36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem by Nam Le
Poetry, Scribner, $26.99
Sixteen years after The Boat, Le returns with a small, white-hot book: a poem, or collection of stitched-together poems. Line by line, he takes apart the violence of empire, history and language, clearing space for a burning interrogation and reclamation of poetic traditions, familial nuance and, especially, the right to an interiority that is rich and undefined.
36 Ways slices at certainty with rage, humour and tenderness. Read it even if you’ve never gone near a poem in your life – for the relentless instability, generous intellectual tapestry, and for the last few pages: a slow, beautiful ambush that made me want to lie down and die (in a good way). – Imogen Dewey
The Silver River by Jim Moginie
Memoir, HarperCollins, $34.99
Driving bass and drums, duelling guitars, rousing choruses, and a singer who danced as if he had been shot out of a washing machine, Midnight Oil was a rock band unlike any other. In The Silver River, co-founder Jim Moginie shows what it was really like.
Stitching in the search for his birth parents, the overall effect is one of sadness: a boy from Sydney’s leafy northern suburbs wanted to be in a band because he needed to “belong”. That desire was fulfilled, but ultimately the band became a beast of burden. If you’re interested in the human cost of the music industry, this moving memoir is for you. – Nigel Featherstone
One Another by Gail Jones
Fiction, Text, $34.99
Sydney-based writer Gail Jones is in fine form with her 10th novel. This time she writes about guilt, displacement and the power of the imagination. It’s the story of Helen, at Cambridge, working on a dry academic thesis about the great writer Joseph Conrad (of Heart of Darkness fame). Helen’s real passion is a fiction-oriented work that imagines aspects of Conrad’s life, from his childhood trauma to the alienation he experiences in his adopted country, England.
One Another is a luminously written meditation that delves deep into themes of obsession and loss. – Joseph Cummins
Appreciation by Liam Pieper
Fiction, Penguin, $34.99
The Australian art world is so ripe for satire it’s hard to believe so few have tackled it – but Liam Pieper is savage and spot-on in his third novel. His protagonist Oli Darling is famous and his average art in high demand – partly because, as a queer but approachably blokey artist from country Australia, he’s infinitely marketable. Until he says something about the Anzacs on Q+A, and gets himself cancelled.
Appreciation follows Oli’s attempt to restore his reputation, which involves hiring a ghostwriter to write his memoir and confronting some unflattering truths about his career. For anyone even slightly involved in the industry, it’s great fun guessing who’s who; for everyone else, it’s just great fun. – Steph Harmon
Loving my Lying, Dying Cheating Husband by Kerstin Pilz
Memoir, Affirm Press, $34.99
First thing’s first, that title. How can you possibly resist it? Kerstin Pilz’s “memoir of a whirlwind romance gone wrong” will grab you even before you’ve read the first word, and then, she won’t let you go. Pilz recounts the fairytale of meeting charming Italian Gianni, marrying quickly, and being swept up into his glamorous life before he is diagnosed with terminal cancer. While caring for him, she discovers his many infidelities, and has to wrestle with whether to walk away or stay.
This is sometimes uncomfortable fly-on-the-wall stuff; a woman recounting only her side of the story for obvious, tragic reasons. But it’s also a story of forgiveness and redemption. Ultimately, it’s a story that pulses with kindness, which is its own kind of beauty. – Lucy Clark
Servo by David Goodwin
Memoir/humour, Hachette, $34.99
I’ve long believed everyone should work in retail at least once; it helps you understand humanity better. On “a six-year voyage of sex, drugs and sausage rolls”, David Goodwin worked the graveyard shift in service stations around Melbourne’s west, dealing with oddballs, addicts, loners, wizards … you name it, they’re in this funny little memoir.
Goodwin also discovered a lot about himself, emerging more “cynical. Unafraid. Manic. Depressed. World-weary”. He ends up developing his own religion, Servo Karma, which mainly involves seeing the good in weirdos and handing out free sauce – a creed I can live by. – Sian Cain
Beatrix Bakes: Another Slice by Natalie Paull
Cookbook, Hardie Grant, $50
“For those who think they can’t bake. You can. I know it.” As a avowed non-cake baker, Natalie Paull’s affirmation is all I need. It helps, of course, that her recipes are full of useful detail (“the batter should be clinging to the paddle, forming a 5cm long V-shape”), precise yet poetic (“stir like you’re in a slo-mo film sequence”), buoyed by Paull’s chatty commentary (she likens eating a strawberry butter sponge to “hugging a puppy”), and embellished with helpful illustrations to guide your pretzel-folding and triple-cake-layering.
It’s the second “bakebook” by the owner of the now-closed Melbourne bakery Beatrix Bakes, but a sweet reminder of her skill and verve for all things cake. – Yvonne C Lam
The Cancer Finishing School by Peter Goldsworthy
Memoir, Penguin, $34.99
On one level, this memoir charts the writer’s path from diagnosis of multiple myeloma, through to chemotherapy, autologous stem cell transplant and remission. Goldsworthy, a doctor of 40 years, is wary of the “narcissism” of illness, and acutely aware that his own experience of cancer is “unspecial”.
His real interest lies in the vagaries, the acrobatics, and the mysteries of his mind. Subjective consciousness – not only his, but that of all humans – is his ultimate fascination. Goldsworthy’s own deep curiosity, his magical thinking, his wonder, his regret … it’s here on the page in all its rich idiosyncrasy, and it’s this which brings his book to life. – Adele Dumont
Thanks For Having Me by Emma Darragh
Fiction, Allen & Unwin, $32.99
A disclaimer: I wrote a blurb for this novel, though Darragh and I had never met before I agreed to read it. I was struck by so much in it – the crystal clear writing, the atmosphere, and what Darragh conveys about the complicated relations between mothers, daughters and sisters.
Maternal ambivalence is still under-explored in literature, and this book captures the bone-deep love that can exist simultaneously with a longing for another life. I thought about it for a long, long time after finishing and have been trying to thrust it into as many people’s hands as I can. – Bridie Jabour
Lead Us Not by Abbey Lay
Fiction, Penguin, $34.99
Millie – a big reader, a little uncool – is having a mostly unremarkable final year at her all girls Catholic high school until her classmate Olive – captivating, daring, provocative – moves next door and threatens to derail things.
Their bond is immediate and intense, borderline toxic, as Millie shoulders out people in her life to make more room for Olive. The intoxicating push and pull between them will be recognised by anyone who has ever been a teenage girl (or devoured a Ferrante novel) – with an added layer of sapphic yearning that’s exquisitely drawn. – SH
Always Will Be by Mykaela Saunders
Short stories, UQP, $32.99
This is an exciting, bold story collection from Saunders, a debut Goori-Lebanese author who imagines the future of Tweed, “a country that transforms its moods and types of magic several times a day, and that’s because it’s as alive as everything that lives in it”.
One story imagines what would happen if everyone destroyed their clocks and did away with “colonial time”; another is about an old woman who hides from the glistening metropolis of Tweed Heads; a third imagines the future of bushfire season in the climate crisis. Saunders’ vision for Australia isn’t all robots and tech – it’s more concerned with Aboriginal sovereignty and a reckoning for colonialism, and all the more interesting for it. – SC
