September Highlights
Our books manager Martin Shaw shares his top picks for new releases this month.
Discovering that special book out of a mountain of submissions is both the great challenge, and surely the great kick, in any fiction publisher’s role. This month we are blessed with some really wonderful Australian debut novels (from publishing houses both large and small, which is always nice), and we also have some welcome returns from a few of our more established authors.
). A wunderkind, perhaps? Her epic book
(coming in at a hefty 832 pages) is simply described as ‘masterly’ by our reviewer, so perhaps indeed.
There’s great excitement, too, for a new book from Cormac McCarthy: The Counselor. It’s a screenplay, set to be released as a feature film towards the end of the year, and it appears to be in the No Country for Old Men vein and then some – think Mexico, drugs, beautiful women, and a whole lot of frontier theology and philosophy. The fans will lap it up, I’m sure.
Throw in a new Thomas Pynchon with Bleeding Edge; the third volume in Margaret Atwood’s dystopian trilogy (after Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood), MaddAddam; and the long-awaited Night Film, the second novel from Marisha Pessl, and it’s a feast of a month.
But closer to home there are, as I’ve suggested, some particular treasures. Sydneysider Fiona McFarlane is an enormous talent and transfixes with her debut The Night Guest; acclaimed non-fiction writer Maria Takolander jumps across to fiction with a short-story collection, The Double; and Eleanor Limprecht has produced What Was Left, which our reviewer declares ‘one of the best debut novels I have read in a long time’.
And finally Chris Womersley, author of the much-admired The Low Road and Bereft, treats us with a highly enjoyable tale of a country boy learning some big life lessons in his richly imagined Cairo.
I’m afraid non-fiction now comes off rather poorly in this month’s wrap, for reasons of space. May I just mention, then, Lloyd Jones’s (of Mister Pip fame) extraordinary memoir A History of Silence? Written partly in response to the psychic jolt the Christchurch earthquakes of 2011 and 2012 induced in him, this is a powerful tale of coming into knowledge about a great swathe of family history that had scarcely been mentioned in his household as he grew up. It’s a fascinating and deeply affecting book which moves towards a riveting climax.
You can read my full review of Jones’s memoir here.
