This Devastating Fever by Sophie Cunningham
Fiction, Ultimo Press, $32.99
In This Devastating Fever – which took Sophie Cunningham 16 years to write – a fictional author named Alice (who seems a stand-in for Cunningham) spends 16 years writing a book, titled … This Devastating Fever. The book is to be about Virginia Woolf’s husband, Leonard, which would be a difficult sell anyway – but Alice’s research becomes an obsession, interrupting her deadlines with red-herring rabbit holes and international trips to far-flung archives, as her publisher’s impatience reaches tipping point.
“More sex!” her publisher demands – and so we get four pages of dot points about the Bloomsbury group titled “Who’s fucking who”. “Less footnotes!” her publisher proclaims – but Alice (read: Sophie) can’t seem to kill her darlings. This is queer historical fiction about the Woolfs, yes – but it also blends autofiction with metafiction about the writing of the book. It’s very funny, very clever and surprisingly moving too. – Steph Harmon
Marshmallow by Victoria Hannan
Fiction, Hachette, $29.99
It’s the stuff of nightmares: after a busy birthday party for two-year-old Toby, his young parents and their friends gather outside for a beer, a joint and a wind-down. Inside, unsupervised for a moment, the little boy has found a stray marshmallow, choked on it, and died. No one is to blame. Everyone is to blame.
Her first book since her acclaimed debut, 2020’s Kokomo, Victoria Hannan’s Marshmallow deals with the fallout for each of the five friends, who – in chapters alternating between them – are dealing or not-dealing with the trauma, on the first anniversary of Toby’s death. With easy comparisons to be made to Christos Tsiolkas’ The Slap, it’s a riveting, tender and empathic take on how grief and guilt affect everyone differently – and how tragedy can bring us together, or wrench us apart. – SH
Harold Holt by Ross Walker
Biography, Black Inc, $34.99
While writing this surprising, literary and fresh-feeling biography, Walker aimed to “a midway point between biography and narrative nonfiction – history told as a story”. Much of it is focused on who Holt was before he became Australian prime minister in 1966, a year before his notorious disappearance at sea. Though there is a lot about that too: Walker shows how Holt was drawn to water all his life – practising holding his breath while bored in parliament, and scaring the bejeezus out of his wife when she found him submerged in the bathtub.
They are small examples of the man Walker reveals to be adventurous, stoic and kind by nature, fine character traits overshadowed by the circumstances of his death. Where there are gaps in first-hand accounts, Walker makes astute observations of how Holt may have behaved or responded by using what is known. It is a confident book, and often beautifully written – unexpectedly so for a political biography. – Sian Cain
Wildflowers by Peggy Frew
Fiction, Allen and Unwin, $32.99
All of Peggy Frew’s novels, in one way or another, explore the dynamics between families, looking through a variety of lenses to reveal the complex, struggling individuals at their heart. Wildflowers is a culmination of Frew’s best qualities – beautifully, deeply observed; brimming with tension; profoundly domestic.
In it, three sisters – Meg, Nina and Amber – drive to an isolated holiday house in far north Queensland in an attempt to right past wrongs and reconnect. Frew has, once again, demonstrated her remarkable insight into the conflicted individual lives and trauma that lie beneath the surface of families. – Bec Kavanagh
Here Be Leviathans by Chris Flynn
Short stories, UQP, $32.99
Chris Flynn’s last book Mammoth was narrated by a 13,000-year-old extinct American mastodon – and so well did he capture the personality of old bones that the author ended up with a side job at Museums Victoria. Here Be Leviathans is a collection that picks up where that experiment left off, as Flynn gives voice to the voiceless: a self-aggrandising monkey about to be shot into space; an aeroplane chair that lands in the Siberian forest after an explosive crash; a family of sassy otters with a flair for the visual arts; and – in a particularly prescient story – a saber-toothed tiger stalking a Jurassic Park-like playground for the awful rich.
The cute premise would be cloying from a lesser writer, but Flynn works in such humour, voice and empathy that the stories can’t help but move you. – SH
Bon and Lesley by Shaun Prescott
Fiction, Giramondo, $29.95
Shaun Prescott’s 2017 debut the Town was an evocative, strange satire about Australian regional towns – capturing both the listless suffocation of being trapped in them (geographically; psychologically), and the tendency they have to disappear. The book won global distribution, critical acclaim and comparisons to Gerald Murnane’s The Plains – so his follow-up five years later represents a bit of a lit world moment.
I haven’t read this one yet, but on first glance Bon and Lesley presents as a companion; again surreal and deadpan and dark; again set in a desolate regional Australian town, where character Bon finds himself after a bushfire stops a train he’s fleeing the city on. The author describes it as his “doom metal novel … I could not write anything else until it was out of my way.” – SH
Against Disappearance, edited by Leah Jing McIntosh and Adolfo Aranjuez
Essays, Pantera Press, $32.99
This collection of First Nations writers and writers of colour – the 20 longlistees of the Liminal and Pantera Press nonfiction prize – contains incredible writing. Contributors include Hasib Hourani, who made me laugh out loud with reflections that are as funny as they are serious, lonely and acerbic; and Kasumi Borczyk, who inventively layers family narratives atop, and across, of one another. Lur Alghurabi writes with pathos and intelligence, and Brandon K Liew offers a piece of Melbourne history that is also something that could never belong to the city: an intimate account of a specific time and a place; a family history only he could bring to life.
Buy a copy for yourself, buy a copy for your friends, and prepare to be overwhelmed. – Declan Fry.
People Who Lunch by Sally Olds
Essays, Upswell, $29.99
The Melbourne-based critic’s debut runs a gamut of social scenes (most of them pretty club-heavy): secret societies to art fairs to crypto. Every piece in the collection – subtitled “essays on work, leisure & loose living” – asks you to think harder about the ways we earn money, party, and look out for each other. Olds’ writing is relaxed and direct, driven by sharp intellect and a radiant, unaffected interest in the world around her. With enviable clarity and style, she pares back assumptions about class and sex.
And she is unafraid of taking the scalpel to her own life – questioning, in a riveting essay on polyamory, the political potential we might seize, or miss, in the ways we structure our closest relationships. Another writer once described Olds to me as “very underrated” – this book should sort that out. (Plus: the year’s best cover? I think yes.) – Imogen Dewey
