Ten new books to add to your reading pile

Sydney Morning Herald

2 days ago

What's good, what's bad, and what's in between in literature? Here we review the latest titles. See all 51 stories.
Looking for some psychological suspense? A reimagining of literary history? Perhaps a deep-dive into the work of the late Australian historian John Hirst, or a gripping real-life account of women working for the French resistance during World War II? Our reviewers have these and more covered in this week's reviews. Happy reading!
FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Famous Last Words
Gillian McAllister
Penguin, $34.99
A nightmare day – one that seems too strange to believe. Camilla is dropping her daughter Polly off on her first day at school, and husband Luke, a mild-mannered writer, isn't there. He isn't responding to messages, which is unlike him. Her annoyance quickly escalates into alarm when the police arrive asking to talk to her about her husband, and shock sets in when she's told the news of an unfolding hostage situation in London. He's being held hostage, she thinks. She's incredulous at viewing video evidence of Luke as the hostage-taker. How on earth did her husband become a violent criminal, without the slightest warning? At a gut level, Camilla refuses to concede that Luke could possibly do what she is seeing him do with her own eyes, but she agrees to assist DCI Niall Thompson conduct hostage negotiations, hoping to defuse the crisis without bloodshed. The game will change, and the inexplicable will become clear in this taut and twisting thriller. Fans of Liane Moriarty (and superior, character-driven psychological suspense generally) should lap this one up.
Stephen King's private detective Holly Gibney returns in Never Flinch, with more than enough to keep her occupied. There seem to be two cases, though her friend, Izzy Jaynes, a detective at Buckeye police department, is handling one of them. It starts with a sinister letter sent to police from a would-be serial killer who promises to mete out lethal vigilante justice to 13 guilty persons and one innocent, to avenge a grave wrong committed. The threat isn't idle. Chapters told from the killer's perspective are interwoven as the body count climbs, but when Izzy turns to Holly for assistance, Holly is temporarily indisposed: she's moonlighting as a bodyguard for feminist author Kate McKay, who fears being stalked by a radical religious activist on a speaking tour. Never Flinch is a rather tortured and over-realised novel for King. It really should have been split into two novels, as without radical condensation and extremely brisk exposition, there's simply too much here to merge the two narrative threads successfully without one pulling focus from the other.
'The week I shot a man clean through the head began like any other.' So begins this revenge thriller from Emma Stonex, author of The Lamplighters. It's a killer line, and for Birdie Keller, vengeance has been a long time coming. The ice-cold nature of her rage is amplified by the casual way she goes about her daily domestic routine, as if nothing had changed, as if Jimmy Maguire – the man who murdered Birdie's sister 18 years earlier – had not been released from jail, as if she didn't have a gun and wasn't about to head into London to use it. The Sunshine Man layers multiple perspectives, including Maguire's, and flashes back to the events surrounding the original crime, where lurking in the westering fields of her childhood in Devon and Cornwall, a terrible truth lies in wait. It would have been easy for this one to misfire. Revenge is a basic human impulse, but without complications it isn't always thriller material. Stonex is excellent, though, at playing with the reader's sympathies, allowing elements of the story to be shaped by memory and character, so that provisional judgments jump around until the picture becomes more complete.
The Haunting of Mr and Mrs Stevenson
Belinda Lyons-Lee
Transit Lounge, $34.99
Where did Robert Louis Stevenson get the idea for The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? Well, his Calvinist upbringing influenced his psychological fable, but there was, too, a charming man of his acquaintance, Eugene Chantrelle, who was later tried and hanged for murdering his wife, Elizabeth. Geelong-based writer Belinda Lyons-Lee goes behind the scenes, reimagining a piece of literary and criminal history from the viewpoint of Stevenson's wife, Fanny, herself a successful author, who fell in love with the younger Robert after divorcing her wayward husband in the US. In Lyons-Lee's telling, theirs was an intellectual, literary and romantic bond, and their encounter with the two-faced Chantrelle is one of many episodes – including a seance with the Shelleys and a haunted wardrobe – that lace literary biography and an eerie, gothic sensibility. Some of the prose isn't polished to the sort of sheen that might make this dark material truly glisten, but it's fascinating literary historical fiction, nonetheless.
Awake in the Floating City
Susanna Kwan
Simon & Schuster, $34.99
Seas have risen and climate change has caused disastrous flooding in a future San Francisco. Just turned 40, Bo – an artist whose desire to create has dried up, even as the rain refuses to abate – is set to leave the city as part of anexodus of residents. She plans to flee the sodden streets and crumbling buildings and head to Canada, but when the day to leave arrives, she discovers a note urging her to stay. Her elderly neighbour, Mia, is 130 years old, and she's been abandoned to her fate. Taking up Mia's offer to be her part-time paid carer, Bo befriends the supercentenarian and eventually, her muse returns: she begins to make art inspired by Mia's long life, finding a way to be creative in the shadow of catastrophic destruction. Awake in the Floating City is literary cli-fi that proceeds from a positively Biblical extreme weather event. The disaster is evoked in spartan but atmospheric detail, and the characters have some depth, but the plot itself is stretched too thin over the length of a novel, and it sometimes feels like the barest frame for philosophical musing on human nature and need.
NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
John Hirst: Selected Writings
Edited by Chris Feik
La Trobe University Press, $36.99
John Hirst (1942-2016), as this collection of essays and commentaries amply attests, was a historian who went his own way. No stranger to controversy, evident, for example, in his views on colonisation and the dispossession of Indigenous Australians. History in its British imperialist incarnation is almost presented as a kind of impersonal force, indifferent to and beyond moralising by 'liberal fantasists' who, seeking some sort of reconciliation with the wrongs of a shameful past, imagine the tragedy could have been avoided and ignore the inevitability of the brutal 'phenomenon' of European expansion. A point that fellow historian and friend Robert Manne addresses in his commentary, stating historians are also humans and will make judgments. Mind you, at the same time, Hirst was morally outraged with the Stolen Generation and the damage done to Aboriginal culture. Whether talking about his politics over the years, multiculturalism, his pro-republic views or the democratic legacy of the convict years, this is a distillation of a contrarian mind that couldn't help but challenge orthodoxy (especially on the left). Overall, it's impossible not to be impressed by the scope of his works.
The Scientist Who Wasn't There
Joanne Briggs
Ithaka, $36.99
When Joanne Briggs was growing up, her scientist father (who'd been a member of a research team at NASA) was the font of all wisdom. Even when he left his marriage and children, she defended him, saying her father knew all there was to know about science. But the charade of his life crumbled in 1986 when The Sunday Times ran an exposé headed 'The Bogus Work of Professor Briggs'. His daughter's investigation into the fabricated life that was the enigma of her father (who died mysteriously in 1986) is a compelling tale of delusion and deception – Briggs, at one point, imagining him as a spy with another whole hidden life. The story, which ranges from Britain, to the US and Deakin University in Victoria, involves, among other things, questionable research findings for pharmaceutical companies and faked qualifications. The fact and fiction of her father's life is mirrored stylistically in a highly imaginative way, Briggs frequently borrowing from fiction. Often very moving, this is amazingly assured for a first book.
The Sisterhood of Ravensbruck
Lynne Olson
Scribe, $37.99
The eponymous sisterhood refers to four French women – Germaine Tillion, Anise Girad, Genevieve de Gaulle (niece of Charles) and Jacqueline d'Alincourt. All were members of the French Resistance during the war, though part of different networks, and all were caught and packed off to Ravensbruck, the all-female concentration camp in Germany. This thoroughly researched, absorbing tale incorporates the lives of many other female resistance fighters, and a key theme running through the book is that the vital role of women in the movement has been either ignored or played down. It's a story of incredible individual bravery that also emphasises the crucial importance and intensity of the lifelong bond between them that was forged in the hell-hole of Ravensbruck. Each of these women is worthy of her own biography. Tillion, an anthropologist, helped POWs and allied servicemen escape until she was betrayed by a Catholic priest working for the Germans who infiltrated her network. She survived the camp, lived to be 100 and, with Girad, is now buried in the Pantheon along with the greats of French history. Among other things, this is an inspiring study of character, courage and grace under pressure.
If Hamlet had taken Tibbits' advice and forgiven all concerned so that he could move on, he might have been a happier character. Mind you, there'd be no play. But this is precisely Tibbits' point – that revenge and anger always end badly, and are emotionally, physically and psychologically destructive. A dead weight that anchors you to the pain of the past. The only effective way out is forgiveness. It doesn't mean absolving the other person of guilt, but the act of forgiving is the most effective way of letting go and conceiving of the future with hope. And it doesn't need to be reciprocal, he points out, quoting Oscar Wilde – 'Always forgive your enemies, nothing annoys them so much' – in this self-help guide with step-by-step strategies. Tibbits is a counsellor as well as a sports coach, and often enough the advice comes across like a half-time revving. And there's the inevitable, rousing 'you can do it' rhetoric, but he's got some pretty valid points.
In a recent experiment, scientists placed a number of white volleyballs among a flock of geese hatching their eggs. The geese, attracted by the large, white objects, left their eggs and attempted to hatch the volleyballs. The geese were in the thrall of what Niklas Brendborg calls 'superstimuli' – his point being that humans are no less susceptible to it than geese. To prove it, he looks at food, sex and online screen superstimuli. Obesity, for example, is not the result of increasingly sedentary lives, but the rise of ultra-processed foods designed by food companies to make us eat more, thereby changing our biology. Similarly, recent surveys point to declining sex in relationships being caused by the rising consumption of the sexual form of superstimuli – glossy, air-brushed pornography. Brendborg makes his points entertainingly, while also drawing on copious research material. But there are also occasions when it feels like he's taking a long time to point out the obvious. Capitalism has always been greedy, grasping and devious.