‘Playful’, ‘elegant’, ‘utterly transporting’: the best Australian books out in August
Young Rupert by Walter Marsh
Biography, Scribe, $35
Like Walter Marsh (who occasionally also writes for Guardian Australia), I too am from Adelaide, which holds the dubious title of being where Rupert Murdoch made his first foray into newspaper editing, having inherited his late father’s (comparably tiny) media empire in his early 20s. Once a bullish boy who argued against capitalism, monopolies and nepotism, young Rupert blew into South Australia like a tornado set on shaking up the dinosaurs in the state’s media and politics.
Marsh has a novelist’s gift for recreating a scene, and the book is meticulously researched and elegantly written. Well worth your time even if you’ve read a lot about Murdoch – or if you feel you couldn’t stand to read one more word about him. – Sian Cain
But The Girl by Jessica Zhan Mei Yu
Fiction, Penguin Random House, $32.99
Jessica Zhan Mei Yu’s protagonist, only known as Girl, is in Scotland, where she is meant to be writing a postcolonial novel. Instead, we follow a writer who is doing no writing but quite a lot of thinking.
Yu’s debut is an intimate novel, steering Girls’ stream of consciousness from her present through the workings of her memory, reflecting on her Malaysian parents in Australia, the grandmother who raised her, her opposition to colonialism as well as her reliance on it, racism, intergenerational trauma, being driven by love that is synonymous with duty, and how identity stems from belonging not to a place or culture but to people. – Rafqa Touma
West Girls by Laura Elizabeth Woollett
Fiction, Scribe, $32.99
West Girls is a composite novel of cleverly interconnected short stories, à la Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge or Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women. The narratives vividly depict the insecurity and existential uncertainty of girls becoming women. Luna Lewis, a key character, parlays her ethnically ambiguous appearance into an international modelling career by rebranding herself the part-Asian Luna Lu.
For the women in West Girls, beauty is the lingua franca and desire is often inexplicable. Though they exist in a world of ambient misogyny and commonplace, even casual, sexual assault, Woollett’s characters know themselves to be “capable of hurting each other in far more inventive ways than men hurt us”. – Donna Lu
The Hummingbird Effect by Kate Mildenhall
Fiction, Scribner, $32.99
Kate Mildenhall is such an exciting writer to read and in The Hummingbird Effect she cleverly and perfectly weaves together strands of past, present and future. This generous, playful novel speaks to themes of climate change, survival and holding space for each other, as well as the enduring power of female friendship.
Deeply embedded in place and plot, Mildenhall also takes extraordinary leaps of imagination as she wonders how human relationships have contributed to, and resisted, the global crises we currently face. She disrupts the paralysing anxiety of facing down the barrel of an uncertain future in the most thrilling, delightful way. – Bec Kavanagh
Life Keeps Me Dancing by Eileen Kramer
Memoir, Pan Macmillan, $36.99
“I’m not old,” Eileen Kramer writes in her new memoir. “I’ve just been here a long time.” Born in 1914, Kramer grew up as Sydney was growing up – but it was her first encounter with Gertrud Bodenweiser that changed her life. The Bodenweiser was one of Australia’s first modern dance companies which – with Kramer – would go on to tour the world.
Kramer is still dancing but she isn’t only a dancer. She has been a painter, a model, a costume designer, a film-maker – and this is her third book. It’s no small gift to be welcomed into memories that date back a century. “Most importantly,” she writes, “I have been having a marvellous time.” – Steph Harmon
God Forgets About the Poor by Peter Polites
Fiction, Ultimo, $34.99
The first chapter of Polites’ third book takes the form of a stream of consciousness delivered by a migrant mother to her son (perhaps a version of Polites, who has written about his mother before). She is unforgiving, scolding, bitterly funny, and she wants him to write her story: “Try and write something good this time.”
The sketch she delivers is filled out in Technicolor across this novel, which takes us from the Greek island of Lefkada where she was born to Athens where she spent her young adulthood, and then to Sydney, where she would build her own family and live out the rest of her life. It’s a tender, funny, full-bodied portrait – and utterly transporting. – SH
Serengotti by Eugen Bacon
Fiction, Transit Lounge, $32.99
After a series of life-altering discoveries (job lost, wife unfaithful, brother missing) Ch’anzu (pronouns zie/hir) leaves hir Melbourne life behind for a fresh start in Serengotti, a gated community for African migrants to Australia just outside Wagga Wagga. There, Ch’anzu starts to believe zie might be cursed.
Bacon is an admired speculative fiction writer, and Serengotti is being billed as her first non-speculative novel. Still, Serengotti has the imaginative chutzpah of science fiction, and a certain confidence that makes it irresistibly compelling. Bacon’s dialogue is particularly energised, thrumming with both humour and verve: “Politicians have no soni. To have shame is a gift. Now they build a plastic city in the middle of nowhere. Like Caniberra.” “It’s Canberra.” – SC
The Compost Coach by Kate Flood
Environment, Murdoch Books, $39.99
Food scraps are having their moment in the sun. But if you’ve wondered why your well intentioned compost has devolved into a smelly, soggy mess, Kate Flood breaks it down for you.
There are tips for garden-havers through to apartment-dwellers, plus a handy cheat’s guide to exactly which food scraps are compost-friendly (eggshells are in, teabags are out). Do it right, she writes and your compost will become host to a “wild 24-hour orgy” – which, at the end of the day, is the sort of life goal many of us aspire to. – Yvonne C Lam
