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FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Others Were Emeralds
Lang Leav, Viking, $32.99
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Poet and novelist Lang Leav (Sad Girls) weaves a delicate, moving coming-of-age tale set in ’90s Australia, when anti-immigrant sentiment resulted in the rise of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation. Growing up in the melting pot of Whitlam, Ai is the daughter of Cambodian refugees who fled the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime. The past still lingers in whispers, but Ai is an ordinary adolescent looking to the future.
She finds her first boyfriend, shares her art with her closest friend, the French Vietnamese Brigitte, and feels the sting of racism: something that obsesses her embittered classmate, Sying, even as it binds Ai’s friendship group closer together. Suddenly, tragedy strikes, and Ai looks back on fateful events from young adulthood, trying to make sense of senseless violence.
Leav layers shadows of the horrors Ai’s parents fled, the immediacy of teen characters in their final year at high school, and a mature, poetic reflection on innocence and traumatic experience.
One Day We’re All Going to Die
Elise Esther Hearst, HQ Fiction, $32.99
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Talented young playwright Elise Esther Hearst has credits including last year’s wonderful production of Yentl and A Very Jewish Christmas Carol, set to open at the MTC in November. Her debut novel follows Naomi, a Jewish millennial struggling to meet the expectations of her parents and grandparents.
Her grandmother Cookie is a Polish Holocaust survivor, and intergenerational trauma plays out through neurotic overprotectiveness and guilt-tripping from Naomi’s parents, especially when she starts dating a goy. They’re not entirely wrong to be worried – their daughter is naive and unlucky in lust. Still, Naomi takes pride in her curatorship of the Museum of Jewish Heritage, where she preserves culture and stories from the Jewish diaspora in Melbourne.
The book is closer to Judy Blume than Sally Rooney, and Hearst’s novelistic skills need work. Some themes and dramatic situations are thrown away through breathless oversharing, with no sexual detail or abnormal bowel movement left untold, and the author’s craft doesn’t yet match her fearlessness.
The Book of Fire
Christy Lefteri, Manilla, $32.99
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A Greek island devastated by fire forms the backdrop to this novel, though it was written before the catastrophic wave of wildfires that broke out in Greece in July. This conflagration is deliberately lit by Trachonides, a property developer who commits arson to facilitate his plans for a boutique hotel.
The fire has other ideas, burning through 100,000 hectares of forest and leaving the island a smoking ruin. Narrator Irini’s daughter Chara is horribly burnt, and her husband Tasso sinks into depression, traumatised by the inability to protect his family from the disaster. The fire itself leaves an infernal aftermath: residents unconsciously react to hot, burning sensations, or smell smoke long after the event.
It’s all recorded in “The Book of Fire”, a journal Irini starts to help herself recover. Lives and friendships and the sound of the bouzouki (Greek lute) do go on, and Irini takes a bolshie perspective, pinning the situation on failures of capitalism and efficient government as much as climate change.
Learned by Heart
Emma Donoghue, Picador, $34.99
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Emma Donoghue’s Learned By Heart offers an intense historical novel based on the early life of the openly lesbian diarist and businesswoman Anne Lister, who was also the inspiration for the BBC series Gentleman Jack.
The author focuses on the real-life boarding-school romance between Lister and Eliza Raine, the illegitimate daughter of an English father and an Indian mother. It’s the early 19th century at Miss Hargraves’ Manor School in York, and the two 14-year-old girls regularly escape from lessons and schoolyard games to the privacy of “the Slope” – a claustrophobic attic, and the only place free enough for a torrid sexual awakening and the ferocity of a forbidden first love.
Unbearable desires (not to mention rage and desperation at their unattainability) continue to haunt Eliza in letters written a decade on, after she’s been separated from her lover and committed to an asylum for life.
NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Lifeboat: Disability, Humanity and the NDIS
Micheline Lee, Quarterly Essay, $27.99
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“People treat disability like it’s a kind of strange and unnatural occurrence,” says Micheline Lee. Yet dependency and vulnerability are “inherent to our humanity”. This truth lies at the heart of this restrained, incisive and moving essay on the NDIS, its shortcomings and achievements.
The scheme, implemented by the Gillard government, was a world first. Not welfare but a form of insurance against the costs and exclusions of a major disability. Drawing on her own experience as a lawyer, writer and someone with a disability, Lee shows why a purely market-based system is inadequate to the task of responding to complex needs and to social exclusion.
The blind spots and mistakes of the NDIS can be fixed, she says, but fundamental to its success is a better understanding of the distinction between “being limited by your own body and being disabled by society’s barriers”.
Sound Bites
Ed Le Brocq, ABC Books, $29.99
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Ed Le Brocq is a writer with a gift for exploring the transformative power of music. He is also well-known as a broadcaster on ABC-FM, where this book began as a podcast about the origins and development of Western classical music.
As a result of its origins, Sound Bites has a highly performative and at times pantomime quality that gives it the air of a romp. There are dramatised “interviews” with remarkable but overlooked composers and performers such as Clara Schumann and Mozart’s sister, Nannerl. There is an imagined showdown in a boxing ring between Wagner and Brahms. It’s all in the name of grabbing the audience’s attention and playfully revising the traditional historical narrative.
While the breeziness required of the podcast doesn’t always translate into a satisfying narrative, Sound Bites is a fun and an educational entree to classical music.
How to Slay a Dragon
Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Polity, $41.95
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It’s not often these days that you hear the call for a genuine revolution. Especially from a wealthy businessman. But that’s exactly what Mikhail Khodorkovsky – imprisoned in Russia for 10 years for his criticism of Putin’s corrupt regime and now living in exile – says is required to achieve a “total reset” of the principles of Russian society after centuries of autocracy.
In this handbook, Khodorkovsky methodically outlines how a leap from dictatorship to parliamentary democracy might come about. Far from being a starry-eyed ideologue, he is acutely aware of the difficulty of the task and the enormous obstacles ahead.
But his years in prison have clearly given him time and the mettle to systematically think through the challenges and pitfalls, especially during the crucial transition period. This rigorous blueprint for a bold new future in Russia makes for heartening and timely reading.
Weatherman Goes Bush
Graham Creed, Allen & Unwin, $34.99
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Self-confessed “weather geek” Graham Creed’s understanding of the weather took on a whole new dimension when he gave up his job as an ABC weatherman to devote himself to life on the farm. Now that he was “living the weather” rather than pointing to isobars on a map, he was experiencing first-hand the interconnectedness of the weather and climate, ecology and health of the landscape. As well as contending with drought and floods, there were the daily realities of how the weather affected raising bees for honey, growing flowers to sell and vegetables to eat. While there were times when it was tempting to see the weather and its impact as a problem, he was learning to appreciate the bigger picture. Quietly spoken and down to earth, this memoir charts Creed’s crash course in the trials, elemental dramas and rewards of living on and caring for the land.
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