Dear Reader, September 2017
Our Fiction Book of the Month is Chris Womersley’s City of Crows, a fascinating historical novel set in seventeenth-century France. Our reviewer is full of praise for this book, calling it ‘fabulous’, ‘dazzling’ and ‘Hieronymus Bosch in literary form’. That’s quite a persuasive endorsement, you must agree.
Considerations of history and the imagined lives of figures from the past offer inspiration for a number of Australian writers this month. Claire G. Coleman’s debut, Terra Nullius, is a powerful retelling of Australia’s history using the devices of speculative genre fiction; Coleman won a black&write! Fellowship in 2016, and is a writer to watch. Ali Alizadeh vividly imagines The Last Days of Jeanne D’Arc; Bram Presser explores family stories and Holocaust survival in an accomplished debut, The Book of Dirt; Steven Carroll brings us his third book fictionalising the life of T.S. Eliot, A New England Affair. Meanwhile, The Choke, the highly anticipated new work from 2015 Miles Franklin Winner, Sofie Laguna, appears, as does Harriet McKnight’s Rain Birds, a first novel about memory loss and climate change.
This month is big on international releases too: new books from Nicole Krauss, Claire Messud, Orhan Pamuk, Celeste Ng and Salman Rushdie; the first in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s new quartet, Autumn; and a stunner of a US debut from Gabriel Tallent, My Absolute Darling. Our resident crime fiction expert, Fiona Hardy, loved Codename Villanelle so much that she prompted us buyers to order extra copies; Stieg Larsson’s fans will be awaiting David Lagercrantz’s next faithful chapter in the Lisbeth Salander story, The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye.
Our Non-fiction Book of the Month is the very special memoir of the late Georgia Blain, The Museum of Words. This is a remarkable book from a much admired and missed author. A celebration of Blain’s life and work will be held during Melbourne Writers Festival.
Look out mid-month for Hillary Rodham Clinton’s What Happened, her crucial reflection on the 2016 US presidential election. Anna Broinowski offers a timely analysis of Pauline Hanson’s resurgence in Please Explain, while A.C. Grayling and Nancy MacLean offer books about democracy (Democracy and its Crisis and Democracy in Chains respectively). I’m keen to read Windham-Campbell Prize recipient Ashleigh Young’s essay collection, Can You Tolerate This? Surely every Australian is at least a little bit in love with Tim Rogers: his new memoir is Detours.
September brings lots of great cookbooks, including Ostro from Melbourne’s Julia Busuttil Nishimura, and Yotam Ottolenghi’s Sweet excursion, with Helen Goh. Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is at last in paperback.
And finally, dear reader, congratulations to the six authors shortlisted for the 2017 Readings Prize: Sam Carmody, Melanie Cheng, Heather Taylor Johnson, Hannah Kent, Marija Peričić and Jane Rawson. What a great shortlist! I’d love to be a fly on the wall when Mark Rubbo and Christos Tsiolkas join the judges to find the winner, which we’ll announce in late October.
