By Jason Steger
A handful of the best new releases to look out for in May.
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May, what a delight – at last it’s really autumn, “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”, as Keats put it in that famous Ode. My favourite season, I think. The cooler weather outside means coming in for a cosy time with a book to hand and some sort of warming drink within reach. Here are 10 books coming next month that could keep you company.
The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from books editor Jason Steger. Get it delivered every Friday.
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Anam, Andre Dao
Hamish Hamilton, $32.99, May 2
Andre Dao has described Anam as a “fictionalised family history”, and it’s clear that this novel, which won the Victorian Premier’s Unpublished Manuscript Award two years ago, has a lot of real family history in it. The narrator’s grandfather was imprisoned by the communists in Vietnam for a decade, “it served as the anchor for my self image. I was the son of refugees, the grandson of a political prisoner”. And so begins this exploration of family, the past and the present, memory, belonging and exile.
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Personal Score, Ellen van Neerven
UQP, $34.99, May 2
Poet Ellen van Neerven loves football and played as a striker as an 11-year-old with Stamford Rangers in Queensland. But this is not a memoir of their sporting days, although that is part of it. This is an investigation of gender and racism in sport based on their own experiences and those of the many people the author spoke to. The question at the heart of the book is “what does it mean to play sport on First Nations land?” What van Neerven wants is for “sport to return to its origins of inclusion and care for land”.
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Naked Ambition, Robert Gott
Scribe, $29.99, May 2
Gregory Buchanan is a junior minister who has been painted for the Archibald. He has hung the huge picture in the family dining room. But there’s one awkward thing about it – he’s stark bollock naked. “In the middle of all that beauty,” as his wife puts it, “at eye level in fact, there is what is inescapably a penis.” And guests are arriving imminently, including the mother-in-law who loathes him and the State premier with a political crisis to deal with. Cue a delicious comic novel from the wonderfully witty Robert Gott.
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The Wager, David Grann
Simon & Schuster, $34.99, May 17
You probably know David Grann from his journalism in The New Yorker, and his books, which include The Lost City of Z and the astonishing Killers of the Flower Moon. His latest is an investigation into the wreck of the eponymous British ship in 1740 and the conflicting stories told by two separate shiploads of survivors that led to a court martial and scandal involving, among others, the poet Byron’s grandfather.
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August Blue, Deborah Levy
Hamish Hamilton, $35.00, May 9
People love the British novelist and playwright Deborah Levy: for her novels – she has twice been shortlisted for the Booker, with Swimming Home and Hot Milk – and for what she terms her three living autobiographies. There’s often been a Freudian angle in her work and this is certainly true in this latest fiction, which involves a pianist, Elsa M Anderson, encountering her doppelganger after fleeing an identity-rocking event.
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The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece, Tom Hanks
Hutchinson Heinemann, $32.99, May 9
A few years ago, the American actor published a book of stories, Uncommon Type. At the time our reviewer said “when Hanks writes from his insider’s POV about acting and the film industry his stories really begin to kick”. So here comes his first novel, which is based firmly on what he does for his day job and takes us through the stages of the making of a superhero film based on a comic book about the war. Love the actor? Read his book.
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Knowing What We Know, Simon Winchester
HarperCollins, $34.99, May 3
As Simon Winchester points out in his latest erudite but fascinating book, “the arc of every human life is measured out by the ceaseless accumulation of knowledge”. With The Surgeon of Crowthorne he helped to usher in a new genre, narrative non-fiction, and here he is investigating how knowledge has been passed on to us humans and how the way it is passed on has changed over the years. He’s always worth reading.
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Reckless, Marele Day
Ultimo Press, $39.99, May 3
Marele Day was in the vanguard of the Australian crime fiction revival in the late ’80s and early ’90s, writing four novels featuring a feminist investigator, Claudia Valentine. But this is non-fiction about when she left Australia after the death of her partner, and became friends and travelling companion of Jean Kay, a former hijacker, embezzler and mystery man, who always called her “little sister”. Thirty years later, they meet again … will the truth emerge?
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The Queen is Dead, Stan Grant
4th Estate, $34.99, May 3
Stan Grant says he cannot love the White Queen who ruled the world “where Whiteness is so assured”. Her death last year breaks a spell “that fixes a hierarchy of humanity with people who imagine they are White at the top and those of us deemed not White measured below”. In this passionate call for change, Grant is incandescent about what the agents of White Queen and Australia have done to his family, “to countless Black families”. Something has to give, and soon.
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Here be Monsters, Richard King
Monash University, $32.99, May 1
As Richard King points out, there are plenty of books on technology but few that come at it by asking what we want from it and how that affects us. And in a revolutionary new era, what could be our relationship to it? His book questions “our direction of travel, to ask where it might be leading us, and to consider what we might become in the process”. His answer is a fightback in the name of a “radical humanism”. Plenty to chew over in a fascinating book.
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