The start of a new month means that there's a new issue of Readings Monthly available online and in our shops. Below you can read Alison Huber's column from the latest issue – and keep an eye on the blog for more updates and recommended new releases throughout the month!
We’ve had such a huge month here at Readings, with (ICYMI) a new shop joining our family in the amazing new retail precinct that has opened in Chadstone with much fanfare. If I sound evangelical when I say it has been a really exciting time for all involved, I don’t mind: it really has! Joe wrote last month about some of the things we think about in relation to shop layout and book placement, the relationship between categories (for those watching closely, True Crime has already moved location at Chadstone), and the way shop fittings enable the display of books and other non-book items we sell (which are often referred to quaintly as ‘Sidelines’ in some parts of the world, but what we at Readings call Stationery and Gifts). It has been fascinating to see (again) how those decisions are playing out in real life now that the shop is open, the way bodies move in its space, as it becomes a new home for the inanimate objects that are animated by our work. How books appear to the people visiting a shop is a constant concern in the everyday work of the bookseller, motivating physical tasks that take up considerable time in our working day: moving books from here to there, checking the books people are asking for are truly visible, thinking about who might like to look at what when they’re in this area or that, trying a favourite title again in a different location, writing a shelf talker to draw attention to the hidden gems you love in amongst all the (literal) tens of thousands of possible books to choose … all this work that calls to the visitor: Look over here! No, over here! Yes, over there!
Month in, month out, there’s an abundance of new titles, most of which you’ve never heard about, and this is where the Readings Monthly does its core work of introducing you to the great literary unknown. In the offerings this month, you might recognise author names for one reason or another (see for example, local lovely Hilde Hinton who has a new book this month called The Opposite of Lonely, which our reviewer calls ‘a truly warm and wonderful read’, or the ‘safe hands’ of journalist Jaqueline Maley, whose second novel Lonely Mouth is out this month), or you may have heard tell of a debut that has reached the status of ‘highly anticipated’ (see Dominic Amerena’s I Want Everything, the first fiction title for Summit Books Australia, which inspired our reviewer to ponder, ‘if maybe, just maybe, Amerena himself might be the next big thing’), or you might know the subject of the tale in question (the ‘haunting and thought-provoking achievement’ that is our Fiction Book of the Month, Nightingale, which author Laura Elvery has based on the life of the historical figure of a certain Florence, or Georgia Rose Phillips’ debut, The Bearcat, based on the notorious cult The Family and its leader Anne Hamilton-Byrne, which our reviewer calls ‘ambitious and complex’).
You might instead seek genre fiction (perhaps the debut Australian sci-fi piece from Cadance Bell, Letters to Our Robot Son, that our reviewer says, ‘will delight any lover’ of the genre, or our Crime Book of the Month, Toby Schmitz’s The Empress Murders, another debut which our reviewer recommends for readers who, ‘wish Agatha Christie novels were a bit more on the gruesome side, or that Hercule Poirot had a potty mouth’: you know who you are!), or you may be on the lookout for a short novel (possibly Little World by Josephine Rowe, which holds so much within its brevity: ‘a eulogy, elegy and prayer to this life’). Perhaps it’s water-cooler fiction you need (Rytual by Chloe Elisabeth Wilson, a sharp and topical debut that we are assured is ‘going to be discussed in group chats, on tram rides, at dinner parties and the office’). We have all these needs covered … And that’s just the Australian fiction! Our reviewers also direct you to the international releases from known and unknown authors including sisters Anne and Claire Berest, Emma Jane Unsworth, Ocean Vuong, Liann Zhang, Sophie Kemp, and Sayaka Murata, and the many delights of debut author Virginia Evans’ The Correspondent, a very appealing novel told in letters written by or to Sybil Van Antwerp, the book’s very memorable protagonist and devotee of its dying art (including fan mail she writes to one of my most favourite authors, the late Larry McMurtry).
Usually at this point I would make a clumsy segue into the Nonfiction offerings for the month, but I’ll leave it to our reviewers to speak for the new books by Micaela Sahhar, Kumi Taguchi, Hannah Kent, Rutger Bregman, Jamila Rizvi & Rosie Waterland, and our pick for Nonfiction Book of the Month, Chinese Parents Don’t Say I Love You by Candice Chung. I have to break with tradition to tell you about a book that’s coming out later this year: Baking and the Meaning of Life: How to Find Joy in 100 Recipes, the first solo cookbook by superstar baker Helen Goh. I’m distracted by/thinking about/dreaming of this book because just this evening, as I race towards my promised deadline (dear Ed., it’s nearly finished), I was one of a small number of booksellers lucky enough to meet the author and sample some of the recipes that will appear in the book. You may know that Goh worked as a pastry chef in Melbourne before moving to London in the early 2000s and finding her way to Yotam Ottolenghi. She has been a recipe developer and colleague of his for many years, co-authoring Sweet and, most recently, Ottolenghi COMFORT. You may also follow her fail-safe recipes featured in the Good Weekend and the Guardian. She’s a wonderfully warm and fascinating speaker in her own right, and had some compelling and true things to say about the importance of baking (with bonus origin stories from the early days of Team Ottolenghi). We also learnt that she is a psychologist with a PhD and the book’s title riffs on one of Irvin Yalom’s, so the thoughtful approach she brings to the table (sorry, I couldn’t resist that) is significant and erudite. Helen, I am more than ready to learn the meaning of life through cake: help me now! Look out for this must-have cookbook in October this year (we’re taking pre-orders right now).
