Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life by Anna Funder
Creative nonfiction, Penguin, $36.99
Anna Funder boldly takes on her hero, George Orwell, to reinstate his wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, in his life and work. Wifedom is a brilliant hybrid of biography, memoir and literary detective work, which demonstrates how patriarchy allows men to exploit women’s unpaid services.
Funder brings Eileen to life through her letters, supported by forensic rereading of male-authored biographies and Orwell’s classics about tyranny and truth. The author of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four was inspiration for Funder’s Stasiland, but guilty of doublethink in his private life. – Susan Wyndham
The Scope of Permissibility by Zeynab Gamieldien
Fiction, Ultimo Press, $34.99
The Scope of Permissibility left me reeling in the betwixt and between of identity torn by contending cultures. As Sara, Abida and Naeem navigate their first years of university – and test the boundaries of religion and propriety – Gamieldien bares coming of age as a Muslim in Australia as a tug-of-war between expectation and ambition, desire and shame.
The three protagonists of Gamieldien’s debut are allied by their faith, but betray each other to save themselves from betraying their relationship with Allah. In the fallout, I was an emotional wreck. – Rafqa Touma
Audition by Pip Adam
Fiction, Giramondo, $29.95
Every now and then, you are lucky enough to come across a book so inventive, so thrillingly odd, that you struggle to stop thinking about it. Audition did that for me, Adam conjuring up the best of George Saunders’ science fiction in this exciting little novel. The premise, on paper: three giants have been sent into space, for reasons unknown, in a spaceship called Audition. They must continuously speak in order to keep the ship moving and to stop themselves from growing.
It’s an absurd scenario, but one that results in a profoundly moving journey through ideas of incarceration and isolation. Adam trusts her reader to spot the trail of clues she drops before revealing all, and it makes for an exhilirating time. – Sian Cain
The Pole & Other Stories by JM Coetzee
Short stories, Text Publishing, $34.99
In this accomplished, elegiac and quietly moving summa – the eponymous novella, plus four connected short stories and a stray concluding narrative, The Dog – Coetzee offers tribute to his recurring themes: animal kinship, ontological questions (of life, love, and death), and the nature of desire – desire to understand the other, to comprehend and be in communion with “that which is beyond us”.
Coetzee summons the kind of playful seriousness that typifies the work of novelists such as Dutch author Cees Nooteboom, whom he has translated (Coetzee’s descriptions of Nooteboom’s oeuvre – “rather cerebral” and “self-reflexive” – could apply to his own). Beneath plain-spoken surfaces unexpected depths are often revealed, melancholy and glinting with flashes of sweetness, humour, and grand, existential strangeness. – Declan Fry
Restless Dolly Maunder by Kate Grenville
Biography, Text Publishing, $34.99
Grenville’s latest continues her thread of books unpicking the lives of women lost to history: in this case, her own formidable grandmother. Dolly Maunder was born the sixth of seven children in a poor farming family in 19th-century New South Wales. Too clever and ambitious for the limits placed on her gender, Maunder is increasingly furious with her lot, whether it is marriage, work or children.
Just as she once did for her mother in One Life, or for colonist Elizabeth Macarthur over two books, Grenville uses exacting research to imagine her way into the life of another – this time a woman she once feared, and with whom she appears to have come to some understanding. – SC
I’d Rather Not by Robert Skinner
Memoir, Black Inc, $27.99
Don’t judge a book by its cover, obviously – but this one captures the weird energy, bleak humour and absurdity of Skinner’s memoir so perfectly it deserves applause. Skinner was the editor of Melbourne’s short story magazine, the Canary Press – which, it becomes clear, you should only do if you don’t mind living in a shed, a van and (for a stint) at the bottom of a ditch in a dog park.
“On the first day of autumn, I was invited to a literary gala,” Skinner remembers. “I knew it was autumn because I woke up covered in leaves.” It’s one of so many moments in this short and delicious book that made me laugh out loud. – Steph Harmon
My Family Kitchen by Tommy Pham
Cookbook, Penguin, $32.99
As a child of Vietnamese parents, anglicised menus and cookbooks on Vietnamese food are extremely confusing. A blandly labelled “beef noodle soup”, for example, does little to capture the elegant complexity of a bowl of pho tai. Full credit then to the ex-MasterChef Australia contestant Tommy Pham for headlining his recipes with their Vietnamese names, with English subtitles for those who need it. He spins the greatest hits – gỏi cuốn (rice paper rolls) and bún gà áp chảo (lemongrass and sesame oil chicken with vermicelli) – plus home-cooking wonders such as canh chua (sour fish soup) and bò kho (beef stew).
The recipes – which serve “2 adults and 2 littles” – are adaptable for baby and toddler diets, which makes this a “family” cookbook in the truest sense of the word. – Yvonne C Lam
Why We Are Here by Briohny Doyle
Fiction, Penguin, $32.99
BB is in her 30s when she loses her partner to an overdose. Still reeling, her city goes into lockdown. And then she loses her father. How to reckon with the aftermath of a crisis when crises keep piling up?
Why We Are Here is an elegiac interior novel best described by Rachel Yoder in her cover-quote, “big hearted, soul-searching”. In long walks with her dog, Baby, across the coastlines and golf courses of gentrified Silver City (a stand-in for Sydney), BB reckons with loss and healing, in dialogue with those who’ve left her and the authors who came before. It’s also a love letter to a dog, and to all dogs, who will sit with us on a rock by the ocean when we need them most. – SH
Tissue by Madison Griffiths
Nonfiction, Ultimo, $34.99
In 2021, Griffiths wrote a piece for the Guardian detailing her experience having an abortion during a lockdown in Victoria. The piece led to a book deal, for her to explore the topic of abortion at length, and with, as she puts it, “compassion”.
Griffiths writes with literary flourish as she unpicks ideas around gender, femininity, guilt and motherhood, delving into how all of this impacts pregnant people in a world where abortion rights are often murky and increasingly politicised. Tissue is not an account of one abortion, but a dissection of our ideas around abortion; a clear-sighted, humane book that will undoubtedly help many readers find peace in choices they have made, or will make. – SC
The Crying Room by Gretchen Shirm
Fiction, Transit Lounge, $32.99
This admirably chilly novel from Shirm, a lauded short story writer, delves into the intergenerational emotional incontinence of a family, through the stories of four women: Bernie Rodgers, her daughters, Susie and Allison, and Allison’s daughter, Monica.
Bernie’s parenting style – a blend of persistent withholding and frustration – bleeds into the lives of her daughters as they age, which in turn impacts Monica, who decides she’d rather be raised by Susie than Allison. Shirm’s writing is crisp and precise, and will undoubtedly appeal to fans of Gwendoline Riley and Charlotte Wood. – SC
