‘Urgent’, ‘stunningly written’, ‘a feat of imagination’: the best Australian books out in October
Juice by Tim Winton
Fiction, Penguin Random House, $49.99 (hardback)
Juice is a Tim Winton novel, but not as you know it. Though it shares many concerns with his other works – the environment, family, the costs of an activist’s life – it also has an urgent energy I haven’t see before: a zing that jolts you out of your comfort zone, like a slap to the face.
Opening as our unnamed narrator talks to his captor in an attempt to save his life, we learn his story: surviving in Australia 200 years into the future, when the world has been ravaged by climate change. It is his mission to do everything he can – and there are no limits – to stop those responsible from continuing to profit from the status quo. This is a novel about heavy issues, but it barrels along like a thriller – but still with the tough, tender beauty Winton is known for. – Sian Cain
The Burrow by Melanie Cheng
Fiction, Text Publishing, $32.99
After the sudden death of their baby daughter, Jin and Amy are living through the same nightmare, but separately – and they’re barely holding it together for their 10-year-old, Lucie. Their home is just as undone: a renovation hampered by Covid and by grief, with a bright blue tarp slung over it like a blanket on a cage.
The image of a house as a cage is one of many that stuck with me from this tender novella about family, grief and finding hope in the dark. That hope comes in the form of two new arrivals, who disrupt the suffocating atmosphere: Amy’s mother, Pauline, recovering from an accident, who moves into the granny flat; and a rescue rabbit, Fiver, who moves into the yard. – Steph Harmon
The Deal by Alex Miller
Fiction, Allen & Unwin, $32.99
Andy is an aspiring novelist, but after he meets the love of his life and starts a family, he decides to become a school teacher. He meets fellow teacher Lang Tzu, a Chinese-born artist struggling to find meaning in his existence. Lang hatches a plan to obtain a much-longed-for artwork, and he needs Andy’s help.
Alex Miller returns to some familiar, autobiographical themes in The Deal: the role of art in our lives, the struggle of the artist, and what it is to be an outsider. And his prose is, as ever, beautiful. – Joseph Cummins
The Belburd by Nardi Simpson
Fiction, Hachette, $32.99
The Yuwaalaraay author Nardi Simpson follows up her transgenerational epic Song of the Crocodile with a tremendous feat of imagination that spans from the late 18th-century Warrane/Sydney to the present, and takes us from its concrete jungle to the depths of the harbour to the inside of a womb – and beyond.
One storyline follows a young female poet in the present day; the other traces the before- and afterlife of the daughter of Cammeraygal leader Barangaroo and Wangal leader Bennelong, who only lived a few months. It’s in this second strand that Simpson takes full imaginative flight, with indelible scenes including a poignant pas de deux between an eel and a whale, and a birth narrated by the baby. – Dee Jefferson
Rapture by Emily Maguire
Fiction, Allen & Unwin, $32.99
I’m always blown away by the nuance Emily Maguire brings to issues of feminism, freedom and care, with her eye on the person rather than the politic. In Rapture, Maguire’s seventh novel, she explores the questions of faith and identity that arise when Agnes, a clever, bold and curious young woman, takes on a male identity to gain access to the religious insights of the Benedictine monks.
In ninth-century Europe, Agnes is isolated by her gender and circumstance, and the revelation of her true identity could cost her her life. Maguire’s narrative voice brings a freshness to the historical setting, and Agnes’s desire to make her life meaningful hits hard. – Bec Kavanagh
Dusk by Robbie Arnott
Fiction, Pan Macmillan, $34.99
Robbie Arnott’s fourth novel, Dusk, tells the story of a pair of twins who set off into the Tasmanian highlands to hunt down and kill a puma that has been preying on sheep.
Essentially a western played out against an Australian landscape, it is a beguiling creation: stunningly written, more than a little weird (the bones of primeval monsters poke out of the ground, and the twins shelter in the skull of another for a time), and full of love for both its setting and the twins themselves. – James Bradley
Mean Streak by Rick Morton
Nonfiction, HarperCollins, $35.99
The fallout of the robodebt scandal is still ongoing: the victims who took their own lives; the $1.8bn class action lawsuit; the royal commission which implicated a bevy of government figures. Morton has spent the better half of a decade covering the issue for the Saturday Paper, with reporting that has won him two Walkeys, and controversy: just last month he publicly condemned his editors for publishing an “unethical” and “misleading” defence of one of the robodebt bureaucrats.
Mean Streak is the culmination of Morton’s work, using the crisis to expose Australia’s political failings and the fraught relationship between a scandal-ridden government and the citizens it purports to protect. – Michael Sun
Uses for Obsession by Ben Shewry
Memoir, Murdoch Books, $34.99
Don’t call this Australia’s Kitchen Confidential. In his own memoir, Ben Shewry, the executive chef and owner of Melbourne’s Attica, questions why Anthony Bourdain’s book endures for its celebration of restaurant “bro culture”. Instead, New Zealand-born Shewry goes where few (male) chefs have (publicly) gone before (in Australia), by taking apart the toxic and sexist workplace culture of hospitality, the broken ecosystem of food media and restaurant award rankings, plus a short yet searing chapter on food, colonialism and preparing cold toast for Prince Philip’s tour of Aotearoa.
But there is light, joy and love too – his reverence for Thai and First Nations food culture, for hot chips, for the music of Yo La Tengo, for his wife, Kylie, and his children. Shewry is a talented chef, no doubt. Uses for Obsession shows he is a born storyteller too. – Yvonne C Lam
Long Yarn Short by Vanessa Turnbull-Roberts
Memoir, UQP, $34.99
Vanessa Turnbull-Roberts was 10-and-a-half years old when, just as she was about to close her eyes to sleep, her father called to her: she was about to be stolen. The Bundjalung Widubul-Wiabul girl would spend the next eight years in foster care, put there by a system of “family policing” that the now lawyer-writer-social worker artfully dissects in both emotional and clinical detail in Long Yarn Short.
Turnbull-Roberts’ story is both heartbreaking and, as she shows, too common among First Nations families. This is a story of love, pain and a deeply broken system told with grace and power. – Celina Ribeiro
