Juice by Tim Winton
Fiction, Penguin, $49.99 (hardback)
Juice opens as our unnamed narrator, surviving in a climate-ravaged Australia 200 years into the future, is captured by a hostile party and forced to tell his story to save his life – a sort of Scheherazade at the end of the world. We learn how he has spent his life: at first, just making do scavenging in this hellscape; later, finding purpose in an activist’s life, using violence in a desperate attempt to punish the centuries-old fossil fuel dynasties who are responsible for the state of his world.
Winton told the Guardian he never wanted to write a novel about climate change: “Can anybody pick a subject that’s more likely to turn people off?” But Juice is Winton’s most exciting novel in years. – Sian Cain
Read more: A beautiful story of a horrifying future: Juice by Tim Winton reviewed by Tara June Winch
Theory & Practice by Michelle de Kretser
Fiction/memoir, Text, $32.99
Fiction, memoir, fictional memoir and essay, Michelle de Kretser’s scintillating shape-shifter is a distillation of the ideas explored in her ever-evolving novels, including Questions of Travel and Scary Monsters. Her narrator, twice removed from Sri Lanka and Sydney, is at Melbourne University in 1986 trying to analyse Virginia Woolf according to fashionable literary, feminist and postcolonial theories. But Woolf will not conform; nor will real life in the share houses and cafes of bohemian St Kilda, with a non-committal lover and an anxious mother.
Don’t be frightened by the title of this brilliant, cut-glass, funny novel, which is both love story and satire. De Kretser’s St Kilda is as memorable as Helen Garner’s Fitzroy. – Susan Wyndham
Read more: What should a novel look like? Theory & Practice by Michelle de Kretser reviewed by Jack Callil
Dusk by Robbie Arnott
Fiction, Pan Macmillan, $34.99
Across his first three novels Robbie Arnott staked out a fictional terrain distinctly his own in the form of a haunted, phantasmagorical Tasmania that is simultaneously alight with wonder. His fourth novel, Dusk, returns to this landscape, this time in the form of a western about a brother and sister raised on the fringes of society who sign up to hunt down a puma that has been killing sheep in the high country.
As the presence of the puma suggests, Dusk inhabits a magical hinterland in which dinosaur skulls lie half-buried in the forest, but its flashes of weirdness only make this wonderfully spare and incredibly beautiful novel even more bewitching. – James Bradley
Uses for Obsession by Ben Shewry
Memoir, Murdoch Books, $34.99
The darker side of hospitality has been in the spotlight in Australia this year – and acclaimed chef Ben Shewry’s Uses for Obsession offers an unflinching look at what it takes to make it to the top of the restaurant business. In it, he shares the story of how he built his internationally award-winning restaurant Attica, while questioning the systems that propelled him to stardom.
Unafraid to bite the hands that feed, there are also moments of levity in the book, like a love letter to hot chips that reveals fine diners rarely make their own. It wouldn’t be a chef’s memoir without recipes, and Shewry delivers with a meticulously detailed lasagne, right down to 30-step instructions for “obsession-level” bolognese. – Alyx Gorman
Read more: ‘If we can’t tell the truth … we can’t run Attica’: Ben Shewry on the failings of fine dining
The Director and the Daemon by Pitaya Chin
Fiction, Puncher and Wattman, $32.95
This slim novel is my book of the year, and one that has flown criminally under the radar. Set in a near-distant future, where temperatures are hitting 50C, The Director and the Daemon follows two storylines: one about a film director who’s in an ethical bind, the other about a group of young radical activists splintering.
If you’re exasperated at the state of so-called progressive politics, if you roll your eyes at empty posturing, if you’re full of rage and despair and, despite it all, a hopeless kind of love – this is the book for you. Pitaya Chin, who published the excellent novel Revenge under a different name in 2020, is a fiery, funny and utterly singular writer.– Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen
36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem by Nam Le
Poetry, Simon & Schuster, $26.99
This lean book took my breath away. Le’s linked poems (36, and one dismantlingly lovely coda) glow with anger and curiosity. They take the heavy cuts of history – the interwoven violences of colonialism, war, racism – and bear them up in a lethal kind of play. Running through it all is Le’s wry and relentlessly observational self, carving out a form that can hold the pain and grace of family love.
36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem is dappled with literary and cultural references, toying with structure and slicing through its legacies. These poems, intimate with intent, are riven with sorrow, pride and vicious humour. Each on its own is arresting; together, they map a spare and startling constellation. – Imogen Dewey
Woo Woo by Ella Baxter
Fiction, Allen and Unwin, $32.99
What a thrill this year has been for the deliciously unhinged female protagonist. She’s the apathetic sad girl emerged from her cocoon looking for mischief, and Ella Baxter has tapped into her creative fury perfectly in Sabine, the protagonist of her second novel. Sabine is a visual artist preparing for her latest exhibition, Fuck You, Help Me: a series of “nocturnal gothic puppet portraits” who becomes increasingly convinced that she has a stalker.
Leaning into stereotypes about art and madness/female bodies and hysteria, Baxter makes us doubt Sabine, feel her paranoia, delight in her abjection. Woo Woo is a feast of a novel and Baxter expertly invites us to take a seat and gorge ourselves. – Bec Kavanagh
Read more: An art world satire brimming with fury and flair: Woo Woo by Ella Baxter reviewed by Imogen Dewey
Australian Gospel: A Family Saga by Lech Blaine
Nonfiction/memoir, Black Inc, $36.99
This remarkable memoir chronicles the relationship between two Australian families: the author’s own parents, Tom and Lenore, working-class people who regularly took in foster children and cared for them with great generosity of spirit; and Mary and Michael Shelley, itinerant missionaries and the biological parents of three of the Blaines’ five foster kids.
When the Shelleys discovered where their children were, they began terrorising the Blaines in a vile harassment campaign that lasted for decades. Blaine is a compassionate storyteller who manages to find even the best in Michael and Mary Shelley while sifting through a very painful, personal history. – SC
Peripathetic by Cher Tan
Essays, UNSW Press, $34.99
Writing well about the internet is no easy task, especially these days, when there are more mediocre essays about AI than you could shake a weirdly configured hand at. Thank goodness for writers such as Cher Tan, who approaches writing about life online in a refreshing, erudite yet unpretentious way. The Melbourne-based essayist and critic’s debut collection combines cultural commentary and critical theory with reflections on growing up on the fringes in Singapore, the joys of discovering the DIY worlds of zinemaking and punk music, and the ills of modern capitalism.
Tan is searingly intelligent and often very funny, making Peripathetic both a thought-provoking and deeply pleasurable read. – GN
Rapture by Emily Maguire
Fiction, Allen and Unwin, $32.99
In Rapture, Maguire reinvigorates the legend of Pope Joan: the woman who ascended to papacy in the ninth century. At 18, Agnes – with her brilliant mind and innate devotion to God, and her desire for a life beyond wifedom and motherhood – disguises herself as a man to secure her place as a Benedictine monk. Maguire pulls her reader through time and place, following Agnes’ life across monasteries in Germany, Athens and then Rome.
Rapture is a work of paradox – man and woman; fleeting humanity and transcendent faith; prideful duty and freedom and fate. It is these contradicting pieces of tesserae that join to create Maguire’s revelatory icon of Pope Joan as Agnes: the Pagan infant, the motherless child, the Benedictine monk, the passionate lover, the girl-Pope, the utterly human daughter of God. – Rafqa Touma
The Burrow by Melanie Cheng
Novel, Text, $32.99
I’m a huge fan of short books – and Melanie Cheng’s tender novella has stayed with me since I read it in a single sitting. The story is set within a house where its roof, mid-repair, is covered by a blue tarp like a cage, and its inhabitants are still reeling from the tragic death of a child. The renovations will never be finished, the parents are barely communicating, and their remaining daughter, 10-year-old Lucie, is struggling to be seen.
All three are suffering the same loss separately when two new arrivals shake things up: adopted rabbit Fiver, who offers a new shared focus; and grandmother Pauline, who brings Lucie back into the light. This book describes so much about how grief can push us apart then pull us back together; and the relationship between Lucie and Pauline is so warmly, vividly drawn that I couldn’t shake it. – Steph Harmon
Read more: A tender, compelling story of family and grief: The Burrow by Melanie Cheng, reviewed by Jack Callil
Rock Flight by Hasib Hourani
Poetry, Giramondo, $27
There are all manner of cliches to describe Rock Flight, Hasib Hourani’s book-length poem: must-read, powerful, important, moving, necessary. All of them are apt, but none do it justice. In it, fragments collect around a handful of striking images – migratory birds, rocks, boxes – to celebrate Palestinian resilience in the face of ongoing surveillance, displacement and dispossession. Hourani’s language is crystal clear and complex, simultaneously reflecting life in Palestine and his life in Australia. He turns images around, flipping them, moving the reader to see things one way, then another.
In Rock Flight, a rock is a promise, a date seed, a country. And if a box is a thing designed to contain, this poem is the thing that escapes it. – BK
The First Friend by Malcolm Knox
Fiction, Allen and Unwin, $34.99
Malcolm Knox’s marvellous new novel dives into the nightmarish world of Soviet Georgia on the eve of the second world war. Told from the perspective of the fictional Vasil Murtov – childhood friend, chauffeur and right-hand man to the monstrous “Boss” of the republic, Lavrentiy Beria – The First Friend dispenses with the usual proprieties of historical fiction: Knox’s cast of grifting grotesques sound like they’ve dropped in from the pub down the road, and Beria is simultaneously a mass murderer and the boss from hell.
The result is blackly hilarious but utterly chilling, offering a ringside seat on a circus of creeps and crooks that looks uncomfortably like the inner circle of the incoming US president, while also saying profound and unsettling things about the nature of power and the slipperiness of reality. – JB
Young Hawke: The Making of a Larrikin by David Day
Autobiography, HarperCollins, $49.99
I thought I knew a lot of what there was to know about the private Bob Hawke, the most messianic, personally flawed and third-longest serving Australian prime minister. As one of our most written-about prime ministers, there was a sense when he was elected in 1983 that, personally at least, he was an open book. The affairs, the boozing, the endless carousing – it was all out there and in the past. Then I read David Day’s Young Hawke, chronicling Hawke from birth to 1979 (another volume will cover his prime ministership).
Australians didn’t know a tenth of young Hawke’s serious character and emotional flaws. Had they, even in those more forgiving times, it’s doubtful he’d have been quite so celebrated. – Paul Daley
Imperial Harvest by Bruce Pascoe
Fiction, Melbourne Books, $32.99
Yuin, Bunurong and Tasmanian writer (and farmer) Bruce Pascoe writes with great clarity and humour in Imperial Harvest, a book about war and its aftermath. While this is a novel set in 13th century China and Europe, it speaks to Australian history, to the violence, grief and trauma experienced by First Nations people.
I was struck by the way Pascoe explores the effects of violence while also imagining the ways people not only survive but show profound kindness. We follow a simple stablehand and his son as they journey across Europe in search of a place to settle. Beautiful, funny and memorable, this book is one of Pascoe’s best. – Joseph Cummins
The Season by Helen Garner
Memoir, Text, $34.99
During football season in Melbourne, Garner watches her grandson Amby’s under-16s team. Her passion? The eros of sport. Look at those players fly! Look at them leap! The Season is Death in Venice with Sherrin balls.
Garner’s accustomed mode of observation is leavened here by age – and the surveillance native to age, when almost everything involves participation-through-observance: observance of the past, of the lives around her, the changing of the seasons, the games people play. In a way, it is what everything Garner has ever written is about. Garner is good, too, on physical description and the depiction of reflexive emotions. These encapsulate something of The Season’s ineffable longing for inclusion and camaraderie. And her uncanny ear for dialogue, its rhythms and pacing, remains spot on. – Declan Fry
Big Time by Jordan Prosser
Fiction, UQP, $34.99
That Jordan Prosser was a film-maker before he was an author bleeds on to every page of this dystopic, drug-filled debut. Big Time is set in the near-future, where eastern Australia is under fascist rule – and buzzy band the Acceptables are trying to tour a provocative new album, while being tailed by dark forces who want to shut it all down.
The catalyst for everything – outside of the band members’ clashing egos – is a new designer drug named F: a hallucinogen that can disrupt time, giving the user an increasingly addictive glimpse of the future. Narrated largely by a rock journo hanging on for the ride, Big Time is an hilarious and biting satire of pop culture, politics and Australia itself. – SH
Noble Fragments by Michael Visontay
Memoir, Scribe, $36.99
Michael Visontay has written a truly original book: a family memoir that also excavates the cutthroat business world of the rare book trade in New York in the early 20th century.
He could’ve easily veered into sentimentality, or got lost in the details – there are many rabbit holes in the rare book world it turns out! Instead he has deftly entwined the history of “the most famous book in the world”, the Gutenberg Bible, and his own family’s story of the Holocaust and emigration to Sydney into a gripping book. Parts of it read like a thriller, while the humanity beating through other sections brought me to tears. – Bridie Jabour
Excitable Boy by Dominic Gordon
Memoir, Upswell, $29.99
Gleefully name-checking Melbourne trends, locales, subcultures, streets and venues – some still operating, others long-since obliterated – Gordon describes “trying to fuse my body and mind to the surface of the city, like there’s no separation”. His memoir-in-vignettes achieves this often hilariously, with writing that is ridiculously good (the “McDonald’s arch fringes” of ravers outside a club at the tail end of Y2K chic; commemorations of the Melbourne Shuffle; “duck-hooked shopfronts in Chinatown”).
Excitable Boy offers the Melways we need, the commemoration of the deserving and undeserving alike. Like John Waters transplanted from Maryland to Melbourne, Gordon shows the beauty in crime and the crime in beauty, offering an ode to the “oddballs, addicts, loners, fugitives of self” all looking for their little “stab at eternity”. He succeeds; this is an eternal book. – DF
Deep Water: the World in the Ocean by James Bradley
Nonfiction, Penguin, $36.99
James Bradley’s enviable depth and elegance as a writer of poetry, journalism, essays, criticism and novels is on full display in Deep Water: a stunning, beautiful and alarming book about the world’s oceans, the places he calls “the memory of the world”. This is a life’s work from an author with so much yet to write and whose output becomes ever more remarkable with the years. Blending science, natural history, travelogue, a little memoir and literary narrative about the seas, there is wonder, magic and revelation on every page.
Of this book’s many triumphs is the way it wears such an impressive body of research so very lightly. It is nature writing in the company of the world’s best like Barry Lopez. – PD
The Thinning by Inga Simpson
Fiction, Hachette, $32.99
In her novel before last, The Last Woman in the World, Inga Simpson crafted a post-apocalyptic thriller that combined a portrait of social and environmental breakdown with acutely observed writing about the natural world. Her new novel might almost be a sequel.
Set in in a near-future in which human fertility has collapsed and governments have taken drastic steps to consolidate their control, it follows two teenagers on a desperate journey across western New South Wales. The first, Fin, is the daughter of an astronomer and an activist; the other, Terry, is one of a new breed of humans known as Incompletes. By turns uncanny and achingly intimate, The Thinning is suffused with sadness about the escalating losses being wrought by the climate crisis and capitalism, but charts a path through care towards possibility. – JB
Ghost Cities by Siang Lu
Fiction, UQP, $32.99
Imagine you took the collected works of Italo Calvino, Charles Yu, Jorge Luis Borges, Joseph Heller, RF Kuang and Gabriel García Márquez and whizzed them up in a high-performance blender. That heady literary cocktail is Siang Lu’s glorious second novel, Ghost Cities.
It all starts with a joke: a young translator gets fired from his job at the Chinese consulate in Sydney after it’s discovered that he’s furtively monolingual and has been relying on Google Translate to do his job. What happens next is wilfully – joyfully – contradictory: as dreamy as it is ferocious; as mythic as it is satirical. Ghost Cities is a tale of dictators, auteurs and the eternal slipperiness of language. It’s also chock full of puns, big-hearted, and genius. – Beejay Silcox
Read more: A funny, fascinating critique of modern China: Ghost Cities by Siang Lu, reviewed by Tara June Winch
Diving, Falling by Kylie Mirmohamadi
Fiction, Scribe, $32.99
In a year where many female writers reckoned with the disappointments of heterosexual marriage, this confident little debut has stayed with me.
We begin as Leila, a former novelist who has drifted away from her own career to make room for the monstrous ego of her husband, acclaimed artist Ken Black, is writing his obit. When she learns he has left the pointed sum of $69,000 to his mistress and muse, “a posthumous assertion of what he saw as his natural right to act recklessly”, she finds liberation in living as he did and choosing “art over people”. A funny and pleasingly caustic novel. – SC
Max Dupain: A Portrait, by Helen Ennis
Autobiography, Fourth Estate, $55
The dust jacket of this handsome biography, showing a charismatic young Dupain, peels away to expose the eminent Australian photographer’s iconic 1930s image, Sunbaker. Inside, a more complex man and career are revealed in lucid prose by Ennis, a leading historian of photography. Dupain grew up on Sydney’s northern beaches with Olive Cotton, a talented photographer and briefly his wife. (She shot the cover portrait.) Ennis’s previous biography lifted Cotton out of Dupain’s large shadow. Here she finds Dupain (1911-1992) was a creative, driven photographer shaped by self-doubt, war, beach culture, modernism, literature, music and commerce. Ennis dug deeply into his archive and sets his first biography against absorbing history and examination of famous and unknown images. – SW
Always Was, Always Will Be by Thomas Mayo
Nonfiction, Hardie Grant, $19.99
For a man who was scapegoated and vilified during last year’s referendum on an Indigenous voice to parliament, the lead Yes campaigner Thomas Mayo demonstrates an extraordinary amount of grace. This book, written in the days after Australia’s damning rejection of the vote, goes to the bewildering question of where to next. How do supporters continue to fight for Indigenous recognition? What should be the focus now?
Mayo’s approach is salutary and inspiring. Rather than focusing too much on the 60% of Australians who voted no, he instead trains his vision on the other 40% – and the 60,000 volunteers who worked for the Yes campaign. As he writes, “We experienced a loss at the referendum, but we gained resilience, and I refuse to give up my hope – a new generation of Indigenous leaders are ready.” – Lucy Clark
