This week’s releases range from literary romance and a rock-tinged whodunit to the life of Errol Flynn and a weighty hospitality memoir.
FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Pick A Colour
Souvankham Thammavongsa
Bloomsbury, $27.99
“Everyone is ugly.” As opening lines of novels go, it’s almost belligerent in its desire to be remembered. Our narrator Ning – a former boxer, now the owner-operator of a nail barsomewhere in Canada – knows how to fight; she also knows the value of appearing to be forgettable in her current line of work. Her small business is called Susan’s. All the workers wear a name tag with “Susan” on it. Clients seem to like the illusion of constant availability and fungibility, of always having a Susan on hand to see to their beauty needs. Pick a Colour is set over one day at the salon, with keen-eyed Ning waging a constant battle against ugliness that she makes no bones about exposing with maximum certitude. The quotidian rhythms and rituals of the place, and what’s really being bought and sold in it, come into focus. Loatian-Canadian writer Souvankham Thammavongsa has composed a brisk and astute novel that questions the nature of beauty and exploitation; her creation, Ning, grabs the spotlight for a minoritised corner of the low-wage service industry with memorable gumption and a worldly eye.
Power Moves
Leesa Ronald
Allen & Unwin, $34.99
This rivals-to-lovers romcom features natural enemies – a spin doctor and a political journo – going head-to-head during an election campaign. Workaholic Camilla “Millsy” Hatton is media adviser to the state education minister. She knows Archie Cohen from university – he was a handsome jock then, now he’s a popular politics reporter with a gift for sniffing out damaging headlines. Battle lines are drawn when an election is called, but as Millsy and Archie square off in the drama of an unfolding scandal, there’s undeniable chemistry beneath the professional struggle between them. Family relationships are woven in. A high-stakes game plays out in the mainstream media, and a spicier, personal one emerges behind the scenes as professional conflict feeds into romantic friction. Power Moves is a diverting romcom with a strong, appealing female protagonist. Millsy’s self-deprecating banter is fun and free-flowing; her froth-machine never runs dry and there’s a sharper strand to the humour that’s unafraid to call out gender bias in professional life.
If I Ruled the World
Amy DuBois Barnett
Simon & Schuster, $34.99
Amy DuBois Barnett – a prominent editor in the 1990s NYC magazine scene – brings an inside eye to its cutthroat milieu in her debut If I Ruled the World. We follow Nikki, a black woman on the rise in the world of fashion and music mags. She finds a mentor in Lucinda, who promotes her at a Vogue-style magazine, while exploiting her for an exotic touch and exposing her to microaggressions and belittling treatment. A move to hip-hop and style mag Sugar is technically a step down on the career ladder, but when Nikki’s offered the position of editor-in-chief, with six months to turn its fortunes around, she’s determined to turn the glass cliff into a pop-cultural phenomenon promoting the beauty and power of black women. Arrayed against her are her former mentor, and a powerful nemesis in oversexed publishing mogul Alonzo Griffin (who wants to destroy Sugar out of spite). Then, of course, Nikki must learn to handle hip-hop gangstas known for their decadence and debauchery. Everyone wants a piece of the action in this wild dive behind the scenes of a period of history that would transform pop culture, music and fashion.
Laws of Love and Logic
Debra Curtis
Bloomsbury, $22.99
Adolescent tragedy derails what feels like romantic destiny in Laws of Love and Logic. Lily and Jane are sisters, raised by a feminist mother in a rather patriarchal environment – a Catholic boys’ boarding school run by monks. Young Lily’s imagination is steeped in the stories of Catholic saints when she falls for a boy – an unnamed high-school sweetheart, smart and athletic, with a bright future ahead. Jane is a maths prodigy who becomes obsessed by the nature of time. A drunken evening leads to disaster, with the boy ending up in jail. Lily moves on, marrying an ornithology professor, though she never forgets her first love or entirely rids herself of guilt over her role in what happened that night. The disturbingly brilliant Jane, meanwhile, goes to Yale, and the story slowly pieces its broken strands together, with roads not taken coming to intersect decades on. It can be a touch heavy-handed thematically, but Debra Curtis’ love story has an intellectual and historical sweep that make it a literary romance for readers of a more mature bent than is usual for genre fiction.
The Last Encore
Rebecca Heath
Head of Zeus, $20.69
A reunion concert is to be held on a remote island. The Cedrics Band fell apart after the death of lead singer Jonny Rake, in an accidental explosion, 18 years previously. Now his daughter Monet is taking his place, with band members – including an estranged uncle – coming together to play a special gig, which will be filmed for a documentary. Monet doesn’t believe her dad’s death was an accident, and there are grudges and grievances between the bandmates, their dodgy manager, the resort owner who’s determined to pull out all the stops for celebrity guests, the doco-maker, and the band’s family members, including the talented Monet. The reunion goes south and most of these unlikeable characters are soon at each other’s throats, but when someone winds up dead, they realise they’re trapped on an island with a killer and no means of escape. Rebecca Heath has constructed a classic locked-room murder mystery with a rock’n’roll veneer. The web does get a little ornate, with exposition rushed towards the end, though the twists are clever and should keep whodunit fans on their toes.
NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Errol Flynn
Patricia A. O’Brien
Allen & Unwin, $36.99
In 1957, two years before he died, Errol Flynn was doing publicity for one of his “comeback” movies (an adaptation of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, in which he effortlessly plays a dissolute Scotsman). He asked the journalist if he’d ever been to Tasmania and added that he wanted to return to “his real hometown of Hobart”. In this informed, perceptive and entertaining study of Flynn, O’Brien delves into his Tasmanian childhood, parents, English schooling, time in New Guinea, Hollywood, legendary fame and an early death. But while delivering an “intimate” portrait, the book also operates on an analytic level seeing Flynn as something of a symbolic site in terms of American culture, where past scandals with contemporary resonance are enacted. This is especially true of Flynn’s sex life and multiple affairs – eventually landing him in court for Statutory Rape, though he was later acquitted. It also looks at Flynn’s politics, ranging from being a staunch supporter of the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War to being accused of being a Nazi spy. By any measure, this is a portrait of a life lived on an intensely epic level that thoroughly justifies the saying that his life generated: “in like Flynn”.
Rasputin
Antony Beevor
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, $55
Rasputin is one of those colourful godsends to historians, but his
significance is often over-stated. The lauded British historian, in this
latest biography, states that the peasant monk is an “intriguing”
variation on the great man theory of history and claims that “Seldom
has the cause-and-effect chain of history been so influenced by a
single man”. He also argues that Rasputin is a case study of that No
Man’s Land between “fact and fantasy” and the power of wild
innuendo and rumour that echoes our own times. Intriguing, yes. But
the Russian people did not rise up because of fake news that the mad
monk was shagging the Tsarina or because he had the ear of the Tsar.
Still, this is a valid correction of analyses of the revolution that
emphasise the economic and social at the expense of individual
influence. For all its tendency for overstatement, it’s scrupulously
documented, erudite and entertaining history (seen through the lens of
a wild card figure, symptomatic of imperial decline), leading to that
tumultuous moment in 1917 when history shrugged twice.
Poisonous People
Leanne ten Brinke
Simon & Schuster, $36.99
When psychologist Leanne ten Brinke talks about “poisonous people”, she means those with psychopathic traits. Most of the time, she says, when we think of psychopaths we think of extreme cases such as Charles Manson. Her emphasis, from considerable research over the years, is on those who often slip beneath the radar, such as workplace bosses, romantic partners or friends. It also includes political leaders who, in these troubled times, play up to popular notions of the “strong” leader. President Trump, for example, according to a number of recent studies – and this may or may not be news – ticks all psychopathic boxes. But rather than depress us, she wants to empower the reader by informing them about how to recognise “dark” personalities, deny them powerful corporate positions, leave or repair a relationship and even recognise such qualities in themselves. For all its concentration on “dark” types, they are a minority, and this is a positive manual for spotting them and dealing with them.
Fed Up
Lucy Ridge
Monash University Publishing, $36.99
It wasn’t just the sexist bullying that drove former chef Lucy Ridge out of the hospitality game. From an early age, she loved the idea of being a chef and creating food from locally grown produce. But hospitality, she discovered, was an industry, and in what was a life-changing decision, she walked out of the kitchen (her decision about her sexuality, at the same, mirroring this move), and defied not only the hospitality trade but the food industries supplying it by entering the world of small producers via a series of short-term internships. Written from a feminist perspective and incorporating indigenous food and farming methods, Ridge charts a journey that took her around Australia: from learning how to distil gin in Darwin, to making cheese in Orange, working on a pig farm in Victoria and much more. As the punning title indicates, humour infuses the serious in this memoir-cum-study of the weighty issue of what she calls “system change”.
Ellen Savage and the Heroes of the AHS Centaur
Grantlee Kieza
ABC Books, $35.99
In the predawn hours of May 14, 1943, the Australian Hospital Ship Centaur was sunk by a Japanese submarine, 50 kilometres off Stradbroke Island, resulting in 268 deaths. Kieza’s dramatisation of events focuses on the few survivors (the ship, clearly marked, sank in three minutes), especially the eponymous nurse Ellen “Nell” Savage, who, in shark-crowded waters, waited 36 hours before being rescued by a US ship. It’s a story of great resilience, faith and grace in the face of death. But in many ways, the book is at its most intriguing as an examination of a war crime. The Japanese submarine commander who sank the Centaur continually denied having done so under extensive postwar questioning, eventually serving a grossly inadequate six years’ hard labour for other atrocities, and died in 1986 in total denial. There is a bit too much background about Savage’s early life and the dramatisation can get a bit stagy, but this is a timely reminder that wars and war crimes are never far apart.
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