Brazen thefts and some scrutiny of that Sydney Sweeney ad: 13 new books to read

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t’s hard to believe that we’re about to head into the first month of winter. While the weather may be about to cool down, publishers aren’t. Here is a baker’s dozen of new titles for you to relish if you’re thinking of hunkering down any time soon.

Angertainment
Ed Coper
Summit, $36.99
As Ed Coper, the man behind the success of online political movement GetUp!, says, “power lies with those who can best harness your attention”. In this examination of how angry noise on social media can kill sensible opinion-forming and become “the new political capital”, he scrutinises the MAGA movement, Russian propaganda, that Sydney Sweeney ad for jeans, the undermining of the Voice referendum and more. “Angry clowns” rule the court of public opinion, he concludes.

Land
Maggie O’Farrell
Tinder Press, $34.99
It’s been four years since her novel The Marriage Portrait, but Maggie O’Farrell has been a bit busy − what with the success of the screen adaptation of Hamnet. Land is her 10th novel and is based on her great-great-grandfather who made maps of Ireland for the British authorities in the 19th century around the time of the Irish famine. She has said in interviews leading up to publication that she wanted to tell the whole story of Ireland via the one plot of land.

The Rolling Stones
Bob Spitz
Michael Joseph, $69.99
Before we get Foreign Tongues, here’s a 700-page biography of the band that started up in 1962 and is still tottering along quite nicely, with Jagger and Richards now in their 80s. The account of recording Exile on Main St. is breathtaking: Bob Spitz has done stacks of research and interviews, but only a couple − years ago − with band members. It’s heavily weighted to the years before 2000, but as Keef says: “This is not something you retire from.”

Detention
Ralph Jackman
Allen & Unwin, $34.99
What a first job for a teacher − the remand unit at a youth justice centre in Melbourne. As former broadcaster Ralph Jackman says, “danger would now be woven into my daily routine”. His disgust at the appalling treatment and conditions he saw, and his recognition of dire systemic failures led him to become a whistleblower. As he writes, “few groups of young people have been let down more by older generations than those in Australia’s youth detention facilities”.

Black Life
Jack Davis
UQP, $19.99
In his introduction to this new edition, Kim Scott writes “the pride of survival is deep in the work of Jack Davis, as is the dance of a life and history”. The latest in UQP’s First Nations Classics, Davis’ poems are angry, passionate, sad and tender. In My Mother the Land he laments what has happened to his Country: “Mother why don’t you enfold me/ as you used to in the long long ago/ your morning breath/ was sweetness to my soul …” Accessible and essential work.

Whistler
Ann Patchett
Bloomsbury, $34.99
Daphne and her husband are at the Metropolitan Museum in New York when they spot an old man tailing them. It turns out it’s Eddie, who was briefly married to her mother − so her stepfather − and whom she and her sister Leda loved dearly. But why did her mother boot Eddie out, what did a car crash have to do with it and where does the story about a horse fit in? There are plenty of Patchett’s familiar interests in this gentle novel of loss, families, reconnection and reassessment.

The Children
Melissa Albert
Bloomsbury, $34.99
Melissa Albert has written about mother-daughter relationships in her children’s books and continues in her first novel for adults. Guinevere’s mother Edith Sharpe was a well-known children’s author and now Guin is spruiking her memoir of an idyllic family life. But her brother Ennis, an artist, is offering a different perspective in his work called Mother, prompting reassessments and recalibrations of relationships and the stories families tell themselves.

The Missing Piece
James O’Loghlin
Echo, $34.99
The first friend ABC broadcaster James O’Loghlin made at university was Jum Walker − “a big presence who lit up every room”. But Jum had a ticking bomb inside − his childhood home had been a den of asbestos. Life got in between them and by the time they reconnected, Jum had mesothelioma. But because he had contracted it in his home, there was no compensation. The friends started a campaign to change government policy. It’s a story that’s poignant, uplifting and important.

At Sea
Y.M. Abdel-Magied
Canongate, $32.99
Some say write what you know, and Y.M. (Yassmin) Abdel-Magied, a former drilling engineer, does just that in her first novel for adults set on an oil-drilling rig. Zainab is a Muslim engineer drafted in for her first posting as a “toolpusher” on a rig where she is the only woman. But something is awry, and her boss wants her to make sure the final operations run smoothly and “everyone gets out alive”. Tension mounts in an unusual, thoughtful sort of locked-room thriller.

Villa Coco
Andrew Sean Greer
Sceptre, $34.99
June 9
The latest from the author of Less is based on his experiences at the Tuscan retreat for writers run by Beatrice Monti della Corte von Rezzori. Towards the end of the 20th century, a newly graduated, gay archivist gets a gig at Villa Coco. He is to be the baronessa’s “adjutant” but finds himself embroiled in the ridiculousness of life there, and her “errant tales” and schemes. It’s a bit of a hoot, one that Greer describes as a “charm novel” a la Mitford or Stella Gibbons.

Make Believe
Mac Barnett
Bonnier, $29.99
June 16
Mac Barnett is a prolific children’s author and national ambassador for young people’s literature in the US. In this short manifesto, he says adults should think deeply about children’s books, which should be as varied as the lives of the children who read them: “When we dismiss children’s books, what we’re really doing is failing to recognise the potential of children”. As Wicked author Gregory Maguire said in a review in The New York Times, “to care about sharing books with children, we have to care about who they are as people”. Hard to argue with that.

Stuff the British Stole
Marc Fennell
Penguin, $46.99
June 23
As Marc Fennell puts it in his further investigations of colonial cultural theft, objects don’t change, but shifting perspectives put a new slant on the history we’ve been taught. He discusses some familiar items from the 8 million objects in the British Museum and elsewhere − the so-called Elgin Marbles from the Parthenon, the Gweagal Shield, and the Shellal Mosaic at the War Memorial − and concludes the brutality and benefits of the British empire will never balance out.

The Beginning Comes After the End
Rebecca Solnit
Granta, $32.99
June 23
In her latest report on the state of our world, author and activist Rebecca Solnit argues that the big change has brought about the idea that everything is connected and that the isolated individual is “at best a fiction”: collaboration and cooperation work better for the natural and social realms than competition. This sequel to Hope in the Dark argues that “we face the past to remember, we face the future to dream”, and a new era will emerge after “a lot of falling apart”.

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