New Books / Reviews
Reviews of New Books Summer 2025/2026
In Normal Women, Gregory draws on an enormous archive of primary and secondary sources to rewrite British history, focusing on the agency, persistence, and effectiveness of everyday women throughout periods of social and cultural transition. She sweeps from the making of the Bayeux tapestry in the eleventh century to the Black Death in 1348, after which women were briefly paid the same wages as men, the last time for seven centuries, to the 1992 ordination of women by the Church of England, when the church accepted, for the first time, that a woman could perform the miracle of the mass.
Through the stories of the female soldiers of the civil war, the guild widows who founded the prosperity of the City of London, highwaywomen and pirates, miners, ship owners, international traders, the women who ran London theatres and commissioned plays from Shakespeare, and the “female husbands” who married each other legally in church and lived as husband and wife, Gregory redefines “normal” female behaviour to include heroism, rebellion, crime, treason, money-making, and sainthood. As she makes clear, normal women make history.
Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is a razor-sharp satire set in Texas during America’s war in Iraq. It explores the gaping national disconnect between the war at home and the war abroad.
Ben Fountain’s remarkable debut novel follows the surviving members of the heroic Bravo Squad through one exhausting stop in their media-intensive “Victory Tour” at Texas Stadium, football mecca of the Dallas Cowboys, their fans, promoters, and cheerleaders.
In life there are few, if any, moral absolutes for us to rely on, and facing an increasing array of choices we often lack the confidence of knowing we have made the right choice.
In Right & Wrong, respected social commentator Hugh Mackay suggests some personal strategies that will make it easier to work out what is right and wrong for each of us in a particular situation. In an engaging, conversational style, Mackay tackles the minefield of personal relationships, business ethics, morality and religion, the benefits of moral mindfulness and the reasons why we should strive for a good life in which we are true to ourselves and sensitive to the wellbeing of others.
A family story spanning two world wars and several generations in a German family. In the devastating opening scene, a woman named Helene stands with her seven-year-old son in a provincial German railway station in 1945, amid the chaos of civilians fleeing west. Having survived with him through the horror and deprivation of the war years, she abandons him on the station platform and never returns.
The story quickly circles back to Helene’s childhood with her sister Martha in rural Germany, which came to an abrupt end with the outbreak of the First World War. Their father is sent to the eastern front, and their Jewish mother withdraws from the hostility of her surroundings into a state of mental confusion. In the early 1920s, after their father’s death, Helene and Martha move to Berlin, where Helene falls in love with a philosophy student named Carl, and finds a place for herself for the first time. But when Carl dies just before their engagement, life becomes largely meaningless for her, and she takes refuge in her work as a nurse. At a party Helene meets an ambitious civil engineer who wants to build motorways for the Reich and make Helene his wife. Their marriage proves disastrous, but produces a son, and Helene soon finds the love demanded by the little boy more than she can provide.
The beautiful city of Venice has been Lydia’s home for many years, a place where she has found peace and fulfillment.
Then one day she glimpses a young man’s face in the crowd that threatens to change everything. He’s a heart-stopping reminder of a dreadful secret she believed she had banished to the past. As a young child, Lydia and her sister were sent to live with grandparents they’d never even met before. It was a cruel and loveless new world for them and it forced Lydia to grow up fast. She learned to keep secrets and to trust sparingly, and through it all she was shadowed by grief and guilt. Now, 28 years later, Lydia is persuaded to leave behind the safe new life she has created for herself and return to England to face the past and maybe her future.
Strange things are happening at Biehl’s Academy when this elite school opens its doors to a group of orphans and reform-school rejects, kids at the end of the system’s tether.
The school is run by a peculiar set of rules by which every minute is regimented and controlled. Soon, they suspect they are guinea pigs in a bizarre social experiment and that their only hope of escape is to break through a dangerous threshold of time and space.
It’s been a quiet year for the Thursday Murder Club. Joyce is busy with table plansand first dances. Elizabeth is grieving. Ron is dealing with family troubles, and Ibrahim is still providing therapy to his favourite criminal.
But when Elizabeth meets a wedding guest who’s in trouble, kidnap and death are hot on their heels once more. A villain wants access to an uncrackable code, and will stop at nothing to get it. Plunged back into action once more, can the gang solve the puzzle and a murder in time?
From her idyllic life in sea country in Nerrm (Port Phillip Bay, Victoria), Nannertgarrook is abducted and taken to a slave market, leaving behind a husband, daughter and son. Pregnant when seized, she soon gives birth to another son, whom she raises with the children of her fellow captives.
Nannertgarrook is separated not only from her Boonwurrung family, but from her birthright: the ceremonies she once was so joyously part of, the majestic whales who are her totem, the land and sky and sea country and its creatures. All these things she loves as deeply as she does her blood kin.
2014 : At a dinner for close friends and colleagues, renowned poet Francis Blundy honours his wife’s birthday by reading aloud a new poem dedicated to her, ‘A Corona for Vivien’. Much wine is drunk as the guests listen, and a delicious meal consumed. Little does anyone gathered around the candlelit table know that for generations to come people will speculate about the message of this poem, a copy of which has never been found, and which remains an enduring mystery.
2119 : Just over one hundred years in the future, much of the western world has been submerged by rising seas following a catastrophic nuclear accident. Those who survive are haunted by the richness of the world that has been lost. In the water-logged south of what used to be England, Thomas Metcalfe, a lonely scholar and researcher, longs for the early twenty-first century as he chases the ghost of one poem, ‘A Corona for Vivian’.
We perform ceremonies every day
We perform ceremonies every day. Some are personal, some highly organised and others are repeated for generations.
For First Nations Australians, ceremonies create the backbone of cultural practice. All Yesterdays for Today tells how Indigenous ceremonies link people today to those of the past in a continuum of inherited stories, places and memories, from rites of passage to smoking ceremonies and Welcomes to Country, and many others.
In Obama’s Wars, Bob Woodward provides the most intimate and sweeping portrait yet of the young president as commander in chief.
Drawing on internal memos, classified documents, meeting notes and hundreds of hours of interviews with most of the key players, including the president, Woodward tells the inside story of Obama making the critical decisions on the Afghanistan War, the secret campaign in Pakistan and the worldwide fight against terrorism.
In this memoir, Kim Huynh traces his parents’ lives from a poor village in central Vietnam through affluence in Saigon, to their harrowing experiences after the American withdrawal and the fall of Saigon in 1975.
In the snowy mountains of Vermont, Sonia is lonely. A college student and aspiring writer homesick for India, she turns to an older artist for inspiration and intimacy, a man who will cast a dark spell on the next many years of her life. In Brooklyn, Sunny is lonely, too. A struggling journalist originally from Delhi, he is both beguiled and perplexed by his American girlfriend and the country in which he plans to find his future. As Sonia and Sunny each becomes more and more alienated, they begin to question their understanding of happiness, human connection, and where they belong.
Back in India, Sonia and Sunny’s extended families cannot fathom how anyone could be lonely in this great, bustling world. They arrange a meeting between the two, a clumsy meddling that only drives Sonia and Sunny apart before they have a chance to fall in love.
For this extraordinary book, the lone wolves became a team. Garner, Hooper and Krasnostein tracked Erin Patterson’s preliminary hearings and trial, joined the media scrum at the Latrobe Valley Law Courts, slept over in Morwell and spent countless hours in fervent discussion of the case and the themes it raises: love, hate, jealousy, revenge, marriage, money, mycology and murder.
The Mushroom Tapes is a true crime book like no other, an unputdownable record of the writers’ private conversations about their impressions from inside the courtroom. They explore the gap between the certainties of the law and the messiness of reality, their own ambivalence about the true crime genre, and all that remains unknowable about Erin Patterson.
There are two kinds of people no one ever expects to be: little girls and old ladies.
Elsie Mabel Fitzpatrick is eighty-one years old. She’s lived on her idyllic street for sixty years, longer than anyone else. Aside from being a curmudgeon who minds everyone else’s business, few would suspect that Elsie has a past she’s worked exceedingly hard at concealing because when it comes to murder, no one ever suspects little girls or old ladies. And Elsie Mabel Fitzpatrick, once a little girl and now an old lady, has a strange history of people in her life coming to a foul end.
It’s been several years since Detective Jimmy Perez left Shetland. He has settled into his new home in Orkney, the group of islands, off the northern coast of Scotland, with his partner Willow Reeve and their growing family. One stormy winter night, his oldest and closest friend, Archie Stout, goes missing. Ever the detective, Perez catches a boat to the island of Westray, where Archie worked as a farmer and lived with his wife and children.
But when he arrives he finds a shocking Archie’s body, on an archaeological dig site and an ancient Westray story stone with precise spirals carved into it beside him, the clear murder weapon. The artifact, taken from a nearby museum, seems to suggest a premediated murder. But Perez is so close to the case that he struggles to maintain an objective distance from the potential suspects. He finds it difficult to question Archie’s wife, whom he’s known for years. Rumours swirl about the dead man’s relationship with a young woman new to the island, an artist. With each new lead, the case becomes more twisted and Perez wonders if he will ever find out what happened in his friend’s final days.
When brilliant young student Jessica Mowbrie is left in a coma after being abandoned in a remote patch of New Zealand bush, the local Masterton police don’t have a clue what happened. Isolated and under-resourced, the detectives struggle even to begin piecing it together. Police records clerk Lorraine Henry will not accept that Jessie simply had a lucky escape. She thinks whoever hurt her needs to be hunted down, and worries that her employers are a bit hopeless.
As Jessie’s life hangs in the balance, it looks as if Lorraine will do the hunting. She’s not getting any younger, of course. But she has all the police records at her fingertips and as much information about who hates who as anyone in their small town. Plus, she’s used to being under-estimated. And you should never under-estimate a middle-aged woman with justice in her sights.
In the fading glow of Australia’s print journalism era, The National is an institution, and the only place that George Desoulis has ever felt at home. A world-weary subeditor with a bookish sensibility and a painful past, George is one of nature’s loners.
But a late-night encounter with an unorthodox and self-assured reporter, Cassandra Gwan, begins to unravel both of their carefully managed worlds. As the decline of the newspaper enters a desperate stage, George and Cassandra struggle to balance their turbulent relationship with their responsibilities to family, and the compromises each has built their life upon.
With a deft wit and a sharp eye for emotional complexity, Pippos examines the stories we tell ourselves, and the ways people handle grief, guilt and generational change. The Transformations is a novel about endings of dreams, relationships, institutions- and the chance of new beginnings.
Is artificial intelligence going to take over the world? Have big tech scientists created an artificial lifeform that can think on its own? Is it going to put authors, artists, and others out of business? Are we about to enter an age where computers are better than humans at everything?
The answer to these questions, linguist Emily M. Bender and sociologist Alex Hanna make clear, is “no,” “they wish,” “LOL,” and “definitely not.” This kind of thinking is a symptom of a phenomenon known as “AI hype.” Hype looks and smells It twists words and helps the rich get richer by justifying data theft, motivating surveillance capitalism, and devaluing human creativity in order to replace meaningful work with jobs that treat people like machines. In The AI Con, Bender and Hanna offer a sharp, witty, and wide-ranging take-down of AI hype across its many forms.