Take your pick: seven new books to keep you entertained this week

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Take your pick: seven new books to keep you entertained this week

By Cameron Woodhead and Steven Carroll

You can be sure at this time of year – pandemic or not – there's a vast number of books appearing. Publishers and booksellers see the critical, impending Christmas season as the crucial time when the bulk of their business is done.

New Australian Fiction 2020, Caitlin Moran's More Than a Woman, and Craig Collie's On Our Doorstep. 

New Australian Fiction 2020, Caitlin Moran's More Than a Woman, and Craig Collie's On Our Doorstep. Credit:

This year, of course, it's particularly important. And while for some of us the way we buy books is different, there are still plenty to choose from.

Admirable Australian literary journal Kill Your Darlings has just brought out its collection of new short stories and there are a few gems there, while Sue Miller has dissected the essence of a marriage in her much admired novel Monogamy.

British newspaper columnist Caitlin Moran's reflections on modern life have wit and clout, while Craig Collie considers how close the Japanese got to us in World War II. Academy Award-winner Guillermo del Toro offers up a sort of horror-cum-detective story, Ben Pobjie sings the praises of also-rans, while Jodi Picoult gets bogged down in big issues and Egyptology. Happy reading.

New Australian Fiction 2020
Edited by Rebecca Starford, Kill Your Darlings, $24.95

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This anthology of Australian short fiction is so new that the pandemic creeps in at the edges, and whether coronavirus is present or not, an aura of crisis clings to many of the stories contained within.

In Miranda Riwoe's So Many Ways, a waitress anxious about getting an abortion suddenly loses her job when the Chinese restaurant she works at is forced to close. K.A. Rees' Among The Ruins sees a games developer travel to a heavily irradiated, Chernobyl-style Exclusion Zone for inspiration.

And the strongest story, Laura Stortenbeker's Low Light, unfurls from unlikely material – its premise wouldn't be out of place in a road safety ad – into a brilliantly observed friendship between two young blokes. There are disappointments. The writing is rarely as mature, well crafted and emotionally intelligent as Stortenbeker's, but at a clutch moment in Australian publishing, the volume certainly has its finger on the pulse.

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Monogamy
Sue Miller, Bloomsbury, $29.99

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This elegant novel takes us deep into a literary family. Exuberant bookshop owner Graham and his art photographer wife Annie have been happily married for decades, with an adult daughter Sarah and book editor son, Lucas, from Graham's previous marriage. When Graham dies, his family reflects on the influence of this larger-than-life character – none more searchingly than Annie, whose introversion and artistic self-doubt always seemed an odd fit for a man whose easy charm, confidence and avidness for the pleasures of life struck everyone he met. We get the impression of a loving marriage that didn't come without cost to Annie, who faces the kind of opportunity for self-discovery only solitude can allow her. Monogamy is a quiet and incisive interrogation of marriage, grief and art.

The Hollow Ones
Guillermo del Toro & Chuck Hogan, Del Rey, $32.99

The Hollow Ones is thick with action and ghoulish setpieces, skeletal when it comes to depth of character and style. It seems to be composed with a film adaptation in mind, and when one of the writers is Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro (Pan's Labyrinth, The Shape of Water), that's perfectly understandable. The novel fuses supernatural horror and detective fiction. FBI agent Odessa Hardwicke attends a multiple homicide, only to shoot her partner dead after he tries to kill a young girl. A demonic presence, she believes, had possessed her fellow agent, and after being suspended from duty, Odessa is advised by Earl Solomon – the first black detective at the Bureau – on how she might hunt down the demon responsible. Despite visually imaginative horror scenes, it's often cookie-cutter, with predictable relationship dynamics and mystery plot points.

The Book of Two Ways
Jodi Picoult, Allen & Unwin, $32.99

Bestseller Jodi Picoult loses control of her material in The Book of Two Ways. Dawn, a graduate student in Egyptology, has her life plan altered early when her mother dies, leaving her to care for her 13-year-old brother. Dawn gets pregnant, marries a Harvard physicist, and abandons archaeology to become a hospice worker. Her regrets begin to surface years later, when her own child is a teenager: an old flame, and the ghost of her career, beckon. The novel treats timeless questions of life, death and love, but both pace and credibility suffer from the author's lack of restraint. Picoult can't resist info dumping every last jot and tittle of her research. The result is tedious and overstuffed, the narrative groaning under the weight of its themes.

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More Than a Woman
Caitlin Moran, Ebury Press, $32.99

This tour through the daily life of a mid-forties mother of two could be described as a sort of middle-aged Bridget Jones's Diary. But there's more to it than that. British newspaper columnist Caitlin Moran's reflections on the crowded hours of her life is comic, candid, edgy and wistful – whether it's examining her naked body in the bathroom mirror (and feeling good about it), time-tabling sex with her husband, parenting, dealing with her parents' impending divorce or retrieving a dead mouse from under the fridge. But the chatty style falls away when she deals with her daughter's serious eating disorder. After the bestselling How to Be a Woman, this is about the multi-faceted demands of being mother, wife, writer and simply herself. Along the way she charts a happy marriage and her husband's contributions.

On Our Doorstep
Craig Collie, Allen & Unwin, $32.99

The lightning Japanese advance down the Malay Peninsula, the fall of Singapore and their arrival in New Guinea is a familiar story. But it is still a dramatic one and quite grippingly told by Craig Collie, who can often be wry in his observations. The British and Australians constantly underestimated the Japanese, especially evident in the bumbling leadership at Singapore – Australia's general Gordon Bennett fleeing in a sampan.

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It's a tale of western hubris and arrogance, but by the time the Japanese were bombing Darwin we were overestimating them. Invasion fear was rife throughout the country when, as Admiral Tojo said after the war, physical occupation of Australia was never planned. Collie weighs all the evidence and comes to the same conclusion.

Second Best
Ben Pobjie, Affirm Press, $32.99

Somerset Maugham said when the final reckoning was made he would be right up there in the front row of the second-raters. Ben Pobjie doesn't mention Maugham in this comic dedication to runners-up, but he does draw on a long line of history's also-rans – from the Second Fleet (a disaster contracted to a slave trading company), Buzz Aldrin following in Neil Armstrong's footsteps, Belka and Strelka, the second dogs in space) to our second prime minister, Alfred Deakin.

Perhaps the most intriguing is the story of British scientist Rosalind Franklin – dead by the time James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins got the Nobel for discovering the DNA double helix – but whose pioneering work paved the way for them. This is entertaining in a Horrible Histories way.

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