New books by Elizabeth Strout, Siri Hustvedt and Robert Forster in May

The Ruiners
Ellena Savage
Summit, $34.99
Six years after Ellena Savage’s acclaimed essay collection, Blueberries, comes her first novel. Pip has non-existent great expectations that are turned on their head when she inherits $50,000. She decamps to Athens with her partner, Sasha, and this very funny, sexy novel loosely continues the essays’ coming-of-age theme − albeit for someone approaching 30 − dealing here with the shadow of a dead mother, an estranged friend and an uncertain lover.

Famesick
Lena Dunham
HarperCollins, $34.99
It’s fair to say that Lena Dunham, creator of the brilliant Girls, has experienced the epitome of tall-poppy syndrome − mega success and public flagellation. Girls made its debut 14 years ago; now, Dunham tells the story of how the series impacted her life in so many ways. Her concern in Famesick is, as our review says, “the cruel co-morbidity of the two conditions, fame and physical sickness, and how the two intertwine to become toxic and debilitating”.

Capture
Amanda Lohrey
Text, $34.99
When psychiatrist James Mathers embarks on the first study of people who claim to have been captured by aliens, he fancies some “profound silliness”. How wrong can you be? Two of his subjects reckon they were part of an alien breeding program, another thinks he has been returned to his home after an abduction. But Mathers is an intriguing character, as are his subjects and his research assistant. It may seem a surprising novel, but Lohrey has always been interested in the complexities of people.

Sirens
Martin McKenzie-Murray
Black Inc., $34.99
The associate editor of The Saturday Paper dives deep into the motivations of first responders Peter, Brett and Tara − a paramedic, a policeman and a firey. He documents briefly his own PTSD, which allows him to delve empathetically into the trauma experienced by his subjects − before, during and after their professional lives − their self-image and their ability to carry on. The professional courage of these people is astounding, but so too is their courage in talking about their experiences with such candour and insight.

Rebirth
Antoun Issa
Hachette, $34.99
Lebanese-Australian journalist Antoun Issa has quite a track record, notably reporting from Beirut during the Arab Spring. Here, he takes on the story of his mother, Laila Khalil, during the civil war in Lebanon that lasted for 15 years from 1975. Based on interviews with Laila, the novel explores the impact of a tragic, doomed love affair and the trauma of leaving home for a new life in Australia. It’s a timely reminder of the suffering of the Lebanese people and the resilience required to begin again.

If You’re Listening: Declassified
Matt Bevan
ABC, $35.99
A love of story lies at the heart of Matt Bevan’s ABC podcast If You’re Listening, and so the same applies to this book, in which he gets to grips with the truths, myths and outright lies of some cracker moments in history. He ranges far and wide, from the Yalta Conference of 1945 and the lack of lemons for the cocktails, to Bob Hawke’s tears over Tiananmen Square, Alexander Downer and Russian interference in the US election, and corruption at the FBI. In truth, never a dull moment.

Phantom Days
Angela O’Keeffe
UQP, $29.99
Can a book really save your life? The hallmark of Angela O’Keeffe’s novels is her use of very different narrative points of view: the painting Blue Poles was one in her first novel, Night Blue, and Hortense Cezanne in the second, The Sitter. In Phantom Days, a book that Isabel brings to London from Sydney to catch up with her partner Lewis shares the duty and brings a vital perspective to the understanding of events and characters. “A book has other ways to see,” it tells us.

Mantle
Romy Ash
Ultimo, $34.99
Nearly 14 years after Romy Ash’s debut, Floundering, comes this metaphorical novel about geologist Ursula visiting her dying mother in Tasmania. Her mother is not suffering from cancer, but from some sort of invasive rash. In her grief, Ursula says “everything has been thrown off balance”, including the natural world and, inevitably, our relationship with it. One of the many meanings of the word “mantle” is a “responsibility passed from one person to another, a type of inheritance”.

Cast Away
Francesca de Tores
Bloomsbury, $32.99
“This island has made such a strange creature of me, full of goat meat and metaphors,” says Alexander Selkirk in this novel about the putative inspiration for Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Francesca de Tores’ Selkirk is a confessed sinner in need of saving, telling the story of his rumbustious life in Scotland, at sea, and his survival while stranded on an island in the company of two talkative cats, Sleek and Pickle, and a goat called Reverend Vicarious Cronch.

Being Patient
Na’ama Carlin, Louise Chappell & Siobhan O’Sullivan
NewSouth, $32.99
The authors knew nothing about “Cancer World” until they received their own diagnoses and moved into what Susan Sontag called the “Kingdom of the Sick”. They talk to patients, medical practitioners and carers about their experiences with cancer, which, they point out, is different for every individual. And while survival is the aim, the impact of the treatment can have lasting effects on different parts of life. Being Patient is at times confronting but nevertheless rewarding.

Demagogues and Despots
John Keane
NewSouth, $32.99
What a timely assessment of political power the professor of politics at the University of Sydney has written. Demagogues are “despots in the making”, and of concern is that the spirit of despotism is “contagious” and constitutional democracies can “easily be transformed into despotic regimes”. Democracy, Keane writes, has a defiantly “punk quality” and “is the condition of possibility of people’s fair-minded acceptance of multiple and divergent lived interpretations of our world”.

Songwriters on the Run
Robert Forster
Penguin, $34.99
As you would expect, there’s a fair bit of music in this first novel from The Go-Betweens’ co-founder, Robert Forster. It’s a sort of crime caper involving Drew and Mick, two musos on tour in the early ’90s. But things don’t quite turn out as expected and “out of the conviviality and rock-and-roll rules … the real world has crashed in and it’s brutal”. It’s not only a question of a dope bust and fraud; where does the Hollywood actor fit in? Forster grabs his material and brings an entrancing riff to it.

The Enigmatic Echidna
Danielle Clode
Black Inc., $36.99
Who doesn’t love an echidna, snuffling through the bush, snout active and spines protecting it? They are tricky to spot and remarkably strong − confined overnight to a kitchen, one echidna managed to shift the fridge around. According to biologist Danielle Clode, author of Koala, echidnas “have a dismissive air about them, as if they care nothing for what the rest of the world is doing”. The male echidna is also known for having one of the world’s “weirdest penises”. Clode knows it all.

Ghost Stories
Siri Hustvedt
Hachette, $34.99
We have had Joan Didion and Geraldine Brooks. Now we have Siri Hustvedt’s memoir about the death from cancer of her husband, the writer Paul Auster. His death was the culmination of a terrible few years that were, for Hustvedt, deranged beyond recognition. Writing from “beyond”, she tells herself: “I am writing from a need to bring something of the man back on the page.” The book is, of course, poignant, but if you’re a fan of these writers, you’ll want to read this.

The Thornbacks
Chloe Wilson
Penguin, $34.99
Poet Chloe Wilson’s short-story collection, Hold Your Fire, was highly rated, not least by Anna Funder, who said it had “enthralled and amazed” her. Now Wilson has extended her prose writing to a first novel, which has mortician sisters Gertie and Tabitha looking for a nice date, but along the way, for revenge on men who have been offensive, violent or worse against women. Like the eponymous thornback ray, the sisters hunt by night, luring their prey (to bars) and then …

The Things We Never Say
Elizabeth Strout
Viking, $35
The thing about Elizabeth Strout is that she loves her characters. Just think of Olive Kitteridge and Lucy Barton. And she has said that she’s a writer because she’s fascinated by what it feels like to be another person. Well, there’s a bit of a change for her in this look at 57-year-old dissatisfied teacher Artie Dam − Damn-dam to his students − who is lonely within his marriage, has dealt with family trauma and then learns something that, well, makes him rethink it all.

John of John
Douglas Stuart
Picador, $34.99, May 12
After four years at textile school in the Scottish Borders, John-Calum Macleod is heading back to the island of Harris and his deacon father, John. But, Douglas Stuart writes, “what skinned him was that the closer he got to home, the more lost he felt”. Of course, he has a secret − he’s gay, and so, an anathema to his fiercely puritanical father. But John has spent his life concealing his own truths, and in this third novel by the Booker Prize winner, those truths will gradually emerge.

The Alchemy of Leadership
Paul Strangio
MUP, $39.99, May 12
In this study of Australian prime ministers this century, political scientist Paul Strangio asserts that we have lived “within John Howard’s political and policy settlement” and while various people have declared the end of Howardism, Strangio is not so sure. He is bracing in his assessments of other PMs, and on Howard concludes that his lack of empathy for those outside his imagined Australian community explains why his legacy for the Liberals has curdled.

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