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 thrilled to present 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 — drawn from January to March releases — features a fictionalised family history of actor-turned-assassin John Wilkes Booth; Italian autofiction about a child of deaf adults; a New York wedding planner and her congressman brother grappling with their Puerto Rican heritage; and two dystopian novels — one exploring the refugee experience; and the other featuring a wistful talking pig.
It also includes three exciting debut novels from Australian writers — the first a funny and emotionally rich story of a woman at the end of her life, by a writer of Kalkadoon heritage; one set in an Australia where the landscape is constantly rearranging; and another featuring a protagonist obsessed with Harry Houdini's 1910 attempt to fly across Australia.
Booth by Karen Joy Fowler
Serpent's Tail (Allen & Unwin)
Before reading this book, I knew a few scant facts about John Wilkes Booth: actor-turned-assassin; pro-slavery; killed Abraham Lincoln at the theatre.
I didn't know that Booth was part of an incredibly famous family – that his dad was at one time the most popular Shakespearean actor in America (and a terrible drunk), and that his siblings also went on to be famous actors and writers. I also didn't know that the family that produced one of America's most prominent white supremacists was also incredibly progressive. Led by their actor dad, the family was anti-slavery, atheist and even – remarkably for this period of history – vegetarian.
So where did John Wilkes Booth go wrong? Rather than focus on the assassin, novelist Karen Joy Fowler turns her attention to some of those other Booths; in particular, three of his five siblings – Rosalie, Edwin and Asia. Rosalie is shy and withdrawn, and written off as an invalid by her family. Edwin is the overlooked middle son who goes on to be as famous an actor as his dad. And Asia is the firebrand – a smart and ferocious woman whose biggest weakness might just be her unconditional love for her family.
We follow the siblings over several decades as they quote Shakespeare at each other, see the family's fortunes rise and fall, and witness the radicalisation of their beloved brother John. The characters are flawed and compelling, and as readers we have to consider how complicit they might be in what is to come.
Narrated in the present tense, the book has an urgency that propels the reader through its 480 pages. It's an engrossing account of a tumultuous moment in America's history, rendered with incredible skill. I was transfixed. CN
Scattered All Over the Earth by Yoko Tawada
New Directions
Reading Yoko Tawada is a marvel. Born in Tokyo and currently living in Berlin, Tawada writes in both Japanese and German. She has even gone so far as to compose novels in both languages at once: see her brilliant 旅をする裸の眼/Das nackte Auge, translated into English by Susan Bernofsky as The Naked Eye. As in her previous work, Scattered All Over the Earth is a reflection on language, migration and identity that manages to be entirely unpredictable.
Knut, a graduate student studying linguistics in Copenhagen, encounters a woman named Hiruko one day on TV and determines to meet her. Hiruko is a refugee from "an archipelago somewhere between China and Polynesia" that has sunk and disappeared. Cleverly, the novel first introduces Hiruko as speaking a gnomic, self-made language that can be understood throughout Scandinavia, which she privately calls Panska ("I stuck the 'ska' of Scandinavia on the end of 'pan', which means universal … Panska was not made in a laboratory, or by a computer; it's a language that just sort of came into being as I said things that people somehow understood"). Panska reads like pidgin, until we switch to Hiruko's point of view, where she speaks and thinks with total fluency, cleverly revealing the losses that occur when 'foreigners' stay foreign.
As the pair travel across Europe they encounter other characters with their own stories — a trans woman from India, a German woman, an Indigenous man from Greenland, and another refugee from Japan — all trying to make sense of the new linguistic and political landscape of Europe.
There are a number of jokes and puns in Japanese and other languages that speakers of those languages will enjoy, and others will simply have to wonder at or intuit; the fact that there is sometimes no attempt to explicate or gloss these is part of the book's lesson. In a Japanese interview, Tawada mentioned drawing inspiration from such Danish luminaries as Hamlet, the man who does nothing until he has to; Hans Christian Andersen, a fantasist, also feels relevant to this vibrant and typically freewheeling work. DF
How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu
Bloomsbury
In American writer Sequoia Nagamatsu's novel you'll meet a wistful talking pig who wants to know the end of The Lord of the Rings; a Buddhist monk who presides over services for robot dogs who've barked their last bark; a couple who can only speak to each other properly in a virtual reality game; and a young theme park attendant dressed as a giant mouse whose job is to give dying children their very best final day, before sending them off forever on a euthanasia roller-coaster.
And truly, that's only the half of it. There are also funerary hotels, dark caverns full of floating memory bubbles ("Excuse me, have you seen my childhood?"), spaceships, and a host of tender almost-love stories.
All these apparently disparate tales are connected, with a character here and a sleight of hand there; a tiny moment in one story that becomes a shadow in the next. This is all easier to follow than it sounds.
It begins in the Arctic Circle, with a group of scientists accidentally setting a plague loose on the world. I know what you're thinking: Here we go, another dystopia, another stand-in for COVID, another set of cod-science theories. But stay with me; plague stories are shifting, and this one is worth entering. It's ambitious, hopeful, creative.
As the story bounds ahead, chapter by chapter, from something like the present to a far distant, starry future, we see a world that is changed by mass death and by grief; by the way societies must adapt and even create new economies of loss.
The world Nagamatsu imagines doesn't tear itself apart like a zombie apocalypse but rather finds ways to survive. That's quite an imagination. KE
The Very Last List of Vivian Walker by Megan Albany
Hachette
I'm always dubious when a book blurb promises laughter and tears. But with this one, I did both. Although, I'm more amazed that I laughed (I cry easily), because it's such a rarity for me, even when a book is described as comical.
The debut novel of Kalkadoon writer and journalist Megan Albany, it follows Vivian Walker in the last months before she dies (this is not a spoiler) from an aggressive form of cancer.
Refreshingly, it's not about Vivian's attempt to attain spiritual enlightenment before she leaves this mortal coil; instead, it's about the life admin she still needs to complete — including cleaning the fridge, doing her taxes and amending her will.
I realise this doesn't sound very amusing — let's face it, there's nothing funny about doing your taxes — but Albany has managed to make death and drudgery comical through an appreciation of life's absurdities.
On her exploration of New Age advice, Vivian says: "I have had the odd occasion where I managed to feel grateful, but unfortunately they're often interrupted when I notice how Clint didn't bloody bring the washing in like I asked him to."
It's also about Vivian's reflections on her imperfect husband, the aforementioned Clint, and the challenges and joys of motherhood.
Vivian isn't perfect, and this is an honest account of someone who has difficult relationships with other family members and who can also be irritating at times. Even though she realises she should be spending as much time as possible with her loved ones, Vivian would actually just prefer more time to herself.
Anyone who has walked with another through palliative care will also appreciate the sensitivity with which Albany portrays this vulnerable period — even as she still manages to do it with humour. It's a light, fun read that gets to the meaning of life through death. SL
Olga Dies Dreaming by Xochitl Gonzalez
Hachette
Olga is a wedding planner for Manhattan's rich and obnoxious – and she's good at her job. She's masterful in placating anxious mothers-of-the-bride, and shows the utmost taste when picking custom hemstitch linen napkins. Her clients are happy, and they don't generally notice the money she's skimming off the top – after all, they've got plenty to spare, right?
Olga is an instantly appealing character in a book that seems like it's going to be pretty standard commercial fluff, before revealing its far more ambitious agenda.
This is a book about migration, Puerto Rican rights, political corruption, broken families and the gentrification of New York. We learn that Olga is a third-generation Puerto Rican American – she and her brother were raised in Brooklyn by their grandmother after their mum, Blanca, abandoned them in order to fight for Puerto Rican self-determination.
The only contact Olga has with her mum is the occasional letter. Blanca writes scorching missives, criticising her daughter's life choices – and leaving no return address.
While Olga has railed against her mum, her brother Prieto has spent his life trying to live up to Blanca's expectations. When we meet him, he's a congressman, representing their Latinx neighbourhood in Brooklyn, and appearing to the public as a charming, successful politician. But he has his secrets – and keeping those secrets safe is costing him, politically and morally.
This book is set in 2017 in the months before and after Hurricane Maria, which devastated Puerto Rico. The storm serves as a catalyst for change for both Olga and Prieto, who have to reconsider what their Puerto Rican heritage really means to them, just as their mother makes an unexpected reappearance in their lives.
This is a hugely impressive debut novel by the Brooklyn writer (and former wedding planner!) Xochitl Gonzalez. It's bold, fun and ambitious – and it works. CN
Strangers I Know by Claudia Durastanti
Text
There's something intensely arresting about the tone of Claudia Durastanti's novel: it confides in you, tells you a story studded with gossip and speculation, with asides about the characters' body language, their smirks, their secrets and lies. But you're not entirely sure – at first – who this intimate narrator is, and who she's speaking for.
She's telling us a family story, about her parents and how they met. It's full of mythologies and contradictions. Each of her parents has a different version of this meeting: each claims they rescued the other. They are extravagant liars, who face the world with "recklessness and oblivion", shaking their fists in the face of their poverty, their status as outsiders, their tendency towards anger and spite.
Also, they're both deaf, never learnt sign language properly, are loud and unapologetic, and refuse to be pitied.
These characters are fascinating, and as Durastanti creates them we see their lives in Italy and also, through various means, their travels back and forth to America. We see them together and apart; we see them with their two children; we see a marriage that ends and the fractious connection that remains.
And then we meet the narrator properly. We realise this is perhaps not a conventional novel after all, and that Durastanti herself is the daughter of deaf parents; that she grew up surrounded by characters who created themselves, who "compete[d] at telling the most majestic lie", who refused to play the conventional roles of disability, and who gave her space to analyse the role of storytelling and the creation of character.
Between the stories of being kidnapped by her father, living in poverty with her mother, and wagging school to read books on the roof, Durastanti creates something that allows us to think about all those strangers we think we know, including ourselves. KE
Waypoints by Adam Ouston
Puncher & Wattmann
This is an exciting, adventurous debut novel from writer Adam Ouston. Using the story of "Handcuff King" Harry Houdini's 1910 attempt to become the first person to fly an aircraft over Australia, it explores the idea that failure and loss forms its own kind of record. Obsessively concerned with recreating, in precise detail, this historical footnote, Bernard Cripp, the foppish, effete scion of a family circus, relates his plans — and much else besides — in a sprawling monologue. Cripp's obsession seems to come from a sublimation of grief: his wife and child died in a plane accident, the circumstances of which remain murky.
Cripp's out-of-time eccentricity is not only a personality trait but a mode of narration, of seeing the world with wonder during a time when everything has become "routine, dull, mundane, everyday, completely unremarkable". Cripp's interest in everything from data storage to Elon Musk's Neuralink serve to remind us how, in spite of "progress", we remain as fragile as ever (Cripp's father, too, is suffering from dementia). The infiltration of technology in the present-day often serves only to emphasise temporality; all the talking and recording and information in the world cannot dispel how much is unknown, not only in life but in all that arrives before and after it.
A meditation on time, mortality, technology, the future and the great unknown — not to mention "weather patterns, ocean currents, winds, wear rates on aircraft parts, responses to trauma, instances of adultery in the relationships of pilots, radio waves, satellite imagery, radicalisation, UFOs, ocean birds, whale song frequencies, the NASDAQ" — it combines the picaresque quality of Peter Carey's Illywhacker with the inquisitiveness of Aldous Huxley and the rhythms of a twinkly, whimsical Thomas Bernhard. Yet Ouston has his own style, taking circumspect precision, combining it with due fondness for the em dash, and then, like Lil Nas X with a bad case of logorrhea, riding until he can't no more. DF
Hovering by Rhett Davis
Hachette
Many of us have experienced the warping of time in the last two years, but reading this debut novel I experienced the warping of geography, place and home in an exciting and original way.
The book opens as Alice is flying into her home city after many years abroad living a peripatetic lifestyle as an underground artist. From her vantage in the plane, the fictional city of Fraser (loosely modelled on Geelong, Victoria) appears to have changed.
Of course, any place changes after a period of absence, but in this case, landmarks have literally shifted: streets, service stations, letterboxes, even houses move overnight. Residents are discombobulated by the constantly rearranged landscape but simply factor in more travel time in case their destination has moved without warning. Conspiracy theories abound and a government department is set up to deal with the confusion.
The collision of life-as-normal with the transforming city creates a surreal sensibility in a story that's also exploring a very common fictional preoccupation: the many ways families can fall apart and lose connection. Alice is returning to an estranged sister, Lydia, who is so stuck in place she doesn't even notice when her house moves to the top of a silo; their parents are forever on holiday visiting the latest exotic man-made island; and George, Lydia's teenage son, is so rattled by digital noise he's taken a vow of silence.
The story is told in unconventional ways too: there are snippets of internet forums, computer code and news articles. While this kind of novelty can be distracting, Davis says he wants us to "look for the human in the noise", and I enjoyed decoding the broader meaning of the story. This is a quirky, fascinating read reckoning with the impermanence of life and the murky ideal of home. SL
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