***
Hometown by Shaun Tan
Children’s books, Allen & Unwin, $35
Shaun Tan’s latest adult graphic novel/children’s picture book feels like a culmination or apotheosis of the artist’s career – forms and creatures from other books haunt its edges, like dreams within dreams. The tale of a teenage girl who feels at home in her eerie, wondrous world until a stranger comes to inform her she doesn’t belong, Hometown is a stunning, deeply spiritual allegory of idiosyncrasy and self-acceptance.
Hovering between the poles of delight and terror, it manages to suggest a harmony of existence derived from our diversity, not despite it. A dazzling, poignant, stunningly realised masterpiece. – Tim Byrne
***
The Lady with the Dog by Carrie Tiffany
Novella, NewSouth, $29.99
Carrie Tiffany’s stunning new novella begins when its ageing protagonist receives a diagnosis. She sits in her garden to ponder it. She quickly loses the thread. (“She must remember to tell her daughter something. Is it something about a flower?”)
The old grizzled dog that enters her life – brought to her by the Old Man, whose role in her home she is never quite sure of – becomes her true companion, and through this cipher we are drip-fed details of her past, and of the present she is failing to grasp. The understated but gorgeous illustrations from Noel McKenna are almost as moving as the story itself – a story ripped from Tiffany’s own life, which is teased out so elegantly, so devastatingly, that you won’t know you’re crying until it’s too late. – Steph Harmon
***
The European Mind: Colonialism, Capitalism, Christianity and How to Recover by Bruce Pascoe
Nonfiction, Magabala books, $36.99
Where Bruce Pascoe left off with his rewritten Australian history in Dark Emu, he refocuses his sights perhaps even more contentiously in The European Mind: Colonialism, Capitalism, Christianity and How to Recover. In this new book the bestselling, multi-award-winning author lays blame unflinchingly at those three forces for the worst excesses of racism and violent dispossession of the world’s Indigenes.
It’s not a novel concept. But in what has the tone of a literary swan song, Pascoe writes from a First Nations perspective to draw on a very broad range of western and European – and later colonial – sources to prosecute his case. – Paul Daley
***
The Country Schoolmaster: A Mystery in 88 Letters by Kate Grenville
History, Black Inc, $36.99
“This book is an odd little thing,” Kate Grenville warns. Neither novel nor straight fact, the celebrated author’s latest is an absorbing meta-fiction about the small-town feud of a schoolteacher in rural New South Wales. She stumbles across letters accusing him of harming children, and more than a century later, tries to uncover the truth. Or, a truth.
With a lively mix of archive, imagination and personal curiosity, Grenville returns to the familiar ground of power, personal morality and the violence threaded through colonial Australian life – and finds her addiction to playing detective raising bigger questions. – Imogen Dewey
***
I Can’t Tell You But I Will by Magda Szubanski
Memoir, Text Publishing, $55
Eschewing the kind of jocular reminiscence of most celebrity biography, Magda Szubanski’s follow-up to her 2015 memoir Reckoning – about her father and the scars of war – is a thoughtful and erudite grappling with family legacy and the things we owe the dead.
I Can’t Tell You But I Will turns the attention to her flinty Scottish mother Margaret, with whom Szubanski had a fractious, if loving relationship. Weaving the story of her mother’s decline and death with Szubanski’s work on the marriage equality campaign, this is both a work of painful recollection and a deeply felt act of benediction. – TB
***
The German Ward by Pip Williams
Fiction, Affirm Press, $34.99
The German Ward is the much-anticipated third novel from Pip Williams, following the mega success of The Dictionary of Lost Words and The Bookbinder of Jericho, both of which were global bestsellers. It is a story of love, art and war that takes us from the Australian War Memorial archives to the Anzac camp at Etaples, June 1916. The conduit is a series of sketches by the Australian artist Iso Rae, who was documenting broken men in a shattered world.
There are moments of intimacy and sensuality in the images that fascinate Eva, an academic, who discovers a puzzle she is determined to solve: a love affair between an outspoken English nurse and a German doctor, taken as a prisoner of war. – Susan Chenery
***
Askew by Andy Jackson
Poetry, Giramondo, $27
In his first collection since he won the Prime Minister’s literary award in 2022, Jackson takes on what might be broadly lumped together as our collective malaise: the climate crisis, male suicide, social disharmony, “algorithm blues” and news cycles, the traumatic hangovers of Covid and bureaucratic callousness.
That Askew manages to be so tender while charting such distressing times is a testament to Jackson’s skill. Take this snippet from 24-hour (no) news (haiku) cycle: “now you don’t know what isn’t news / the temperature at the Svalbard Seed Vault rising / return from a walk exhausted / from carrying yourself.” Or his bushfire poem What endures: “We ignored the warnings, became a pack-a-day country. / What now? No poet can reason with this lust for smoke.” – Sian Cain
***
Weeknights with Alice by Alice Zaslavsky
Cookbook, Murdoch Books, $45
Continuing her reputation as Australia’s hype girl for vegetable cookery, Guardian regular Alice Zaslavsky’s fourth book delivers whip-smart, veg-leaning recipes, many of which clock in under 40 minutes from prep to plate. She instructs cooks to “plonk”, “slosh” and “empty the baggie” (of prepacked slaw); she tops a tuna mornay with salt and vinegar chippies; she throws Japanese curry cubes into a mac and cheese; she is an advocate of wet-frying mushrooms for a stroganoff-pasta hybrid.
If her recipes sound slightly chaotic but undeniably joyful, that’s because they are. – Yvonne C Lam
***
The Last Best Place on the Internet: A Human History of Wikipedia by Richard Cooke
Nonfiction, Black Inc, $36.99
In his very funny and deeply researched book about Wikipedia, Richard Cooke preserves a rare history of the internet before the internet ruined the internet; of “one of the strangest and most outlandish successes of its time”. We learn how a website so “profoundly uninnovative” managed to get going (if you build it badly, they will come); about the messy fights between Wikipedia’s obsessive volunteers; and about the radical attempts to make it better.
One gets the sense that Cooke was sucked down his own Wikipedia wormhole to write this book, which is packed with hilarious and heartwarming stories – like the time “the cream of roadgeek Wikipedia” staged a mass exodus to start a Wiki of their own, “where every road is welcome”; and like the man who bravely uploaded images of his micropenis to be used for free via Wikimedia Commons. (“After our brief email interview, Mr. Lasiter spent months sending me unsolicited photos from the same series.”) Prepare to learn, sure, but also prepare to laugh. – SH
***
Well Well Well … by Judith Lucy
Memoir, Scribner Australia, $36.99
If you follow Judith Lucy on social media, you will have noticed a startling number of her posts are about faecal transplants. This book is the explanation you may have been looking for: the beloved comedian is fascinated by wellness and, when she retired from standup in 2022, decided to dedicate her time to write a guide to everything she had tried – including float tanks, reiki, sound healing and meditating (with a horse). Then she found herself sick, burnt out and did what we all do: went on an ayahuasca retreat in the Amazon.
This is a funny exploration not only of wellness but also the very modern illness Lucy has experienced that many readers will know all too well. – SC
***
The Lucky Son by Li Cunxin
Memoir, Penguin, $36.99
Li Cunxin has, by all standards, lived an extraordinary life: from extreme poverty in rural China during the reign of Mao, Cunxin rose to become one of ballet’s most internationally renowned dancers. The Lucky Son is the follow-up to his global hit Mao’s Last Dancer, and if it doesn’t have quite the narrative sweep of his previous work, it still captivates and moves in equal measure.
Cunxin’s wife Mary emerges as the true hero, sacrificing her own career to guide the couple’s profoundly deaf daughter Sophie into a world of music and dance. The word inspirational somehow seems insufficient. – TB
***
Simple Pleasures by Julia Busuttil Nishimura
Cookbook, Plum, $44.99
My siblings’ WhatsApp chat is an echo chamber of Julia Busuttil Nishimura recipes, which hit the sweet spot of being aspirational and approachable. In her fifth book, the author leans again into Mediterranean territory with pasta, minestras and tomato-based stews, plus a chapter on cookies and fruity cakes that make me, a storied non-baker, want to get friendly with some flour and butter.
The photography by Armelle Habib is impeccable. A restrained, elegant book. – YCL
