Dear Reader, April 2018
Anita Heiss has edited our Non-fiction Book of the Month, Growing up Aboriginal in Australia, an essential and generous collection that our reviewer calls nothing short of ‘brilliant’; this book gives voice to the variety of Indigenous experience and should be compulsory reading across the land. Please obtain this book immediately (and help raise money for the ILF as well).
The title alone of our Fiction Book of the Month, Robert Hillman’s novel, The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted, should be enough to win you over (heartbreak and bookshops – what more romance can a bibliophile need?), but if you require further encouragement, our reviewer tells you that ‘it doesn’t get better’ for her than this book; this is such an enjoyable novel, and I predict that you and all your friends will soon be debating who should star in the mini-series.
April also brings us Holly Ringland’s debut, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, a book sure to capture botanical imaginations everywhere: our reviewer loved it. Brow Books has another discovery, local wunderkind Jamie Marina Lau’s debut, Pink Mountain on Locust Island. Also out this month are new novels from Gail Jones, Rodney Hall, Andrew Hutchinson, S.A. Jones, Roger Averill and Jenny Ackland, and the collected stories of Gerald Murnane.
Top of my international fiction wishlist is The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner, but yours might be the new work from Raymond E. Feist, Sally Vickers, Mario Vargas Llosa, Donal Ryan, Jo Nesbo, Richard Powers, Négar Djavadi, Madeline Miller, Lisa Genova, Charles Frazier, or Frances Mayes. Joseph Cassara’s hyped debut about the New York voguing scene of the 1980s, The House of Impossible Beauties, is out this month too, as is Asymmetry, an impressive first novel by Lisa Halliday.
Readers of memoir should take note of A Certain Light, journalist Cynthia Banham’s impossible personal story of recovery following a plane crash. Publishers, please keep bringing us books about climate change so that future generations can know that people did care that this was happening: Sunburnt Country and A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things each provide analyses of the journey to this stage of climate crisis. Meanwhile, the global influence of accounting firms is the subject of The Big Four; Everyday Sexism founder Laura Bates has a new essay collection, Misogynation; Alberto Manguel echoes Walter Benjamin’s famous essay – but in reverse – with Packing My Library; David McKnight hopes for a progressive form of populism with Populism Now!; Jennifer Palmieri inspires a new generation of female leaders with Dear Madam President.
And finally, dear reader, the book I’ve most been looking forward to reading this year is Stephanie Bishop’s Man Out of Time. Hachette heeded my desperate plea in my February column, and sent me a proof via express post (thanks to our rep Mary!). I read it immediately. This follow up to 2015’s impeccable Readings Prize-winning The Other Side of the World is sublime. I can’t wait to write a full review and have it on our shelves in September.
