Edenglassie by Melissa Lucashenko
Fiction, UQP, $32.99
Lucashenko’s focus has always been on “ordinary Australians and the extraordinary lives they lead”. Here, entwining a sweeping historical love story with a tense, funny contemporary one, she pulls the country’s history out from under the rug.
The Miles Franklin winner bears unflinching witness to the violence endured by Aboriginal people past and present, and prods hard at the frequent absurdities of white Australia. But neither is mutually exclusive with the stubborn joy that spills from her writing, the way she revels in the stickiest sides of human nature. Like Mullumbimby and Too Much Lip, Edenglassie is shot through with the beauty of First Nations languages and culture, generously illuminating their power and complexity. Gripping, political, horny, moving and very, very funny. Make it into a film already. – Imogen Dewey
Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood
Fiction, Allen & Unwin, $32.99
Stone Yard Devotional is a deeply moving, meditative book about grief and despair, set in a monastery in a small country town. It is the narrator’s home town, and she has abandoned her city life to live there, beside the nuns and despite her atheism, in search of some kind of solace, or service, a way to live alongside all of the catastrophes – of her life and of the world – that feel too much to bear.
It is a spare and spacious novel, deeply interior, and all the more powerful for everything it leaves suggested and unsaid. – Fiona Wright
The Year I Met My Brain by Matilda Boseley
Nonfiction, Penguin, $35
Current estimates put the prevalence of ADHD at around one in 20 Australians. That means there’s a good chance you already know someone who has the disorder or is awaiting diagnosis. In her debut book, Guardian Australia’s very own Matilda Boseley takes readers on a journey into her mind (and that of many others) with the help of psychiatrists, psychologists and other experts.
In a friendly, accessible tone that makes room for emotional complexity, The Year I Met My Brain discusses the gauntlet adults recently diagnosed with ADHD are likely to run, and the lasting impacts of the ones they’ve already passed through. The book may have pretty colours and playful illustrations (both ADHD-friendly design features FYI) but it is also thoroughly researched and – particularly for those still coming to grips with what ADHD means for them – thoroughly helpful. – Alyx Gorman
Late by Michael Fitzgerald
Fiction, Transit Lounge, $32.99
This beguiling little novel by the former editor of Art Monthly imagines what could happen if Marilyn Monroe faked her death and moved to a Seidler apartment in Sydney, under the name Zelda Zonk. It is a ballsy idea and one that pays off, as Fitzgerald is a marvellous ventriloquist for Monroe, who feels instantly solid as an ageing icon.
Monroe-Zonk befriends Daniel, a young man she meets in her building, and the unlikely pair become close as they wander the harbour, exchanging ideas on art, religion and life. It is fabulously elegant writing, a lovely book to read in one sitting. – Sian Cain
Killing for Country: A Family Story by David Marr
Nonfiction, Black Inc, $39.99
“We can be proud of the things done by our families generations ago. We can also be ashamed,” writes David Marr of the discovery that his great-great-grandfather and his brother were members of the Native Police, active in the “massacre business”.
It was a discovery that sent the journalist and Guardian contributor on an “act of atonement, penance by storytelling”. It hurt to look but his family tree warranted a hard stare. So Marr bears witness to his “murdering ancestors” and undertakes a scouring and detailed investigation into the history of the Native Police, while telling the bigger, brutal history of invasion. The timing of this book is painfully exquisite and it demonstrates perfectly how little race politics have changed in Australia. – Lucy Clark
7 Days of Dinner by Adam Liaw
Recipes, Hardie Grant, $49.99
This style of cooking is exactly to my taste: it’s recipe-ish. MasterChef alumni Adam Liaw provides a list of ingredients and instructions, sure, but if you want to go off-piste with whatever’s in the pantry, he certainly encourages it.
The book is helpfully divided into themed days: meat-free Mondays, taco Tuesdays. And I have never felt so “seen” in a cookbook than in “wok Wednesdays”, where Liaw says family quantities of fried rice are actually best made not in a wok but a frypan. After I had a child I realised the necessity of quick, family friendly dinner ideas; Liaw has made my job a little easier – and a lot tastier. – Yvonne C Lam
Unfinished Woman by Robyn Davidson
Memoir, Bloomsbury Publishing, $34,99
Trekking with camels across 2,700km of Australian desert at the age of 27 was neither the beginning nor the end of Robyn Davidson’s remarkable story. More than four decades after Tracks was published, Davidson’s long-awaited memoir explores how her mother’s suicide at age 11 influenced the trajectory of her unconventional life – her intimate relationships, mental health, and sense of self and home.
“Sequential time eludes me,” Davidson writes; but memories do not, as we jump between her childhood in outback Queensland, her bohemian awakening in Brisbane, her itinerant existence in Sydney, the “catastrophe” that was her relationship with Salman Rushdie (though he remains unnamed here) and the decades of commuting to India for her wealthy politician partner. A compelling, exquisitely crafted journey into Davidson’s inner world. – Janine Israel
Gunflower by Laura Jean McKay
Fiction (short stories), Scribe, $29.99
McKay’s 2020 novel, the Arthur C Clarke award-winning The Animals in That Country, was a work of speculative fiction about a pandemic that enables communication between humans and animals. In this follow-up, consisting of 25 short stories penned over a two-decade period, the boundaries between sci-fi and realism continue to be blurred.
The collection is divided into three sections – birth, life and death. Many of the stories have dystopian overtones, from those a mere paragraph long, to another told from the perspective of beleaguered battery hens, to the wry title story set aboard an abortion ship adrift in international waters off the US coast. – JI
The Man Who Wasn’t There by Dan Box
Fiction, Ultimo Press, $36.99
True crime is a tricky beast. On the one hand, it can offer justice for survivors or the wrongly accused. On the other, it can be an exploitative, gory, insensitive quest for clicks and sales.
When crime journalist and Walkley winner Dan Box embarked upon this book about a young Indigenous man who claims he was wrongly convicted of murder in the Northern Territory, he admits he was motivated by the lure of another top journalism award. And with that admission, Box signals this is not your ordinary true crime page-turner (although the pages do turn easily). Box himself becomes a character in a complicated, self-aware story about family tragedy, an unlikely friendship, a media ecosystem that can do as much harm as good, and a justice system he comes to see as tragically flawed. – Celina Ribeiro
Home to Biloela by Priya Nadesalingam with Rebekah Holt
Nonfiction, Allen & Unwin, $34.99
The story of the Nadesalingam family – Sri Lankan asylum seekers who arrived by boat seeking protection – became a touchstone across Australia, representing the excesses of this country’s adamantine asylum policies. But to hear the five-year saga retold in all its grotesque oppression is shocking all over again: the dawn raid on a family home, the forcible removal on to planes, the steady, relentless pressure to push this family home to potential danger.
Rebekah Holt, a passionate, forensic journalist who spent years reporting this issue, has told the family’s story empathically and adroitly. And to hear Priya – the family’s most outspoken member – narrate her family’s trials from the eye of the storm is an extraordinary and vital account of a dark chapter in our nation’s history. – Ben Doherty
