Welcome to ABC Arts' monthly book column. Each month, we'll present a shortlist of new releases read and recommended by The Bookshelf's Kate Evans and The Book Show's Claire Nichols and Sarah L'Estrange — alongside freelance writers and book reviewers. This month, we're sharing recommendations from Declan Fry.
All four read voraciously and widely, and the only guidelines we gave them were: make it a new release; make it something you think is great.
The resulting list includes the sequel to the best-selling historical mystery The Miniaturist; a gen-X novel soaked in the grunge and grime of 90s Melbourne; a book of short stories that'll stir your emotions; and a collection of essays about reading and the stories we tell ourselves.
The House of Fortune by Jessie Burton
Picador (Pan Macmillan)
When British writer Jessie Burton published her debut novel The Miniaturist back in 2014, it was something of a sensation. It sold a million copies in its first year, was adapted for TV, and now Burton is back with a sequel.
But first, a refresher on The Miniaturist: inspired by a doll's house Burton saw in the Rijksmuseum in the Netherlands, the story took us back to the 1680s and introduced us to Nella, a young newlywed who moves from the countryside to Amsterdam, and into a house of secrets. Craving affection from her distant husband, Nella takes solace in a doll's house he gives her, which is eventually filled with the tiny and intricate creations of the mysterious "miniaturist", a woman with a startling insight into the family's life.
The House of Fortune is set 18 years after the events of the first book. Nella is still living in the same grand house, but inside, the walls are bare. Her brother-in-law, Otto, has lost his job – it's implied that racism is at play here, as Otto is a Black former servant — and Nella has been selling the family's paintings and heirlooms in a bid to keep up appearances, until she can secure a marriage for her rebellious niece, Thea.
Thea is a firecracker: bold, impulsive, and filled with desire. As the book opens, she's in love – but not with the kind of wealthy gentleman Nella would like to see her paired with. Instead, she's sneaking backstage at the theatre, for a fling with the chief set painter, a man who literally creates fantasies for a living.
Nella is the closest thing Thea has to a mother, and tensions are high between these two outspoken women, as one seeks freedom and the other security. When Thea receives an anonymous parcel with a tiny figurine inside, we know the miniaturist is back, and secrets will be revealed once again. CN
Forty Nights by Pirooz Jafari
Ultimo Press
A gentle read about war, trauma and displacement sounds like a contradiction, but this is what Pirooz Jafari has achieved in his debut, Forty Nights. Like the author, the main character Tishtar is a photographer-turned-lawyer who came to Australia from Iran as a young man more than 20 years ago.
There are three interwoven threads: contemporary Melbourne, 1980s Iran and, unexpectedly, 1360s Gotland, Sweden. This last thread takes the narrative beyond autobiographical fiction by adding an element of magical realism.
The novel opens in Melbourne in December, but for Tishtar it's Shab-e Chelleh (Iran's winter solstice) and he feels bereft because he doesn't have anyone to share a feast with, as most of his family are still in Iran.
As the story unfolds, we discover why Tishtar made the decision to come to Australia. He recounts growing up in a warm, loving family in a country whose foundations were shaken first by the Islamic Revolution and then the eight-year war with Iraq that began in 1980.
As the bombs make their way to Tehran, Tishtar describes the fear of going to school and not knowing whether he would return home; on the domestic front, he fears surveillance by the morality police, who he refers to as the "men with beards", on the lookout for anti-Islamic behaviour. "I wondered if the stars wept as they watched our country crumble," Tishtar recounts.
Another thread focuses on Tishtar's attempt, as a migration lawyer in Melbourne, to help a neighbour secure refugee status for her Somali nieces; through this process, we see how slowly the wheels of bureaucracy turn, despite the immediacy of refugees' needs.
Which brings us to the third thread: Gretel, a ghost or visitation from 1360s Gotland, who tells Tishtar the story of her people's struggle against tyranny and war, showing the pervasive impact of conflict through history.
Forty Nights is an accomplished, beautiful novel soaked in the poetry of Tishtar's Persian heritage, and his longing for home. SL
Self-Portrait with Ghost by Meng Jin
Mariner (Harper Collins)
This follow-up to Meng Jin's debut novel, Little Gods, which was released to acclaim in 2020, is a collection of 10 stories, each with a romantic, incantatory sense of scene and frisson. In a landscape allergic to expressiveness and feeling, it is deeply refreshing.
The title story is a beautifully rendered account of an uncanny familial visit. Three Women is a dizzying amalgam of fable, fantasy, and political satire about what it means to be a woman in the world, the unruly strangeness of existence, and selfhood. The Garden is a COVID story that makes the pandemic feel as strange as it was (and is). Rather than rehash familiar referents and details, it channels a harrowing depiction of domestic life during a time of urban environmental collapse. With Feeling Heart is a dreamlike evocation of place and time and change that reminds us, as Roubaud did, that the shape of a city changes faster than the human heart.
In the Event both cleverly mimics the rhythms of phone texting conversation and showcases Jin's talent for crisp writing and telling details: "I hated every aspect of performing: the lights, the stage, the singular attention. Most of all I could not square with the irreproducibility of performance – you had one chance, and then the work disappeared – which, to be successful, required a kind of faith."
Suffering has a similarly sharpened piquancy ("Yet the knowledge of this death, so many years later, remains abstract, so abstract it is like forgetting").
In Phillip Is Dead, the first story and a highlight of the collection, a woman studying art in Buenos Aires develops a complicated relationship with a (wonderfully comically drawn) white male artist as she develops her artistic craft. It's a glibly hilarious story to rival Mitski's Your Best American Girl, whose vertiginous excitement it captures and distils down to its humorous, fraught essence. "Misery made me brave," the narrator reflects; Meng Jin will make you weep, yell, laugh. DF
The Diplomat by Chris Womersley
Picador (Pan Macmillan)
Edward is an artist, just returned to Melbourne from five years in London. Did I say artist? Sorry, I meant an art forger. And when I said 'returned', I meant, 'deported' – him, his dead wife Gertrude's ashes, and 50 grams of smack hidden inside the urn. Bit of a mess, really.
Chris Womersley summons the sticky carpets and discarded mixtapes of 1991 with a layer of grunge that's grimly believable, funny and somehow exhilarating – for all Edward himself is weighed down by guilt, grief and the wrong clothes. He's in an op shop suit, bedecked in a post-punk despair, in a city that's way too hot for him.
Things were pretty hot for him and Gertrude when they left the country too, after an art heist that took Picasso's The Weeping Woman from the National Gallery of Victoria. This was a real 1986 theft (and return), fictionalised by Womersley in his 2013 novel Cairo. You don't need to have read that to make sense of this new novel – because like the best TV series, we get the backstory and context set up in the first few chapters, in the equivalent of an extended opening title sequence.
Edward and Gertrude lived the high life for a while in London, partying and squatting, living for their art. Then the money dried up — but the paint never did; so they turned to art forgery, inventing a lost Polish artist whose work they could sell to Russian art collectors looking for good things now the Wall has come down.
The Diplomat moves back and forward across a day as Edward tries to find his feet again in Melbourne, heading towards a meeting at the Diplomat Motel in St Kilda – and back into his life with Gertrude and all the things he's lost. He's a pale hero whose soundtrack rises and falls, but we hold on with him – unsure whether he'll end with a dramatic crescendo or a slow fade. KE
How to Read Now by Elaine Castillo
Viking (Penguin Random House)
Elaine Castillo had me from the first page: "Author's Note, or a Virgo clarifies things." I'm a Virgo, I thought. I like to clarify things! Virgo or not, you'll require no clarification when it comes to deciding whether to read this book: it's magnificent.
Having come to attention with her debut, America Is Not the Heart, Castillo now turns her attention to the fundamental nature of the stories we tell ourselves: "I have in some crucial way lost my faith in our capacity to truly be commensurate to the work that reading asks of us," she writes.
How to Read Now is a book about the reciprocal relationship between story and reader, and how existence is "not something to be bartered or made palatable so I would one day have value in the world". Castillo is alert to the easy hypocrisy of everything — from those who would decry politicised reading ("It's a political choice to say that certain artists make Real Art That Must Be Protected, and other artists (seemingly always writers of color, queer writers, minoritized writers) make only socialist realism or sentimentalist dogma"), to the related act of commemoration, relevant to recent debates about statues and naming ("Monumentalizing is already an act of editing (and censoring) the past […] Where is that much-romanticized – and much-instrumentalized – love of history when it comes to understanding just whom that history is actually built and peopled by?").
There are cogent reflections on what it means to be an "unexpected reader", as when characters mention, in passing, "Filipino houseboys", and Castillo feels as if "I am walking in on a conversation I wasn't meant to witness, that they never really expected an actual Filipinx person to hear them." (She also considers the Filipinx bodies thrown overboard in Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and Margaret Atwood's revelation that she took inspiration for The Handmaid's Tale from Ferdinand Marcos's murder of dissidents, and Argentinian child abductions).
Yet for all the bravura engagements with the work of Austen, Didion, Handke, Atwood, Henry James and others, it is the aching beauty and pathos of her writing on the colonisation of Filipinx languages and its intersection with Homeric storytelling, or on figures like Māori filmmaker Merata Mita, Wong Kar-wai, Park Chan-wook and Hou Hsiao-Hsien, that really expand the book, together with her moving account of her father's passing in 2006:
"My father in the years I knew him — late in the long book of his life; that last, uneven, American chapter — was mostly a quiet, melancholy, and deeply internal person, who nevertheless had an indomitable sense of his own worth […] He was, of course, misread every single day of his life in America."
"For if our stories primarily serve to educate, console, and productively scold a comfortable white readership, then those stories will have failed their readers, and those readers will have failed those stories," Castillo writes.
This is a thoughtful, humorous collection narrated with elan, passion, and fierce intelligence. DF
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