‘Poetic’, ‘fearless’, ‘a creative triumph’: the best Australian books out in February
My Brilliant Sister by Amy Brown
Fiction, Scribner, $32.99
The reading year is off to a fantastic start with Amy Brown’s triptych of sorts. Using the life literary icon Stella Maria Miles Franklin as her starting point, Brown has shifted focus to look at the lives of three women who fall outside the spotlight, unrelated to each other except in their creative discontent.
The novel is an easy read – almost episodic in the way it taps into the lives of its subjects whose frustrated desires are infinitely relatable. Brown’s debut novel is a creative triumph. – Bec Kavanagh
We All Lived in Bondi Then by Georgia Blain
Short stories, Scribe, $29.99
In December it will be eight years since author Georgia Blain died of brain cancer, and her work still resonates. This collection of previously unpublished short stories presses adroitly into classic Blain territory – fractured families, grief, love and sadness – while her prodigious literary skill invites instant fly-on-the-wall engagement.
As her friend and fellow author Charlotte Wood says, after losing an author at the height of her powers, these stories are precious. – Lucy Clark
Politica by Yumna Kassab
Fiction, Ultimo, $34.99
War and its indelible marks are the focus of the new novel from western Sydney author Yumna Kassab, who became the inaugural Parramatta Laureate in Literature in December. Taking place in an unidentified place and time and amid an unnamed conflict, the real antagonist emerges as politics itself, its human impact both cataclysmic and insidious.
Kassab tells this tale in her recognisable style of mosaic storytelling, with many characters passing in and out of the book like ghosts, the unique fragmented structure chiming with its preoccupations of communities fissured; families and friends torn apart. Trauma and its distortions also feature, told with attentive care in the author’s economically poetic prose. – Jack Callil
The Great Undoing by Sharlene Allsopp
Fiction, Ultimo Press, $34.99
Sometime in the near future, a global tech blackout brings society crashing down. Scarlet Friday and her friend David make a desperate journey from an apocalyptic London, back to a locked-down Australia. This novel – the Bundjalung author’s debut – takes the form of Scarlet’s diary, her entries written over the top of a book she grabbed on the run: Ernest Scott’s Short History of Australia.
It’s an inventive premise: Scarlet’s entries not only trace their journey, but also unpick Scott’s version of history, and some of the more sinister lies about Australia’s colonial past. Factor in, too, some family reckonings, a swooning romcom and abundant love notes to literature. Sharlene Allsopp has burning points to make about the policing of belonging and exclusion – then, now and onwards. – Imogen Dewey
Monument by Bonny Cassidy
Literary memoir/nonfiction, Giramondo, $32.95
It’s notable when two releases coincide with similar themes. Like Allsopp’s novel, poet Bonny Cassidy’s literary memoir is an unpicking of Australia’s history. She weaves prose, imagined history and forensic research to reject what WEH Stanner described as a national “cult of forgetfulness”, and to excavate what it means to be a white Australian living complicitly on violently stolen land.
Benjamin Duterrau’s famous 1840 painting The Conciliation is a starting point. Inherited by Cassidy’s great-grandfather, it casts colonist George Augustus Robinson as a saviour of the palawa people during lutruwita/Tasmania’s Black War – but his real story is far less comfortable. “Remembering is not about repetition,” she writes. “It is about re-reading history that is not yet ready to be forgotten.” – Steph Harmon
The Pulling by Adele Dumont
Memoir/essays, Scribe, $29.99
There is something impressively unsettling about the atmosphere of Dumont’s new memoir reflecting on her life with trichotillomania – a disorder that causes sufferers to feel irresistible and repeated urges to pull out their own body hair. Dumont also bites and picks at her skin and fingernails. “Before I go on,” as she writes 50 pages in, “let me say that the chapters that follow this one may be hard for you to bear.”
And they often are. But Dumont manages to maintain a curious softness in her writing despite such hard subject matter – a fearless precision and a elegiac quality that is perhaps borne from having peeled away the layers of shame and familial forces that shape us all. – Sian Cain
Ho Jiak by Junda Khoo
Cookbook, Hardie Grant, $55
Junda Khoo has come a long way from cooking eggs in the microwave. In his first cookbook, the Ho Jiak restaurateur chronicles his life – and recipes – from teenaged kitchen incompetent to a chef who has stamped his own gleeful style of Malaysian cooking on the Sydney dining scene.
Yes, there are home-style and hawker favourites like bak kuh teh and char kway teow, but there are also more offbeat inclusions like laksa bombs (prawn laksa-filled wontons) and dry-spiced Wagyu satay. But above all, it is a love letter to the woman who taught him how to cook, his amah. – Yvonne C Lam
All the Words We Know by Bruce Nash
Fiction, Allen & Unwin, $32.99
While promoting this novel, Nash’s publishers have likened him to Richard Osman and Jonas Jonasson: two wildly successful authors writing about wayward seniors. But while this also has an elderly narrator, her having dementia gives this murder mystery a far more solemn quality than most in this field.
We follow indefatigable octogenarian Rose as she investigates the death of a friend, found after an apparent fall in their aged care home. Disbelief will have to be suspended in part, but it’s a charming, warm-hearted whodunnit. – SC
The Next Big Thing by James Colley
Fiction, Pantera Press, $32.99
James Colley – a comedy writer, occasional Guardian contributor, and (full disclosure) a friend – has delivered a breezy, funny and sweet debut: a Castle/Dish-style Aussie romcom about a guy called Norman who has big dreams for his tiny, struggling outback town.
The town, which also happens to be called Norman, is under threat from a mining company and an opportunistic mayor – so Norman (the person) has an idea: to build a new Big Thing, a tourist attraction on the top of Vodafone Hill (so named because it’s the only place you can get phone reception). He and his best friend, Ella, enlist a ragtag team of locals to help in the mystery project, and the payoff is delicious. – SH
