Welcome to a bumper summer edition of our regular book column, where we look back across the season of new releases and pick out some favourites.
Your guides are The Bookshelf's Kate Evans and The Book Show's Claire Nichols, and critics Declan Fry and Cher Tan — all of whom read voraciously for a living.
Their summer highlights run the gamut from literary 'prince of darkness' Bret Easton Ellis and international stalwarts James Kelman and Vigdis Hjorth, to emerging stars — homegrown (including crime writer Dinuka McKenzie and poet Shastra Deo) and international.
There's a gory, glamorous high school thriller; a gripping contemporary Indian epic about class and corruption; cracking crime fiction that breaks the mould; lush historical fiction set in 1940s Trinidad; and a poetry collection exploring "paganism, the occult, and lavish apocalypses".
Enjoy!
The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis
Swift Press (Allen & Unwin)
Sex, drugs and murder: Bret Easton Ellis (American Psycho; Less than Zero) returns to familiar thematic territory in The Shards, his first novel in 12 years. And he does it in style.
In a blurring of the lines between memoir and fiction, the narrator of the novel is Bret Ellis himself, remembering his senior year of high school in Los Angeles in 1981. On the surface, Bret's life is pure 80s glamour: He's rich, popular, and handsome, from the tips of his perfect hair down to the soles of his boat shoes (no socks); he's dating the hottest girl in school, and his life is nonstop champagne, cocaine and long drives in his Jaguar.
But inside, Bret is a tortured artist. Perpetually under a valium and Quaalude haze, he is disconnected and lonely. His bisexuality is a secret – he has two lusty, covert affairs with fellow schoolboys – and his interest in a serial killer on the loose (a horrific Easton creation called The Trawler) quickly develops into a worrying obsession.
Things are thrown off course when a new boy arrives at the school. Robert Mallory is impossibly handsome and charming, and Bret is simultaneously attracted to him, and fearful of how this new force could tear his social group apart. As his writerly imagination moves into overdrive, Bret suspects that Robert Mallory could have links to The Trawler himself.
The Shards is glamorous, gory, lyrical, playful, and provocative. It was originally released as an audio serial on Ellis's podcast over a year of the pandemic — which might account for its 600-page heft. In truth, it feels a little overstuffed, with the repetitive, hazy recollections of our teenage antihero starting to wear by the end. But fans won't mind – and neither did I. CN
Age of Vice by Deepti Kapoor
Fleet (Hachette)
Former journalist Deepti Kapoor knows how to write an arresting beginning. It's 3am one February in 2004, in New Delhi, and an expensive car mounts the footpath, killing five "pavement-dwellers" – including a young pregnant woman. The driver is handsome, well-dressed.
Into this horrifying, bloody scene come the police. And what do they see? The driver. Despite his fancy clothes, they can smell the poverty on him, and recognise that this car does not belong to him. They know he's a servant, and with the brutal clarity that marks this novel, we're told, this "means he can be hurt".
His name is Ajay.
There's a violent episode in jail — but then Ajay's status suddenly shifts. He's treated with respect and care once the authorities realise he's associated with a young man named Sunny Wadia and his powerful family.
Who is Ajay and who are the Wadias? What happened that night? And what role does Neda play, a young journalist who is not super-rich, but has access to the young hedonists of that class? She is part of a cultural elite, the storytelling class of India.
It takes 350 pages (of a 500-plus-page novel) to find out what happened that night – and it's more surprising, complicated and horrifying than you might imagine. But that one event is also not the main focus of the novel, which instead takes us into the life and background of Ajay, the aspirations of Sunny Wadia, and the many layers of Indian culture as it responds to money and desire and change.
In Age of Vice, Kapoor's second novel (following 2014's A Bad Character), she uses the breathless pace of a thriller to write a social novel of New Delhi and Uttar Pradesh, with a raised eyebrow at western perceptions of India. It's also a cracking page-turner. KE
Taken by Dinuka McKenzie
HarperCollins
In a superlative era of Australian crime fiction (with Jane Harper, Chris Hammer and Gary Disher part of the vanguard), Dinuka McKenzie is the exciting new kid on the block.
Taken is the second novel in her Kate Miles detective series, which sets itself apart from the broader crime fiction pack in a few key ways: Our investigating hero is a woman, a person of colour, and a new mother.
In Taken, Detective Sergeant Kate Miles has made an early return to work from maternity leave. Her new daughter is only four months old, and Kate's husband Geoff, whose own career has stalled, is staying home with the children.
Of course, the case that she faces is the biggest of her career so far: A baby (another four-month-old) has been snatched from her cot in her parents' home. Baby Sienna's mother is beside herself with worry, while the father seems to have some secrets.
The case would disturb any police officer, but the emotion is amplified for Kate — a breastfeeding mum working long hours as her own baby waits for her at home. Add to that some workplace drama, marital tension at home, and a possible scandal around her former police officer father, and the pressure on our hero often seems insurmountable.
The mystery element of this story works well, with all the possible culprits, false starts and red herrings you'd expect from a well-crafted crime novel. But it's the characterisation that I will remember. In Kate Miles, McKenzie has created a wonderfully complex woman – prone to both overconfidence and self-doubt. I can't wait to read more. CN
A Minor Chorus by Billy-Ray Belcourt
University of Queensland Press
Following the success of his Griffin Poetry Prize-winning debut collection This Wound Is a World and bestselling memoir A History of My Brief Body, Billy-Ray Belcourt, a writer and academic from the Driftpile Cree Nation, delivers this marvellous first novel.
A Minor Chorus opens with the book's unnamed narrator returning to northern Alberta, the place where he grew up, in an effort both to write and to escape the strictures of his PhD.
The journey brings him into contact and conversation with different people; he becomes, as he puts it, a historian and coroner, interlocutor and elegist.
He describes wanting to write something that will "amount to an autobiography of a town, of rural Alberta", based on his interest "in how the autobiographical was rarely an individualistic mode; all of its wonder and devastation was social".
Belcourt is, like many poets-turned-novelists, sensitive to language, to how things work at the sentence level; he frequently coaxes words into novel arrangements of perception and rhythm.
It's no surprise to find his narrator quoting Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector's Água Viva midway through the book: In both authors' styles there is a kind of permissiveness, a way of letting in philosophy and abstraction, the lyric and poetic.
In A Minor Chorus, prose, poetry and theory coexist. As its narrator observes, "They're streets in the same city, and sometimes they intersect."
In the novel's best chapters, such as a moving encounter between the narrator and a married man in a hotel room, Belcourt captures the difficulty and pathos of the narrator's essential dilemma:
"I'm cursed with the conviction that I have it in me to unearth something interesting about the human condition. I said 'human condition' as if it were the title of an Oscar-winning film or a terminal illness that hadn't befallen anyone I knew. It wasn't, however, incorrect to say that I suffered from the Human Condition, that I would die without having written down everything I could about being alive."
DF
Hungry Ghosts by Kevin Jared Hosein
Bloomsbury
When it rains in Trinidad, it rains hard. Water rushes through buildings and communities, and for the people who live in the barrack at the outskirts of Bell Village, the water comes right inside, relentlessly dripping.
There's also the relentless drip of poverty, exclusion, rat piss and ambition, in the third novel by Caribbean novelist and short-story writer Kevin Jared Hosein (following two works of young adult fiction).
Hosein takes us to the 1940s, and into the lives of Indian Trinidadians in rural communities. The US navy is in the country, and the systems of English colonialism are still in play. The legacy of slavery, officially abolished in 1838, is keenly felt.
At the centre of the story is the Saroop family – parents Hansraj (Hans) and Shweta, and teenage son Krishna – who live side by side with five other families, in the barrack: a ruined building on an old sugar plantation; a "discarded bone in the skeleton of colonialism", as Hosein described it when we talked about his book.
Hans looks out for everyone in the community, helping people, to the exasperation of his wife, who simmers with grief and rage. Their son Krishna is acutely aware of the discrimination he faces, and confronts it with a reckless, glorious defiance that makes you ache for him.
Up on the hill, safe from floodwater and disease, there is another house – well-maintained, gaudy, eccentric, dangerous; the home of dodgy businessman Dalton Changoor.
Dalton has disappeared; meanwhile, his beautiful young wife Marlee engages in an elaborate performance to suggest she has always belonged there.
Marlee is receiving threats in the form of dead dogs and ransom notes, so invites one of the casual labourers who works for her to come and stay as a nightwatchman. That man is the handsome, ever-helpful Hans – a man who wonders how he'll ever escape the grind and violence that has shaped him thus far.
What could go wrong? Well, everything.
Hosein's novel, written in lush language, rich with metaphor, is beautiful, dark, heartbreaking and tender. KE
The Exclusion Zone by Shastra Deo
University of Queensland Press
Subtly building on the promise of Shastra Deo's first poetry collection, The Agonist, which won the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize and the 2018 Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, her second explores paganism, the occult, and lavish apocalypses.
The Exclusion Zone reprises Deo's concern with things elemental – blood, flesh, molecular compounds – in a way that recalls aspects of Irish poetry (think of the rough-hewn reservoir of feeling in the work of Seamus Heaney, or the lyricism of Tony Curtis; one poem is even called Irish Book of Spells), as well as the science fascinations of the later output of Australian poet Jennifer Maiden. (Author J.G. Ballard and director David Cronenberg also come to mind, for their interest in the visceral.)
Deo's verse yields a strange kind of beauty, cerebral yet warm. She might be described as a romantic eschatologist.
Poems such as Post-detonation Linguistics play with the line break, while Frameshift Mutations experiments with space and the position of letters, attentive to language's physicality and how it can mutate.
There is also an interest in multimedia and digital poetry: Transcript of a Fight Scene begins with a sequence of diagrammed video game controller buttons before any words appear on the page; Search History makes footnotes from our typically distracted web browsing. Deo even invites those she dubs "curious reader-players" to use Google Translate's camera function to delve further into the Hindi language sections of the poem It Survives.
The book proceeds like a game of choose-your-own-adventure, albeit one in which the adventure may sometimes look like a nightmare. All roads lead to hell, Deo suggests, but equally this: When you're going through hell – as we all surely are – the least you can do is to keep going. DF
God's Teeth and Other Phenomena by James Kelman
PM Press (NewSouth Books)
Scottish writer James Kelman's impressive bibliography includes 14 collections of short stories, a memoir, sundry works of non-fiction, and 10 novels.
He's best known for How Late It Was, How Late, which won the 1994 Booker Prize — to the irritation of some, given its exuberant sweariness, experimental stream-of-consciousness style, and use of working-class Glaswegian language.
Kelman himself is known to be rather irascible, curmudgeonly, difficult.
Why mention all this? God's Teeth and Other Phenomena is a work of exuberant, first-person, stream-of-consciousness fiction about a 70-something Scottish writer (Jack Proctor) who had once won the "Banker Prize", is heartily sick of being asked about it, is grumpy and outspoken, and for some reason has agreed to go on a writer's residency where he might (gasp) have to speak to other people.
I'm laughing to myself just writing that description – because this is a novel that bubbles up with ideas and energy and irritation and humour. It's alive!
First, there's the title: God's Teeth. Is this about the dentures of a deity; the chompers of God? Nope, it's a regular exclamation that punctuates the text: "GOD'S TEETH!"
Our protagonist's words burst out of him. He doesn't just excoriate others, though — his inner critic is strong: He casts himself as "ruined gambler, dogmatic pedant, sarcastic father, selfish husband, cantankerous neighbour; utterly ruthless in all day-to-day activities".
Simply following a meandering curmudgeon could pall, however. Instead, this is both a skilled representation of the wildness of thought itself, and a celebration of art, the making of it and why it matters. KE
Is Mother Dead by Vigdis Hjorth
Verso (Bloomsbury)
"If we knew, if we understood when we were young how crucial childhood is, no one would ever dare have children." Such is the quality of one-liners in Is Mother Dead, the latest novel by prolific Norwegian novelist Vigdis Hjorth to be translated into English by her long-time collaborator Charlotte Barslund.
Hjorth is perhaps best known internationally for her 2016 family psychodrama Will and Testament, which was controversial in its own right but also provoked debate about the strain of 'reality literature' to which it belongs.
With this new novel, she consolidates her place within a contingent of contemporary writers who dig unsparingly into mother-daughter relationships and the psychic wounds they produce (Kate Zambreno's Book of Mutter and Gwendoline Riley's My Phantoms come to mind).
Is Mother Dead concerns Johanna, a painter who has been semi-estranged from her family. Thirty years ago, she abandoned them, her marriage and her career as a lawyer to elope with her art-teacher-turned-lover and to pursue a life of art. Now almost 60, she returns to her home city of Oslo from the United States after her husband's untimely death, ostensibly to exhibit a retrospective of her work but largely impelled by an all-consuming desire to find out how her mother and sister are. She tries to imagine what her mother's life is like, and even goes so far as to stake out the flat where she lives.
Hjorth is a master chronicler of existential tension. She depicts Johanna's troubled interior world with a detached intimacy: The story is told entirely in the first person, immersing us in Johanna's recollections of her emotionally traumatic upbringing; the narrator lays herself bare for excavation. At the same time, Hjorth holds the reader at a remove from her protagonist: Johanna questions her own memories, and wrestles with self-doubt over whether she or her mother is to blame for their torturous relationship.
Written in chapters alternating between long reminiscences and acerbic one-liners such as the above, Is Mother Dead has the quality of a diary — one where the author is extremely deft at reaching into her unconscious mind. There's a sense of controlled restraint in the prose that calls to mind the writing of Annie Ernaux.
Family indubitably forms us, but Hjorth seems to ask: Can we escape? And if we do, then what do we have to confront? There are no happy endings in this novel; yet, the author suggests, art may be able to save us. CT
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