Welcome to ABC Arts' monthly book column: a shortlist of new releases read and recommended by The Bookshelf's Kate Evans and The Book Show's Claire Nichols, and critics Declan Fry and Cher Tan.
All four read voraciously and widely, and the only guidelines we give them are: make it a new release; make it something you think is great.
The resulting list includes Margaret Atwood's poignant, tour-de-force story collection; a page-turning whodunnit that critiques true crime; a dark mystery that reckons with Ireland's history of violence; a funny, surreal caper through the world of K-pop standom; and a Booker Prize winner's satirical thriller about a guerilla gardening collective in rural Aotearoa.
Old Babes in the Wood by Margaret Atwood
Chatto & Windus (Penguin)
Margaret Atwood mines deeply personal terrain in Old Babes in the Wood, her first work of fiction since The Testaments, her Booker-winning sequel to The Handmaid's Tale.
Old Babes in the Wood is a short story collection bookended by stories about two characters — Nell and Tig. This couple have been together for decades, and their love is deep and comforting. In the opening story, First Aid, Nell remembers a training course the couple once completed together. Nell and Tig approach the course in good humour; at one point, when told to get down on the ground to practise resuscitation, Tig tells Nell that, given the state of his knees, she'll have to call 911 to get someone to lift him back up again.
Nell recalls various moments in the couple's relationship when they might have needed first aid: the camping trip where they could have been attacked by a bear, a kitchen knife accident, an almost-crash. She asks, "Had they really been that careless, that oblivious?" We realise that this is a story about grief. Tig is gone.
Margaret Atwood lost her own beloved partner Graeme Gibson in 2019, and these are stories of a woman trying to make sense of her grief and memories. In one story, Widows, Nell talks about the "curious folding nature of time" that makes her feel like Tig isn't really gone. Atwood's powerful, direct prose gives these stories an emotional truth that left me in tears.
The middle section of the book is in sharp contrast – here, you will find a riot of stories about reincarnated snails, alien storytellers, neighbourhood witches and the spirit of George Orwell. Atwood's skill and dexterity are on dazzling show.
At 83, Margaret Atwood is an author that remains at the top of her game. CN
Old God's Time by Sebastian Barry
Faber (Allen & Unwin)
Irish writer Sebastian Barry creates novels from family stories and fragments. His nine most recent novels feature Dunnes and McNultys — fictional versions of real people who are grappling with Ireland's complicated past and its politics, its wars and uprisings, famines and reprisals; coping with migration across the seas in boats filled with terror and hope.
Always, his characters brim with poetry and surprise, and often with tears. Need to weep at the unfairness of World War I? Turn to his A Long Long Way. Or to cry at how particularly unkind history has been to women? Pick up The Secret Scripture. For love and longing, go for Days Without End.
In his latest novel, Old God's Time, Barry is weeping tears of rage for his country.
At least one member of the McNulty family makes an appearance, but the book's focus is a retired policeman, Tom Kettle. He's 66 years old and has moved to a house overlooking the sea; overlooking his own life and memories.
What happened to his wife June, who he adored, and where are their two children? And why have two of his former colleagues come for a visit? There's a dark, dark mystery starting to unfold, involving a crime of vengeance, that Tom himself may be a part of, and the many crimes of Catholic priests against children.
The story splinters as Tom begins to see things that aren't there. We're privy to his memories and his imaginings; we see how his trauma seems to distort the very air and light around him, creating mirages that he can't distinguish from reality.
What begins as an ostensibly straightforward mystery becomes something harder to fathom; more poetic, shaped by a national fury and reckoning. This is a book that demonstrates what storytelling can do. KE
Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton
Granta (Allen & Unwin)
A guerilla gardening collective of young activists team up with a venture capitalist in rural Aotearoa/New Zealand. What happens next? My prediction: This book gets optioned.
The latest literary thriller from 2013 Booker Prize winner Eleanor Catton (The Luminaries) revolves around the titular collective, which cultivates land on the sly — planting crops and hoping landowners won't notice. In the novel's opening stretch, the group's unofficial leader, self-styled anarchist Mira Bunting, sets her sights on a big prize – a large farm belonging to the recently knighted Sir Owen Darvish and his wife.
Enter Robert Lemoine: a Peter Thiel-esque entrepreneur who heads up surveillance drone company Autonomo, and prospective purchaser of the Darvish land (under the guise of doomsteading, but with more sinister intentions). When Mira has a run-in with him during a reconnaissance mission, he proposes to help her out.
Lemoine meets his foil in the form of erstwhile Birnam Wood member Tony Gallo, freshly returned from an overseas backpacking jaunt and harbouring journalistic pretensions, who attempts to write an exposé of the billionaire. Meanwhile, Mira's seemingly reliable sidekick Shelley Noakes has plans of her own.
When members of the collective move to the Darvish land and begin gardening, eventually all the characters' paths cross.
It's delusion of grandeur after delusion of grandeur in this story of superegos. As the characters play games of reveal and conceal with one another, their myriad and oftentimes contradictory self-interests come to the fore. Catton has a particular gift when it comes to the interiorities of her characters.
She also has a predilection for adroitly constructed Easter egg plots (as seen previously in The Luminaries). In Birnam Wood, plot lines are stacked like nesting dolls, with little clues scattered around for us to uncover. Like her characters, the story isn't always what it seems: What initially appears to be eco-fiction spins out into a full-blown thriller (albeit with a satirical edge). A lesser author might butcher this mixing of genres, but Catton manages a seamless transition.
She asks some big questions — about the allure and evils of capitalism; about how we hold on to our beliefs in the midst of social upheaval; about the unforeseen consequences that emerge from even the minuscule choices we make, knowingly and not.
Come for the riveting interpersonal tension, stay for the darkly comic denouement. This is a classic for these times. CT
I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai
Fleet (Hachette)
American writer Rebecca Makkai resists pigeonholing. Her breakthrough hit The Great Believers, a historical novel set in Chicago, explored AIDS and friendship; across her short stories, she traverses place and time; and her latest, I Have Some Questions for You, is a page-turning whodunnit and a critique of true crime, with concerns of class, memory, race and feminism embedded within it.
It's deeply political, very clever — and entertaining as hell.
It's also a novel punctuated by lists — lists that invite you in, with assurances that "You've heard of her", "You know who I mean", and "It's the one with…" Was it "the one where the guy kept her in the basement" or "the one where the rapist reminded the judge of himself"? Or maybe it was the one where the details are too explicit to comfortably write here.
For Bodie Kane, at the centre of this novel, it was "the one with the swimming pool". When she was at high school – a poor kid at a fancy boarding school, living in quasi-foster care, not fitting in – Bodie's roommate Thalia was murdered and left floating in a pool. A Black man was jailed for the crime. Now in her 40s and a film studies academic and podcaster, Bodie is invited back to the school to teach — and some of her young, clever students want to explore this 'notorious' case of the dead girl.
But Thalia wasn't just a dead girl, or a mystery, or a true crime sensation — and Makkai cleverly uses both the appeal of true crime, and the uneasy ethics of it, to write her way into the lives and experiences underpinning this type of story, exposing the cultural politics of the genre.
Right at the heart of it, there is someone who deserves questioning – on what he did and what he knew and how he reacted. But it's clear that Makkai has questions for all of us and is not afraid of putting us on the spot. KE
Y/N by Esther Yi
Astra House
The Beyhive. Swifties. BTS ARMY. Fandom is forever, but rarely have we been able to get as close as we now can to the objects of our adoration, via live streams, AI-generated voice calls, and "private" messaging apps. In her dizzyingly surreal debut, Berlin-based writer Esther Yi takes the concept of pop star obsession to places you could never have imagined.
Y/N – an abbreviation of "your name", fan fiction in which the reader enters their name and becomes the main character – introduces us to an unnamed woman living in Berlin. She works from home, as "an English copywriter for an Australian expat's business in canned artichoke hearts". Breezily cynical ("Nothing made me want to end a conversation faster than the words 'Oh, that reminds me of the time . . .' I did not want to remind anyone of anything"), she undergoes a transformation after attending a concert by a wildly popular new Korean boy band.
The boys – performers of "supernatural charisma whose concerts could leave a fan permanently destabilized, unable to return to the spiritual attenuation of her daily life" – quickly become an obsession. She is drawn especially to the group's youngest member, Moon. Moon is not only an object of adoration but, for her, the purest form of passion: that which can never be fulfilled. When Moon mysteriously disappears, the narrator flies from Berlin to Seoul to track him down – and finds herself lost in the bizarre universe of the company tasked with managing the band.
Seven pages into Esther Yi's debut, I quietly whispered to myself: "Oh my gosh, this is good." There is some singular and inimitable writing here – of a performer at a K-pop concert, Yi writes: "It was the neck that disturbed me. Long and smooth, it implied the snug containment of a fundamental muscle that ran down the body all the way to the groin, where, I imagined, it boldly flipped out as the penis" – and a great deal of humour ("Each boy was named after a celestial body; it went without saying that none of them was named Earth").
Quirky (I was reminded both of Lisa Hsiao Chen's Activities of Daily Living and Jamie Marina Lau's Gunk Baby), yet serious in its treatment of desire and K-pop, Y/N maps our contemporary landscape with sardonic wit, psychological acuity, dreamy narrative turns – and, of course, fan fiction.
Mordant yet tender, hilarious but heartfelt, Y/N is the definitive novel of K-pop standom we never knew we needed. DF
The Illuminated by Anindita Ghose
Bloomsbury
In the opening chapter of The Illuminated, all Shashi Mallick wants is a good cup of tea. A tea bag won't do; she prefers loose leaf Darjeeling from Kolkata's Shyam Lal & Sons, the brew poured over sugar crystals, with just a drop of milk added at the end.
Shashi's husband Robi has died, the funeral rites have been performed and the visitors have left. And with the right cup of tea maybe Shashi can stop to consider her future without her handsome, charming husband by her side.
Anindita Ghose's novel is about two women — Shashi and her daughter Tara – navigating a life outside the shadows of powerful men. Robi Mallick was not a bad man, but he saw himself as the centre of the universe. Shashi begins to realise that she lost something of herself in her marriage. Tara, meanwhile, is nursing her wounds after a disastrous relationship with an older, married man. Tara, a Sanskrit scholar, is bright and independent, but did she really have the power in the relationship that she thinks she did?
This is a novel heavy on the specifics – the loving attention paid to a perfect cup of tea is a good example. But in that specificity, Ghose speaks to the universal. The story of these two Indian women will resonate with readers around the world thanks to its nuanced examination of power and the patriarchy.
This is Ghose's first novel – she started on the book while working as a features director at Vogue India. It's an impressive and assured debut, and a total pleasure to read. CN
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