, who were already enrolled in the stress recovery program, telling Hall and Tibbits how they applied their strategies to help them recover. Strategies included controlled breathing, acting out smiles instead of frowns, and buying a rocking chair to rock themselves into a state of calm. Quoting Walt Disney (think, dream, believe, dare), the whole thing comes across as a transcribed motivational talk.