From a Grisham-tier legal thriller to a satire on tabloid journalism, a novel that mines righteous horror from perimenopause, and engaging histories on queer literature and the cats of Australia, there’s truly something for everyone among this week’s top new releases. Read on as our critics deliver their verdicts on the latest books to hit our shelves.
Fiction
Dissection of a Murder by Jo Murray
Macmillan, $39.99
Junior barrister Leila Reynolds lands her first murder case – the high-profile murder of a judge – when the accused, Jack Millman, requests her personally as his defence counsel. Leila knows that the case is beyond her expertise but the cab-rank system means she shouldn’t decline to represent Millman, though she has a fair reason to do so: her own husband (and former law tutor) Julian is prosecuting. A twist-riddled murder trial unfolds and, as secrets emerge, the case looks increasingly impossible to defend. Will Leila be able to get her client acquitted? Will she be able to keep her marriage intact if she manages to win? As the truth behind the crime becomes enmeshed and obscured by the theatre of the trial, all is revealed at a page-turning clip. Jo Murray deepens these characters with realistic detail and handles the nuts and bolts of the legal thriller as smartly as any in the business. Highly recommended for genre fans who’ve read all of John Grisham and are looking for a courtroom drama that’s just as compelling.
The Scoop by Erin Van Der Meer
Headline, $24.99
The decline and fall of print journalism is a subject close to my dark heart and it lies at the core of Erin Van Der Meer’s The Scoop. For 29-year-old Francesca Miller, the axe has already swung. The former features editor at Marie Claire suddenly finds herself out of a job. She’s lured to a trashy tabloid website – with the promise of a transfer to a prestige business journalism masthead if she performs well – run by an analog of the Murdoch press. As Francesca dives into her new life as a tabloid bottom-feeder, she comes to realise the harm her work is causing to one of her subjects, and from there the book takes a moralising tone that undermines the power of its humour. At its best, this is a biting slide into journalistic turpitude that lands somewhere between satire and farce and sometimes feels like Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop updated for the 21st century. Unfortunately the black comic enchantment is partially unwound by the need for Francesca to salvage her virtue – and for the novel to preach against the gutter press in a rather didactic fashion.
The Secret Garden Club by Wendy Lynn Newton
Macmillan, $34.99
When 52-year-old Hilary finds her husband of three decades, George, dead near their compost bin, she’s distraught. Their plans for a tranquil retirement together dashed, Hilary takes out her anger at the unfairness of it on the immaculate garden to which George was devoted, hacking and slashing at all the plants, leaving a wasteland populated only by trees. (Hilary couldn’t get the chainsaw to work, or they would’ve been felled, too.) After the funeral a group of strangers intrudes upon Hilary’s grief. They claim to be members of The Secret Garden Club, of which George was apparently a member, and vow to restore the garden to its former glory. Meanwhile, Hilary is suspicious of George’s secret friends, especially the woman who turned up to her husband’s funeral, and she’s determined to uncover the truth about the mysterious club. What follows is an exploration of grief, community and midlife renewal that avoids the saccharine, disarms with gentle humour and wears its wisdom lightly.
Femme Feral by Sam Beckbessinger
Bloomsbury, $34.99
Feminine rage, and the bodily changes most women undergo in life, have proven a rich field for horror fiction. Adolescence and menstruation have been done – Carrie is a horror classic – so it’s perhaps unsurprising that more recent stabs at feminist body horror, such as The Substance, have homed in on ageing. Femme Feral takes perimenopause – hot flushes, hair growth and other potential symptoms – and crafts it into a werewolf story. Tech executive Ellie is 46 and she’s got a lot on her plate: an imminent promotion to chief executive, a thankless family and a husband blithe to her rising troubles. Ellie hasn’t got time for perimenopause, though, when her doctor misdiagnoses her with it and the hideous men in her life – from idiot co-workers to purveyors of medical misogyny – unleash the beast within. Sam Beckbessinger has created a gory feminist revenge fantasy that will doubtless have female readers nodding their heads in recognition.
Mrs Dickens by Emily Howes
Phoenix, $34.99
There’s been much debate in recent years on whether you can separate the art from the artist when the art is genius and the artist turns out to be an awful human being. Charles Dickens isn’t often mentioned but he fits the mould – at least in relation to his wife, Kate. This historical novel from Emily Howes takes up the story of a troubled marriage from Kate’s perspective, with an invented domestic servant, Anne Brown, thrown into the mix. While it pays due heed to the happy, early years of the Dickens’ family life, it refocuses the lens on the inequities of Victorian marriage and on a separation that was considered scandalous at the time. (Poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning described Dickens’ treatment of his wife as “criminal”.) Fans of Dickens’ fiction may find it difficult to read a portrayal of the artist as a narcissist who engages in manipulation, cruelty and coercive control, and I’m not sure the anachronistic psychological framing is helpful to understanding the underlying complexities and contradictions. Still, as with Howes’ previous novel The Painter’s Daughters, the book is an act of feminist reclamation, allowing imagination to speak where history is muted or silent.
Non-fiction
An Ocean and a Day by Hannah Richell
Fourth Estate, $34.99
It is 10 years since Hannah Richell’s husband, Matt, died in a surfing accident at Tamarama Beach in Sydney. Her account of the days, weeks and months that followed his death is visceral and piercing, the writing honed by time and distance, giving it the crystalline clarity of the ocean on a still day when one can see all the way to the sea floor. The insights this memoir holds are not new but they are immediate, hard-earned and deeply felt: “How fragile we are. How quickly we can leave this world.” As Richell tries to carry on for the sake of her two young children, she finds herself tossed by enormous waves of emotion. The pain is sharper than ever but so, too, are the small joys that “now fill me with a soaring love, a deep appreciation for the tiniest moment of beauty”. In An Ocean and a Day, the story of her time with Matt alternates with the aftermath of losing this love. Her sense of his presence pervading and enriching her life is beautifully achieved.
The Beginning Comes After the End by Rebecca Solnit
Granta, $32.99
Given the chaos that certain global leaders are unleashing on the world and their attempts to turn back the clock on human rights, it is easy to fall into despair about the future. Writer and activist Rebecca Solnit has been on the frontline for decades and is no Pollyanna. So when she says there is reason for hope, it’s possible to take heart. She urges us to consider the bigger picture, all the incremental changes for the good that were inconceivable to many only 60 or 70 years ago. There are landmark cases, such as the removal of the biggest dam in US history along the Klamath River so that Chinook salmon can return to their ancient spawning grounds. Or the more widespread developments in Indigenous rights, women’s rights and LGBTQ+ rights and the shift towards a world view of interconnectedness and interdependence. These incisive essays are a tonic and a balm, a reminder that the slow motion revolutions of the past half-century cannot be easily halted or reversed, and that our greatest hope lies in learning from the past.
Joyful, Anyway by Kate Bowler
Bloomsbury Tonic, $34.99
For much of her life Kate Bowler thought her hunger for more than life was dishing up as a personal weakness. Fulfilment was something that happened to other people. After her miraculous recovery from stage 4 cancer it began to dawn on her that this pervasive state of dissatisfaction was the human condition. What she discovers in the course of this funny, pithy and slightly madcap meditation is that while you can’t make it happen, you can open yourself up to the possibility of being “surprised by joy”, as the poet William Wordsworth puts it. Joy, she says, “is an argument for life itself. Joy is the idea that, yes, it is good to exist – even now. Even in the midst of horrible suffering. It is the ultimate yes.” You won’t find instructions, however, on how to achieve this state of acceptance amid the manic tedium of daily life. Thankfully, Bowler is wary of self help “toxic positivity”, and her sense of humour is too dry to tolerate belief that optimism is the answer. “Joy shows up,” she concludes, “when we are out on a limb.”
The Queer Bookshelf by Layla McCay
Scribe, $39.99
Layla McCay had read hundreds of “girl meets boy” books by the time she was 15. But she’d never encountered a story that reflected her own desires. Finding books that reassured her she wasn’t alone turned out to be a life-changing but haphazard process. While there is no shortage of online lists of must-read LGBTQ+ books, these days, The Queer Bookshelf has the advantage of providing a comprehensive yet accessible overview of queer literature from ancient times to the present day, along with lists of queer classics and recommendations from queer authors for books that matter to them. Given the grim, socially mandated trope in early queer literature that resulted in most homosexual characters meeting a bad end, McCay reserves a special place in the queer bookshelf for works such as Truman Capote’s 1948 coming-of-age tale Other Voices, Other Rooms “for being unusually joyful – the main character realises he’s gay and nothing terrible happens to him”.
The Cats of Australia by Jodie Stewart
ABC Books, $36.99
In recent times the beloved moggy has been cast as the enemy within: a purring pet by day and a cold-blooded killer of native fauna by night. Jodie Stewart’s history of cats in this country since European settlement puts this antagonistic narrative in perspective as one thread of a larger, more complex tale. When Stewart found herself falling in love with her cat, Poppy, she became obsessed with understanding this “confounding” feeling. Have we always loved cats? What does our relationship with them reveal about us? During World War I, cats provided comfort in military hospitals and the trenches on the Western Front. At various stages of our history, cats were hailed as the answer to the rabbit problem, condemned as a plague to be exterminated and held up as emblems of femininity or overfed politicians. These are just a few of the debates documented in this playful work that places these chameleon creatures at the centre of the national story.
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Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: www.smh.com.au
