Music memoirs, cooking classes and squatting at Kanye’s: the best Australian books out in November
The Voice Inside by John Farnham
Memoir, Hachette, $49.99
Most Australians would assume they know everything they need to know about John Farnham, possibly our best living singer, given his living-legend status and that song’s ubiquity. But Farnham is a man who prizes privacy and he has largely kept his cards close to his chest – until just three years ago, when he allowed film-maker Poppy Stockell to make a documentary about him.
“I don’t enjoy talking about myself, I really don’t,” his new memoir, written with Stockell, opens. But what follows is a surprisingly fascinating and rather brave account that gives us the first real window into the singer’s mind. – Sian Cain
Theory and Practice by Michelle de Kretser
Fiction, Text Publishing, $32.99
Theory is a swirling eddy that chews you up and spits you out: both exciting and intimidating, it can heighten our attention to the gulf between ideals and real-world actions. It’s in this gap that Michelle de Kretser’s new novel takes place. Narrated by a young woman living in St Kilda in the 1980s, it grapples with no less than jealousy, colonialism and racism, patriarchy, relationships, motherhood and the towering figure of Virginia Woolf – our intellectual, literary “Woolfmother”.
Formally inventive, drily funny, this novel is a stellar accomplishment, artfully articulating the lived experience of the innocuous “and” of its title – a bridge that “makes the transition from theory to practice seem effortless” (which is rarely, if ever, the case). – Jack Callil
Highways and Byways by Jimmy Barnes
Memoir/short fiction, HarperCollins Australia, $45
In the Cold Chisel singer’s fourth autobiographical book, which this time also includes some short fiction, Barnes revisits some previously told yarns, this time holding each gem up to the light for a more detailed, reflective inspection. He’s a compassionate narrator, whether he’s interrogating his own childhood or writing short stories about others.
In the story Sacred Heart, pensioner Mary yearns for human connection but is too slow in opening the safety lock to catch a glimpse of the grocery delivery boy. And in Shirley Knott, about a Darlinghurst drag queen: “Country town prejudices had forced her to fight all her life. She had become hardened beyond belief by the time she learned to sew her own sequins on her first dress.” – Jenny Valentish
Squat by John Safran
Nonfiction, Penguin Australia, $36.99
When we were told John Safran had written a book about squatting in rapper Kanye West’s mansion for a week, our first response was: of course he has. Our nation’s most famous professional provocateur is back with a new book that opens with him slipping into West’s now-abandoned home – but its about much more than that.
Safran became interested in West after his spate of antisemitic outbursts in 2022, and uses that interest as a jumping off point to explore the history between Black and Jewish Americans. He interviews rabbis, pastors, Black Hebrew Israelites, Orthodox Jews, Holocaust deniers and more to tell a story that is – as always with Safran – far more complex and interesting than we first understood. – SC
Tony Tan’s Asian Cooking Class
Cookbook, Murdoch Books, $59.99
It is hugely ambitious to title a cookbook as “Asian”. Charmaine Solomon did it with The Complete Asian Cookbook in the 1970s, when cuisines from the continent were less known to white Australian audiences. But what makes this book by Tony Tan – a prolific Malaysian-born, Victoria-based writer, teacher and chef – so satisfying is his curiosity, reverence and respect for cuisines that are not of his Hainanese heritage.
There are recipes, personal stories and historical context for nasi biryani, khao pad sapparot (Thai fried rice with pineapple) and bánh cuốn (Vietnamese rice noodle rolls). And there is playfulness, with dishes like whole-roasted char siu cauliflower or cheesecake with fermented tofu. The elegant, moody photography and food styling by Mark Roper and Lee Blaylock deserves a special mention too. – Yvonne C Lam
Australian Gospel by Lech Blaine
Memoir, Black Inc, $36.99
Australian Gospel tells the story of two Australian families whose lives overlapped for decades: the Shelleys and the Blaines. It is a sensational tale that is close to home for author Lech Blaine, and it is to his enormous credit that he tells it with compassion, intelligence and wit.
Australian Gospel is a captivating work of narrative nonfiction, at once a tremendously moving story of family life, and a profound meditation on family-making and the legacies of love, grief and trauma that get passed from one generation to the next. – Catriona Menzies-Pike
Max Dupain by Helen Ennis
Biography, 4th Estate, $55
As an artist, Max Dupain was – and remains – that rare beast, a household name, primarily because he’s the photographer behind the iconic Sunbaker (1938), which depicts a young man lying face-down on a beach. In this compassionate but not uncritical biography, Helen Ennis, Australia’s pre-eminent writer on art photography, unmasks Dupain and discovers someone who was riddled with contradictions and doubt.
Ennis is also the writer of the award-winning biography of Olive Cotton, who was a photographer of great ability herself and a childhood friend to Dupain, before becoming his first wife. Despite his phenomenal success, Dupain comes across as the more fragile of the two. Highly illuminating. – Nigel Featherstone
Leave the Girls Behind by Jacqueline Bublitz
Fiction, Allen & Unwin, $34.99
Unlike its title, Jacqueline Bublitz’s second novel leaves no girls behind. Its ambition to weave together a string of girls across the past and the present – one missing, some dead, some ignored and others obsessed over – makes it initially a tough story to crack.
But stick with it: Bublitz’s flawed, amateur detective protagonist, Ruth, has such a strong personal stake in the investigation that its impossible not to get swept up in her enthusiasm. Beyond the tangle of the novel’s opening pages is a smart, gripping (albeit deeply unsettling) read. – Bec Kavanagh
The Thinning by Inga Simpson
Fiction, Hachette, $32.99
Fin Kelvin must travel from the Warrumbungles across the Pilliga in time for the solar eclipse and send a laser signal to her mother. Why? She has no idea. The world around Fin is changing too fast for her to make sense of anything.
Inga Simpson’s taut, melancholic thriller registers the profound losses of the climate crisis through the experience of a traumatised teenager. Simpson projects a vision of life on a planet on the brink of systems collapse that is terrifying but all too recognisable. It’s a terrific read, attentive to the cosmic and the microscopic, with the action propelled by the competing energies of light and darkness. – CMP
Unlovable by Darren Hayes
Memoir, Penguin, $36.99
The former Savage Garden frontman truly tells all here, writing about growing up in Queensland with a loving mother and an abusive father; about the insanities of fame during his time in Savage Garden; and his painful falling out with bandmate Daniel Jones. (Hayes’s hurt and frustration about the way their band ended is palpable.)
Throughout Hayes returns to the burden of homophobia and what it does to gay kids, which is painful and moving. In one chapter Hayes, who briefly married a woman, recounts calling Lifeline after realising he was attracted to men; in another he learns how to have gay sex from an STD clinic doctor, having believed his first “very vanilla” same-sex encounter must have given him HIV. – SC
