New Books / Reviews
Reviews of New Books Spring 2025
In only a few short decades, we have come a long way from Francis Fukuyama’s declaration of the ‘end of history’ and the triumph of liberal democracy in 1989. Now, with the inexorable rise of China, the ascendancy of authoritarianism and the retreat of democracy, the world stands at a moment of crisis.
This is a time of momentous upheaval and enormous geopolitical shifts, compounded by the global pandemic, economic collapse and growing inequality, Islamist and far right terror, and a resurgent white supremacy. The world is in lockdown and the showdown with China is accelerating – and while the West has been at the forefront of history for 200 years, it must now adapt to a world it no longer dominates. At this moment, we stand on a precipice – what will become of us?
‘Shakespeare and Company’ in Paris is one of the world’s most famous bookshops. The original store opened in 1921 and became known as the haunt of literary greats, such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Bernard Shaw, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and James Joyce. Sadly, the shop was forced to close in 1941, but that was not the end of ‘Shakespeare and Company’. In 1951 another bookshop, with a similar free-thinking ethos, opened on the Left Bank. Called ‘Le Mistral’, it had beds for those of a literary mindset who found themselves down on their luck and, in 1964, it resurrected the name ‘Shakespeare and Company’ and became the principal meeting place for Beatnik poets, such as Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs, through to Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell.
Today the tradition continues and writers still find their way to this bizarre establishment, one of them being Jeremy Mercer. With no friends, no job, no money and no prospects, the thrill of escape from his life in Canada soon palls but, by chance, he happens upon the fairytale world of ‘Shakespeare and Co’ and is taken in. What follows is his tale of his time there, the curious people who came and went, the realities of being down and out in the ‘city of light’ and, in particular, his relationship with the beguiling octogenarian owner, George.
Kate arrives on the wild, remote island of Rathlin in the freezing Irish Channel for a ten-day writers’ retreat.
Plagued by memories she can’t unravel and desperate to understand the breakdown of her marriage, Kate is determined to leave the retreat with answers. As the retreat’s director uses techniques that tap into the eerie mythology of the island, Kate becomes increasingly fascinated by him and her surrounds. But as the temperature plummets and the strange therapy intensifies, her memories unspool. Triggered into a series of disturbing flashbacks, Kate realises her past hides a frightening truth, but can she trust her own mind?
It was 1994 when Xinran, a journalist and the author of The Good Women of China, received a telephone call asking her to travel four hours to meet an oddly dressed woman who had just crossed the border from Tibet into China. Xinran made the trip and met the woman, called Shu Wen, who recounted the story of her thirty-year odyssey in the vast landscape of Tibet.
Shu Wen and her husband had been married for only a few months in the 1950s when he joined the Chinese army and was sent to Tibet for the purpose of unification of the two countries. Shortly after he left she was notified that he had been killed, although no details were given. Determined to find the truth, Shu Wen joined a militia unit going to the Tibetan north, where she soon was separated from the regiment. Without supplies and knowledge of the language, she wandered, trying to find her way until, on the brink of death, she was rescued by a family of nomads under whose protection she moved from place to place with the seasons and eventually came to discover the details of her husband’s death.
Based on the lives of real people in Somerset on the borders of Exmoor, Miller tells his own story of a young labourer swept up in the adventure of riding second horse in a west country stag hunt.
Finding himself in a closed social system in which he has neither status nor power, the young man identifies with the aberrant Tivington nott stag, which despite its lack of antlers, has become a legend in the district for its ability to elude the hunt and to compete successfully with the antlered stags.
In November 2024, Castlemaine Community House hosted its first Memoir Writing course, facilitated by artist and writer Anne Rittman. She didn’t anticipate that out of this course, nine of her participants would become published authors.
“Each week, Anne gave us a theme to work on, along with prompts that would illuminate memories within us. We then wrote furiously and shared our stories with the class. Towards the end of the course, someone in the class jokingly said that we should publish an anthology,” says Ana Radovcich, one of the participants. And that’s exactly what they did, with Anne’s support and experience in self-publishing, they proudly published their memoirs, titled Snap Shot: Our Memoirs. The group were able to produce the anthology thanks to the Community Grant awarded by Mount Alexander Shire Council
The absolutely fabulous Joanna Lumley opens her private albums for this illustrated memoir. The real-life scrapbook of the woman known as Ab Fab‘s Patsy Stone, this is an intimate memoir of one of Britain’s undisputed national treasures.
A former model and Bond girl, her distinctive voice has been supplied for animated characters, film narration, and AOL’s “You’ve got mail” notification in the UK. She discusses speaking out as a human rights activist for Survival International and the recent Gurkha Justice Campaign for which she is now considered a “national treasure” of Nepal because of her support. She has won two BAFTA awards, but it is the sheer diversity of her life that makes her story so compelling; early years in Kashmir and Malaya, growing up in Kent, then a photographic model before becoming an actress, appearing in a huge range of roles.
A violent robbery has taken place in an affluent area of the Costa Del Sol, in which an entire family are killed, grandmother, mother, father and two children.
Annika Bengtzon is assigned to the story, and when she arrives in Spain and gains access to the crime scene, she is horrified to discover there was a third child, a teenage daughter, who is unaccounted for. Annika makes it her mission to find the missing Suzette. But as she delves into the mystery, she becomes embroiled in a far darker side of Spanish life than she’d envisioned as once again those closest to her turn out to be the ones she knows the least about.
Nick and her cousin, Helena, have grown up sharing sultry summer heat, sun-bleached boat docks, and midnight gin parties on Martha’s Vineyard in a glorious old family estate known as Tiger House. In the days following the end of the Second World War, the world seems to offer itself up, and the two women are on the cusp of their ‘real lives’: Helena is off to Hollywood and a new marriage, while Nick is heading for a reunion with her own young husband, Hughes, about to return from the war.
Soon the gilt begins to crack. Helena’s husband is not the man he seemed to be, and Hughes has returned from the war distant, his inner light curtained over. On the brink of the 1960s, back at Tiger House, Nick and Helena with their children, Daisy and Ed try to recapture that sense of possibility. But when Daisy and Ed discover the victim of a brutal murder, the intrusion of violence causes everything to unravel. The members of the family spin out of their prescribed orbits, secrets come to light, and nothing about their lives will ever be the same.
Spanning four decades, from 1968 onwards, this is the story of a fabulous but flawed family and the slew of ordinary and extraordinary incidents that shape their everyday lives.
It is a story about childhood and growing up, loss of innocence, eccentricity, familial ties and friendships, love and life. Stripped down to its bare bones, it’s about the unbreakable bond between a brother and sister.
When Mara, Brehon of the Burren, is summoned to the sandy beach of Fanore, on the western fringe of the kingdom of the Burren, she sees a sight that she has never witnessed before during her thirty years as law-enforcer and investigating a dead man lying in a boat with no oars.
Immediately her scholars jump to the conclusion that the man has been found guilty of kin-murder. The Brehon sentence for this worst of all crimes is that the murderer be towed out to sea and left to the mercy of wind and waves and the ultimate judgement of Almighty God. But Mara notices something odd about the body, something which arouses her suspicions. And something familiar about the boat in which he lies. Soon she has embarked on a full-scale murder investigation. And gradually suspicion dawns that someone near and dear to her is involved in the murder.
On her first day at a new school, Lily meets Eva, one of the daughters of the infamous avant-garde painter Evan Trentham. He and his wife are attempting to escape the stifling conservatism of 1930s Australia by inviting other like-minded artists to live and work with them at their family home. As Lily’s friendship with Eva grows, she becomes infatuated with this makeshift family and longs to truly be a part of it.
Looking back on those years later in life, Lily realises that this utopian circle involved the same themes as Evan Trentham’s art: Faustian bargains and terrible recompense; spectacular fortunes and falls from grace. Yet it was not Evan, nor the other artists he gathered around him, but his own daughters, who paid the debt that was owing.
In the centre of historic Edinburgh, builders are preparing to convert a disused Victorian Gothic building into luxury flats. They are understandably surprised to find skeletal remains hidden in a high pinnacle that hasn’t been touched by maintenance for years.
But who do the bones belong to, and how did they get there? Could the eccentric British pastime of free climbing the outside of buildings play a role? Enter cold case detective Karen Pirie, who gets to work trying to establish the corpse’s identity. And when it turns out the bones may be from as far away as former Yugoslavia, Karen will need to dig deeper than she ever imagined into the tragic history of the Balkans: to war crimes and their consequences, and ultimately to the notion of what justice is and who serves it.
Guilt and grief have driven a wedge between long time crime-fighting partners psychologist Tony Hill and ex-DCI Carol Jordan. But just because they’re not talking doesn’t mean the killing stops.
Someone is killing women. Women who bear an unsettling resemblance to Carol Jordan. And when the evidence begins to point in a disturbing direction, thinking the unthinkable seems the only possible answer.
Quentin Jacobsen has spent a lifetime loving the magnificently adventurous Margo Roth Spiegelman from afar. So, when she cracks open a window and climbs into his life, dressed like a ninja and summoning him for an ingenious campaign of revenge, he follows. After their all-nighter ends, and a new day breaks, Q arrives at school to discover that Margo, always an enigma, has now become a mystery. But Q soon learns that there are clues—and they’re for him. Urged down a disconnected path, the closer he gets, the less Q sees the girl he thought he knew.
Following weeks of heavy rain, the earth comes crumbling down on one of Larvik’s residential areas, burying a handful of houses.
Detective William Wisting is quick to join the rescue operation. Luckily, by sunrise the next day, it becomes clear that the landslide has claimed no victims. And yet, just twenty-four hours later, a body is found and the victim was killed before the landslide. As Wisting opens an investigation into the mysterious murder, he soon discovers this death might have dangerous ties to a series of ongoing cases. The clues start leading Wisting not towards an enemy on the outside, but to a traitor in his own unit.
Fred Cahir tells the story about the magnitude of Aboriginal involvement on the Victorian goldfields in the middle of the nineteenth century. The first history of Aboriginal–white interaction on the Victorian goldfields, Black Gold offers new insights on one of the great epochs in Australian and world history, the gold story.
In vivid detail it describes how Aboriginal people often figured significantly in the search for gold and documents the devastating social impact of gold mining on Victorian Aboriginal communities. It reveals the complexity of their involvement from passive presence, to active discovery, to shunning the goldfields.
The last person Alice Shipley expected to see when she arrived in Tangier with her new husband was Lucy Mason.
After the horrific accident at Bennington, the two friends, once inseparable roommates, haven’t spoken in over a year. But Lucy is standing there, trying to make things right. Perhaps Alice should be happy. She has not adjusted to life in Morocco, too afraid to venture out into the bustling medinas and oppressive heat. Lucy, always fearless and independent, helps Alice emerge from her flat and explore the country. But soon a familiar feeling starts to overtake Alice – she feels controlled and stifled by Lucy at every turn. Then Alice’s husband, John, goes missing, and she starts to question everything around her.
When a woman goes missing, it gets personal for DCI Craig Gillard. But he could never imagine what happens next.
Criminologist Martin Knight lives a gilded life and is a thorn in the side of the police. But then his wife Liz goes missing. There is no good explanation and no sign of Martin. To make things worse, Liz is the ex-girlfriend of DCI Craig Gillard who is drawn into the investigation. Is it just a missing person or something worse? And what relevance do the events around the shocking Girl F case, so taken up by Knight, have to do with the present?
As NY Lt. Eve Dallas and her billionaire husband Roarke are driving home, a young woman, dazed, naked, and bloody, suddenly stumbles out in front of their car.
Roarke slams on the brakes and Eve springs into action. Daphne Strazza is rushed to the ER, but it’s too late for her husband Dr. Anthony Strazza. A brilliant orthopaedic surgeon, he now lies dead amid the wreckage of his obsessively organized town house, his three safes opened and emptied. Daphne would be a valuable witness, but in her terror and shock the only description of the perp she can offer is repeatedly calling him “the devil”.
Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Detective Stilwell has been “exiled” to a low-key post policing rustic Catalina Island, after department politics drove him off a homicide desk on the mainland.
While following up the usual drunk-and-disorderlies and petty thefts that come with his new territory, Detective Stilwell gets a report of a body found weighed down at the bottom of the harbour, a Jane Doe identifiable at first only by a streak of purple dye in her hair. At the same time, a report of poaching on a protected reserve turns into a case fraught with violence and danger as Stilwell digs into the shady past of an island bigwig.
When the redoubtable Miss Phryne Fisher receives threatening letters at her home, she enlists the unflappable apprentice Tinker to investigate. But as the harassment of Phryne threatens to spin out of control, her lover, Lin Chung is also targeted.
Meanwhile, Dot begins to fear that her fiancée, newly promoted Sergeant Hugh Collins, has gone cold on setting a date for their wedding. Phryne’s clever daughters, Ruth and Jane, begin their own investigation into suspiciously dwindling funds when they are sent to help at the Blind Institute.
None of this is quite enough to prevent Phryne from accepting an invitation to a magnificent party at the house of the mysterious Hong. When the party is interrupted by shocking tragedy, Phryne gathers all of her unerring brilliance to track down the miscreants. With some unlikely assistance, Phryne is in a race against time to save a pair of young lovers from disgrace and death.
The changing seasons captivated Vincent van Gogh (1853-90), who saw in their unending cycle the majesty of nature and the existence of a higher force. Van Gogh and the Seasons is the first book to explore this central aspect of van Gogh’s life and work.
Van Gogh often linked the seasons to rural life and labour as men and women worked the land throughout the year. From his depictions of peasants and sowers to winter gardens, riverbanks, orchards, and harvests, he painted scenes that richly evoke the sensory pleasures and deprivations particular to each season.
In the blink of an eye everything changes. Seventeen year-old Mia has no memory of the accident; she can only recall what happened afterwards, watching her own damaged body being taken from the wreck.
Little by little she struggles to put together the pieces, to figure out what she has lost, what she has left, and the very difficult choice she must make.
“Provides project designs and complete directions for building 24 innovative metal-work projects. Features the latest in welding equipment and techniques, and offers projects that are both practical and ornamental”–Provided by publisher.
Hazel’s new job at the docks quickly turns perilous when she stumbles into the criminal underworld that lurks beneath the surface.
A million in gold coins has vanished from a cargo ship and a dead body washed up. Suddenly, she’s in over her head. Disillusioned with her life, Betty is led astray by a charismatic new friend and finds herself exposed in more ways than one until a crisis drags her back to reality.
Living in a high-class brothel, Irene gets wind of a threat that could destroy her livelihood. She takes on the Maltese mafia and becomes involved in a dangerously sticky situation. When one of the tea ladies disappears, they face their greatest challenge yet, pushing their detective skills to the limit. It will take more than a glass of Hazel’s homemade wine to solve this one.
‘We were four shattered souls saying goodbye that night.’
That same night a storm raged as Helena drove through sheets of rain back to Melbourne, to the hospital, willing Maria to delay her last breath. In her follow up to the award-nominated When the Past Awakens, Helena Kidd recounts the final days of her mother, Maria Avraam. Maria came to Australia from Cyprus in 1957. She was a survivor of an abusive marriage and was later deserted in the 1960s. With the assistance of her children, she became a first-time homeowner at the age of 64 in Brunswick, Victoria. Called ‘The Quiet House’, it gave Maria new life and set her free from cultural patterns of restriction.
Willa Drake can count on one hand the defining moments of her life: when she was eleven and her mother disappeared, being proposed to at twenty-one, the accident that would make her a widow at forty-one.
At each of these moments, Willa ended up on a path laid out for her by others. So, when she receives a phone call telling her that her son’s ex-girlfriend has been shot and needs her help, she drops everything and flies across the country. The spur-of-the-moment decision to look after this woman and her nine-year-old daughter and her dog, will lead Willa into uncharted territory. Surrounded by new and surprising neighbours, she is plunged into the rituals that make a community and takes pleasure in the most unexpected things.
Madeleine d’Leon doesn’t know where Edward came from. He is simply a character in her next book.
But as she writes, he becomes all she can think about. His charm, his dark hair, his pen scratching out his latest literary novel. Edward McGinnity can’t get Madeleine out of his mind, softly smiling, infectiously enthusiastic, and perfectly damaged. She will be the ideal heroine for his next book. But who is the author and who is the creation? And as the lines start to blur, who is affected when a killer finally takes flesh?
Among the most popular attractions at The Cloisters, the medieval branch of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, is a set of tapestries depicting the hunt of the fabled unicorn.
Each of the seven exquisite tapestries is reproduced in large colour plates and with a wealth of colour details. Created in the Netherlands in 1495-1505, they contain supremely memorable images – from the vulnerable unicorn and the individualized faces of the hunters to the naturalistically depicted flora and fauna. The author also looks at the construction of the tapestries and the historical and cultural context in which they were woven.
Ghost Cities – inspired by the vacant, uninhabited megacities of China – follows multiple narratives, including one in which a young man named Xiang is fired from his job as a translator at Sydney’s Chinese Consulate after it is discovered he doesn’t speak a word of Chinese and has been relying entirely on Google Translate for his work. How is his relocation to one such ghost city connected to a parallel odyssey in which an ancient Emperor creates a thousand doubles of Himself? Where a chess-playing automaton hides a deadly secret? Or a tale in which every book in the known Empire is destroyed then re-created, page by page and book by book, all in the name of love and art? Allegorical and imaginative, Ghost Cities will appeal to readers of Haruki Murakami and Italo Calvino.
Deep Listening to Nature is an invitation to open our ears to the natural world. Beginning by tuning in to the sounds of creatures around us, Andrew discusses how to identify species by call, interpret their communications and find empathy for their sentience. Part reflection, part nature and travel diary, Andrew asks what does listening reveal about how the living systems of nature function, and why do birds in particular negotiate their interactions in such lyrical and extraordinary ways? He concludes by suggesting we not only listen to learn about nature, but learn from nature. He asks how, in our current environmental crisis, we may mimic what the biosphere has achieved in sustaining life as we move toward an ecological future and in doing so, form a deeper and more personal connection to Country. Andrew encourages us to be still and listen. Extend our senses. Let nature get to know us, and in its own way, to welcome us. The book is accompanied by an online soundtrack with 300 audio recordings, which bring the text to life.