From David’s Desk

So we come to mid-year, a chance to take a break and take stock, amid all the activity and changes for us in 2023. And I’ll begin with a warm welcome to our new Gleaner editor, Gabriel Wilder, who brings a wealth of journalistic experience with her to the role. We’re all looking forward to working with her.

An update on those comprehensive and exciting renovations at 49 Glebe Point Road (above), half way through the process. The place looks like a bomb site, as architects, builders, engineers, and all kinds of specialists work their way through the myriad of complex issues involved in restoring the battered old building. Never fear, they’re on schedule, but just to remind readers, that means we won’t move back down the road until early next year. So please keep coming to our lovely “outpost office” shop up the hill, for the rest of the year. In the meantime, we’ll try to ramp up our much missed events program, if we can secure some viable space options outside the shop.

We’ve been closely associated, as booksellers, with the Sydney Writers’ festival, for almost 20 years now, and I’m pleased to report that the recent event at Carriageworks and elsewhere was one of the best. There was great energy and vibrancy within and without the many sessions, and I was delighted by the enormous response to the children’s program, both at Carriageworks and at the hugely popular Schools Days programs. I hope that podcasts and repeats of some of the best sessions come your way, meanwhile, start planning for next year!

So much has been happening that I’ve been on a (time) restricted reading diet. But I wanted to remind everyone of two “recent-ish” publications, in case you missed them. Old God’s Time, Sebastian Barry’s unforgettable and haunting exploration of memory, loss and justice. A retired police detective, living in pinched circumstances in a lean-to that is attached to an old castle on a bleak Irish coast, has to come to terms with his past actions. Barry’s moral sense is unerring, it’s beautifully done.

As well done, in its own uniquely different way, is Fiona Kelly McGregor’s Iris, published late last year. Its brilliance crept up on me as I read it. It’s a bold and boisterous and thoroughly original recreation of the pre-WWII underbelly of Sydney, arranged around the fictionalised life of one Iris Webber, a notorious figure of the time. I loved it.

Finally, and importantly, July sees the publication of what must be the most anticipated book of the year, Anna Funder’s Wifedom. It won’t disappoint – I can only find superlatives to describe my response. Magnificent, profound, utterly original genre-bending work will do to begin with. Wifedom moves seamlessly from the known facts and history of the life of Eileen O’Shaughnessy, wife of George Orwell, to the imagined world behind the letters written by her to her best friend, and takes in, for good measure, contemporary reflections and responses from Funder to her own world as writer, wife, mother. It’s a dazzling and captivating and challenging achievement. A tour de force. Read it and see.

Letitia reviews: Yellowface

The new American bestseller Yellowface by Rebecca F. Kuang is a compelling story about an author who steals the manuscript of her much more successful and suddenly deceased “friend”. This very “now” novel is set against a background of cultural appropriation, social media and the publishing world. An engrossing story that will appeal to lovers of contemporary fiction and books about books. A great bookclub choice.

Zara reviews: August Blue

Deborah Levy

$35 Penguin

Deborah Levy’s highly anticipated new novel is set across Greece, Paris, London and Italy. Elsa, a famous pianist fallen from grace, is a funny, obsessive protagonist and her navigation of childhood loss and personal identity is deeply moving. This book is an instant Levy classic.

Victoria reviews: Forbidden Notebook

Alba De Cespedes

If you love Elena Ferrante, you’ll love this glorious book by Alba De Cespedes. It is a snapshot of a woman living in Italy in the 50s just after WWII. She shares her inner-most thoughts – her desires and fears – at a time when it was “forbidden” for a woman to show or share her discontent with her life of child-rearing and housework. With a foreword by Jhumpa Lahiri who sets the scene.

Andrew reviews: I Am Homeless If This Is

Lorrie Moore

Not My Home

One of Lorrie Moore’s greatest short stories, People Like That Are the Only People Here, takes as its grim setting a paediatric oncology ward, and yet is a wickedly exciting tightrope walk, in which Moore deftly flits between pitch-black gallows humour and the monstrous tragedy of parents facing the likely death of their children. It is vertiginously, dizzyingly, funny and poignant. I’m pleased to say Moore consummately traverses similar terrain with this, her first novel in 14 years, largely set in a Bronx hospice and centring on two brothers as one fights to stay alive. Moore is on fire with this perfectly calibrated, smartly funny, eagle-eyed, beautiful, and moving book.

Tilda reviews: Eta Draconis

Brendan Ritchie

Eta Draconis is a binary star in the constellation Draco, which forms the shape of a wolf lying in wait for a camel’s foal. It sends meteors crashing to Earth and onto the two sisters at the heart of this blazing novel by Brendan Ritchie. Facing a world both familiar and unrecognisable, they undergo a fraught journey along the west coast of Australia from home to university. Along the way they relearn their shared past, and begin to understand what a future looks like in the midst of this cosmic threat.

Ultimo Press

$35

Sad Girl Novel

Pip Finkemeyer

Over the course of a year in Berlin, an aspiring novelist, Kim, and her historian best friend, Bel, confront their twin acts of creation. Kim is becoming a writer, and is determined to write a bestseller. As she attempts to buoy herself using other people for external motivation, they poke holes in her fantasies. Meanwhile, Bel is becoming a mother, and gives birth, certain it will fulfil her in ways her career does not. Kim and Bel support and deceive each other as only the best of friends can.

Feast

Emily O’Grady

Alison is an actress who no longer acts, Patrick a musician past his prime. The eccentric couple live an isolated, debauched existence in an old manor house in Scotland. That is, until Patrick’s teenage daughter, Neve, flees Australia to spend a year with her doting father, and the stepmother she barely knows. Despite Neve’s objections, her mother Shannon arrives in Scotland, bringing with her a hidden agenda that has the potential to shatter the delicate façade of the loving, if dysfunctional, family.

Minds of Sand and Light

Text

Secrets of the Huon Wren

Claire Van Ryn

Senior journalist Allira is writing a story when she meets Nora, a nursing home resident with dementia. Bit by bit, Nora reveals details about her younger life as a spirited teenage girl living beneath the Great Western Tiers in lutruwita/Tasmania’s heartland. When Allira opens up to Nora about her own recent tragedy, the secrets embedded in the story of a carved Huon pine wren become the key to a life-changing discovery from the past. The Secrets of the Huon Wren is a lyrical and highly evocative story about two lives connected by a shared tragedy, and a universal love.

House of Longing

Tara Calaby

Where other young women see their destiny in marriage and motherhood, the reclusive Charlotte wants only to work with her father in his business. Then Flora Dalton bursts through the shop door and into Charlotte’s life – and a new world of baffling desires and possibilities seems to open up. But Melbourne society of the 1890s is not built to embrace unorthodoxy. When tragedy strikes Charlotte finds herself admitted to Kew Lunatic Asylum ‘for her own safety’. A compulsively readable historical romance.

HarperCollins $30

The world is in the midst of a new Cold War – between the wasteful nations of the West, and the oppressively tyrannical regime of the Greater Far East. Ruth Sharpe and Cassie Bailey are radical journalists and brilliant hackers investigating rumours that multiple governments are covertly run by sentient AI systems. They will need to cut through decades of lies to reach the truth and warn the world. A gripping dystopian thriller from the bestselling author of the Dark Heavens and Dragon Empire series.

Where I Slept

Libby Angel

Text Publishing $33

Where I Slept is the story of a young woman’s devastating and inspirational search for a life of artistic integrity. Leaving a seedy boarding house in a provincial town in the 1990s, she travels to Melbourne where she lives in bohemian share houses with painters, activists, addicts and petty criminals, and, for a time, in the streets, parks and railway stations of a city both richly gratifying and callously indifferent. Libby Angel’s work of autofiction is an unforgettable portrait of a life on the fringes, peppered with dark humour and moments of elation – a poem of longing and desire.

Penguin

$27