October Highlights
Our books manager Martin Shaw shares his top picks for new releases this month.
Perhaps not, but if anyone was wondering whether the Australian male fiction writer had ‘gone missing’ in recent times – after a couple of years where the likes of de Kretser, Funder, Mears and Tiffany have ruled the Australian literary roost (and how) – the month of October sees a re-assertion, of sorts. Much-heralded new novels from Richard Flanagan, Tim Winton and Alex Miller are appearing, with early readers suggesting that this may be some of their career-best work.
New releases from Tim Winton, Alex Miller & Richard Flanagan.
It will be fascinating to see what the Miles Franklin judges make of them next year – throw in Christos Tsiolkas’s new book Barracuda, out in November, and we may have a short-odds literary quadrella on our hands for the shortlist!
Though, as ever, there are some really interesting new books released slightly in the shadows of the ‘big guns’. A one-time Vogel winner, Bernard Cohen, returns after a long hiatus with the intriguing Antibiography of Robert F. Menzies; the bookseller turned crime-fiction writer Lenny Bartulin has jumped genres into literary fiction with Infamy, a rollicking historical fiction set in nineteenth-century Tasmania, described as like ‘Martin Scorsese let loose in Van Diemen’s Land’. And Jenny Bond, on debut, transports us to a world of early Arctic exploration in Perfect North.
Turning to international fiction, the Booker Prize shortlist seems to me to be a selection of wide appeal for many readers. On the list, and only just released, is Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland. It’s great to see that a writer already treasured for her exquisite short stories and novels will now find even more readers – she is undoubtedly the real deal. David Vann is another writer with many dedicated fans, and one of them – my colleague Jason Austin – reviews Vann’s latest, Goat Mountain, rather rapturously this month.
On the non-fiction front, there are some much-anticipated new books. Patrick Leigh Fermor was always asked when he was going to write the final volume of his remarkable trilogy, detailing his walk from Holland to Constantinople in the 1930s – but in his lifetime he always claimed that he was unable. Since his death it has been discovered that he had, in fact, an early draft all along, and this has now been assembled for publication as
.
A retrospective of Art Spiegelman’s work, Co-Mix, will be lapped up by fans excited by his visit to our shores this month; and the inimitable John Safran brings us his fascinating take on life and death (and sex and race) in the American South in Murder in Mississippi.
Finally, the most astonishing book production of the year may well be Joe Sacco’s new graphic novel The Great War, which unfolds into a seven-metre long panorama depicting the first day of the Battle of the Somme. It wordlessly expresses so much of the waste and madness of that day, and simultaneously reminds us of the values we need to hold on to if we are to consider ourselves ‘civilised’.
Read more about The Great War and see some photos here.
