FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
The Winter Warriors
Olivia Norek
Scribe, $35
This cinematic novel from Olivia Norek takes us into the Winter War in November 1939. As World War II began in earnest, the Soviet Union invaded Finland, expecting their small and almost defenceless neighbour to succumb to the might of the invading Red Army. The Finns offered ferocious resistance, assembling irregular infantry – soldiers alongside farmers and workers – to repel the invasion and fight the aggressors into a gruelling stalemate (and subsequent retreat). Norek portrays the shock of sudden war and the intense bond that forms between men compelled to defend their lives and homes. The novel doesn’t skimp on the horrors of the battlefield or the brutal weather conditions in which the war was fought, but nor does it underplay the courage and prowess of the Finnish resistance. (Among the legends who emerge from the conflict is Simo Hayha, an unerring sniper who earned the nickname “the White Death”.) The Winter Warriors is a bracing historical war epic that’s begging to be filmed, and given the current war in Ukraine, it stands as a stark reminder of past Russian aggression and the heroism of those who resisted it.
The Barbecue at No. 9
Jennie Godfrey
Hutchinson Heinemann, $34.99
Author Jennie Godfrey came to notice with her bestseller The List of Suspicious Things – a wry, perceptive, quietly devastating blend of coming-of-age and detective fiction that featured two tweens mounting their own investigation into the Yorkshire Ripper murders in 1979. A similarly tragicomic vision emerges in her latest novel. A nostalgia-streaked neighbourhood comedy-drama, The Barbecue at No. 9 is set in 1985, at a barbecue thrown to watch the Live Aid concert. Domestic goddess Lydia Gordon is keen to impress the neighbours with her posh home, immaculately kept garden and picture-perfect family. Her guests bring their secrets with them – Rita, an Australian, has escaped a past involving shocking abuse she’s ashamed to share; Steve is a veteran of the Falklands War, struggling with terrors of his own; even Mr. Wilson has something lurking under the handsome facade. As the truth comes out, the neighbours’ stories make perfection seem like an inhuman quality. Thankfully, Lydia and her family are more human than she imagines, and hidden depths loom under the soapie surface.
Operation Bounce House
Matt Dinniman
Michael Joseph, $34.99
Gamer geeks might get a kick out of Operation Bounce House (and may be familiar with Matt Dinniman from his Dungeon Crawler Carl series), although it does seem like a highly derivative sci-fi fantasy to me. In a far future, humans have colonised other planets. New Sonora has recently re-established contact with Earth, 50 years after a mystery disease decimated the population. It’s a planet of farmers, peaceful enough. It begins with a rancidly hungover Oliver Lewis being chastised by Roger, a sarcastic AI and regular source of comic relief. That’s a comfort, as events quickly darken. Earth is waging war on New Sonora. The sinister Apex Corporation is selling tickets to gamer nerds on Earth, who pay to control combat mechs (giant robots), on New Sonora, thinking their genocidal actions are just a game. Oliver and fellow colonists – including firebrand Rosita – must fight for their lives against an army of death machines. Dinniman demonstrates more of a gift for slacker humour than novelistic structure or originality (the book borrows heavily from the premise of Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game). Still, the world-building does become strangely immersive, and the author knows his audience and how to entertain them.
The Other Child
Susi Fox
Penguin, $34.99
Country doctor turned author Susi Fox wove the uncertainties and stresses of new motherhood into her last novel. Mine portrayed a woman convinced the baby she’s given birth to in hospital isn’t hers, and the mystery turns on whether there’s been an unthinkable medical error or whether she’s suffering postnatal depression spiralling into psychosis. In The Other Child, obstetrician Lauren is encouraged by her partner, stay-at-home dad Alex, to return to work after the birth of their second child, Charlotte. She’s riddled with anxiety at the prospect – still navigating her grief and guilt at the drowning death of her firstborn – and worried about the safety of her daughter while she’s struggling to readjust to working again. Are her fears an understandable response to the trauma of losing a child, or does she have reason not to entrust Charlotte to her husband’s care? Is Lauren experiencing mental illness, or might she be the victim of a chilling and insidious form of gendered violence? Fox has written a psychological thriller with sustained tension and a serious twist.
The Girls Before
Kate Alice Marshall
Macmillan, $34.99
Kate Alice Marshall’s The Girls Before follows a dark trail of child abduction. Audrey is a school counsellor and a search and rescue volunteer. The novel begins with a toddler found unharmed, but for Audrey, the prospect of children disappearing has always tormented her since Janie, her best friend growing up, vanished without trace. Janie always loved the local legend of a forest witch who saves girls from bad men. As an adult, Audrey is reminded of this when she begins to suspect that a local girl, Meghan, who vanished months ago, didn’t just run away as everyone assumes. Her investigation into Meghan’s disappearance leads to a prominent local family. It’s interspersed with chapters from the desperate perspective of a girl undergoing a horrifying ordeal. Calling herself Stranger, the girl has been abducted and imprisoned underground. She surmises that she will be murdered like girls before her and is determined to escape her fate. Known for her YA fiction, Marshall has composed a tense thriller with a folk-horror vibe that will keep you guessing, despite implausible elements.
NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Letter From Provence
Sheryle Bagwell
Allen & Unwin, $34.99
This is so much more than the usual run-of-the-moulin story about buying a house in rural France. In 2017, Bagwell and her husband did buy a place in a village in Provence, but what follows is multi-layered, cleverly structured and often very moving. It turned out that Madame de Sevigne, famous for her 17th-century letters to her daughter (lauded by Proust), lived and died in a nearby chateau for five years with her daughter, and she becomes a ghost-like presence in her tale. Bagwell’s mother (who died at 42 and dreamed of going to Paris) is also an abiding one; Bagwell looks back on suburban Sydney from her room in Provence to her parents’ violent, unhappy marriage and the lifetime of baggage that came of it. All the challenges and rewards of village life, from difficult neighbours to the Mistral, frame the tale. Told in simple but such effective writing, it is essentially a daughter’s love letter to her mother, reversing the parallel narrative of de Sevigne’s letters to her daughter – both amplifying the central preoccupation of mothers and daughters.
A Theory of Happiness
Kim Hyung Seok
Bloomsbury, $29.99
Kim Hyung Seok may be a former Harvard professor, but it’s just possible that his best qualification to write about the philosophy of happiness is that he’s 105 years old – and he must know something. Although it’s called a “theory” of happiness, it’s really a series of anecdotes about life’s lessons and his conclusions. Most of the time, the approach works. In one story in Boston, he and a friend look forward to a Beethoven concert by the city’s orchestra, but it’s sold out. They hang about waiting for cancellations, finally getting in via a cleaner. Conclusion: they have not only received the uplifting gift of beauty, but – through observing the conductor at the end, thanking his orchestra for the applause – the lesson of humility. Whether it be receiving a new set of teeth, observing the noble suffering of others or being moved by a simple or grand act of kindness, his idea of happiness often merges with contentment. In the end, happiness is integral to what he calls life’s “growth”, not straining for it in the future, but living every moment in the present.
I’m Not Mad (Anymore)
Bron Lewis
Affirm Press, $36.99
Much of this rollercoaster reflection from comedian Bron Lewis on women, pregnancy, motherhood, menopause and madness reads like dispatches from the front line of womanhood. Especially the mental anguish that many women endure, which is expected to happen silently, without fuss. Drawing heavily on personal experience, she takes us back to her childhood in a very difficult household – five children, a menopausal mother, frequent screaming matches between her stepfather and mother, and white-hot anger, like the time her mother smashed a casserole dish onto a glass-topped table, shattering them both. She then takes us into her own experiences: going on the pill at 17, grillings from doctors, the exhaustion of motherhood, the pressure to breastfeed, guilt and more. By turns funny, raw, wacky, candid and outspoken.
Breaking Awake
P.E. Moskowitz
Bloomsbury, $34.99
In 2017, New York journalist P. E. Moskowitz, then 29, drove with friends to Charlottesville, Virginia, to protest against the newly installed Trump administration. Left and Right clashed and a far-right protestor drove his car through an anti-Trump crowd, nearly killing Moskowitz. The trauma that followed led to a complete nervous breakdown in which an over-arching sense of dissociation set in – from self and society – leading to the death of the old self. Moskowitz had been gay from his early years, but from the ashes of the old self (slowly, through pain, anxiety and therapy) a new trans self emerged. Moskowitz contextualises their trauma, taking us back to 9/11, running from the Twin Towers, convinced that death was at hand. Other traumas followed, culminating in Charlottesville. For a while their impulse was to get back to normal, then gradually, with the aid of various drugs, they began to embrace what had happened and turn it into a positive, a pathway to a new life altogether. Vividly described, considered, thoughtful writing.
Unlock Your Breath
Rory Warnock
Macmillan, $39.99
Professor Higgins says of Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady that he’s so accustomed to her face it’s second nature – “like breathing out, and breathing in”. To performance coach Rory Warnock, however, it’s not quite that simple. Yes, breathing is a reflex. It “isn’t a choice, but the way you breathe is”. To Warnock, who coaches elite athletes and CEOs, breathing is the bridge between brain and body, between the involuntary states of “flight or fight” marked by intense breathing, and “rest and digest”, or coming down. Addressing the latter may help in affecting, say, blood pressure. And, as a part of this general examination of what you might call the art of breathing properly, he proffers the 4/6 method of breathing, especially in the evenings to aid sleep. Close your eyes, breathe in for four seconds and breathe out for six. Then, repeat. As he says, we all breathe, but not many breathe optimally, and the aim of this self-help guide is to do exactly that.
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