‘Destined to be a classic’: the best Australian books out in September
The First Friend by Malcolm Knox
Fiction, Allen & Unwin, $34.99
The Australian journalist and novelist Malcolm Knox contemplates the dark heart of post-truth gangster-totalitarianism via the toxic relationship between Lavrentiy Beria, the notorious leader of 1930s Soviet Georgia, and his adopted brother turned driver.
Like a perverse cross between Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin and Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend – where the frenemy in question is, in a crowded field, one of the 20th century’s great monsters – Knox makes the unthinkable recognisable. Knox renders this dark satire in familiar terms, where comrades refer to each other as “old mate” and “drongos” like contemporary politicians trying to sound normal on breakfast television – because some flavours of bullshit transcend time, language and communism. – Walter Marsh
Translations by Jumaana Abdu
Fiction, Penguin, $34.99
The debut novelist Jumaana Abdu is able to capture the specificity of her characters in just a few tender words. We meet no-nonsense Aliyah, “difficult to belittle”, who escapes a traumatic past to reinvent both her life and a rundown property in rural New South Wales. With her is her young daughter Sakina (“she had a charlatan smile and luminous baby-cow eyes, and was a devious thing”) and a reticent, mysterious hired hand, Shep: a Palestinian man who “asked of others what he wished to be asked of himself: nothing.”
As this trio transforms the wilderness around them, Aliyah takes in an old school friend, Hana – and a long-dormant and charged devotion brings the tenuous balance to boiling point. – Steph Harmon
Diving, Falling by Kylie Mirmohamadi
Fiction, Scribe, $32.99
There is a pleasingly frosty quality to this debut, which follows a novelist called Leila, freshly widowed after the death of her husband, the acclaimed artist Ken Black. Having long accepted his moods, pride and infidelities as the necessary price of her comfortable life, she knows he has left his estate to their sons – but soon discovers he secretly altered his will to also leave the pointed sum of $69,000 to his mistress and muse, “a posthumous assertion of what he saw as his natural right to act recklessly”.
A very chichi battle over who will shape Black’s legacy ensues, while Leila begins to emulate her husband and choose “art over people”. Elegant, biting writing. – Sian Cain
Jilya by Tracy Westerman
Nonfiction, UQP, $34.99
While becoming the first Indigenous person in Australia to complete a PhD in clinical psychology, Tracy Westerman learned a fundamental truth: “If you get assessment wrong, you get treatment wrong, and you make things worse.” But when she began to practise in Indigenous communities, she found wrong assessments everywhere: psychologists used a one-size-fits-all model, ignoring “culture-bound syndromes” and causing “incalculable harm”. For instance, cultural practices after a death in the family – such as spirit visitation or “sorry cutting” – are over-diagnosed as symptoms of schizophrenia or self-harm, she writes, leading to traumatising outcomes that could be avoided.
Having founded an institution that trains Indigenous psychologists in the highest-risk communities across Australia, Westerman tells the story of how she got to where she is and the lessons she learned along the way. – SH
Vortex by Rodney Hall
Fiction, Pan Macmillan, $34.99
“Rodney Hall displays the English language as if he had freshly washed it. It looks new,” Angela Carter once wrote. And now, at 88, the two-time Miles Franklin winner has published his 14th novel and again, it feels new, broadly telling the story of a single year: 1954.
There is a Brisbane coming-of-age tale in here – it opens as the city prepares for the young Queen Elizabeth II, on her first tour of the Commonwealth – but this is just the heart of the spout around which twists grander geopolitical forces: the Hague convention, McCarthyism, H-bomb tests in the Pacific, the British empire’s last gasp and plenty more. Hall swoops between vignettes with almost breathless energy, many sentences left tantalisingly hanging as he veers off yet again. – SC
The Degenerates by Raeden Richardson
Fiction, Text Publishing, $34.99
An impoverished shoeshiner flees the slums of Bombay with dreams of building a new life among Melbourne’s grimy laneways. An Australian teenager grieves the loss of a friend who livestreams his suicide. A young woman escapes an unloving family and seeks redefinition in Brooklyn.
Each of these narrative wisps that the Indian-Australian writer Raeden Richardson brings together in his absorbing debut The Degenerates slowly, surely and skilfully manifest a remarkable tale of departure and displacement. It’s authentic, vivid and a stellar first act for the writer, one that holds no punches in challenging preconceived notions of narrative and language. – Jack Callil
Karkalla at Home by Mindy Woods
Cookbook, Murdoch Books, $49.99
Karkalla was the first native plant that Mindy Woods picked with her nan (they called the coastal succulent “pink bush lolly”). But native karkalla, writes the Bundjalung chef, author and former MasterChef contestant, is threatened by an introduced South African variety, often planted as ground cover by landscapers and councils. In the kitchen, the juicy leaves of the native plant work wonderfully in stir-fry, green mango salad and salsa verde.
This is just one example of Woods’ prolific knowledge of Australia’s native ingredients, including where to source them and how to use them in home cooking: bush tomatoes find their way into an XO sauce for pipis; wattleseed and anise myrtle become a tadka for dal; lemon myrtle stars in a summer-ready margarita. This is how Australia could and should eat, if we leaned into First Nations expertise. It is destined to be a classic. – Yvonne C Lam
Beam of Light by John Kinsella
Short stories, Transit Lounge, $32.99
John Kinsella is perhaps best known for his poetry but his latest collection of short stories is a pleasant reminder of how excellent his fiction can be. His characters here are mostly loners and outcasts who yearn to be somewhere better, or to be better.
A boy agonises over whether to join in on a dangerous game of chicken; a grown man recalls an uneasy, sexually charged friendship he struck up with an older couple when he was in his late teens. An alcoholic father reluctantly negotiates his addiction for his baby daughter; a meth addict dumps his girlfriend’s treasured couch in a forest out of spite, then resolves to return it to her. A deeply enjoyable collection, both bleak and hopeful. – SC
Sassafras: A memoir of love, loss and MDMA therapy by Rebecca Huntley
Nonfiction, Hachette, $34.99
The social researcher and media commentator Rebecca Huntley doesn’t come across as a rule-breaker but, when she found herself at the age of 50 grappling with symptoms of complex PTSD that regular therapy wasn’t making a dent in, she turned to alternative medicine – and committed a crime in the process.
Since engaging in underground MDMA therapy – a treatment that was transformative for Huntley, which she describes here in gripping and illuminating scenes – the practice has been legalised in Australia, in a controversial world-first. In Huntley’s occasionally devastating, often funny and deeply researched memoir, she takes a balanced look at the potential offered by this treatment – and the concerns she has about its application. – SH
