Fiction and non-fiction new releases

Pack a coat, some sunscreen and perhaps working knowledge of political philosophy for this week’s reading. The new fiction takes us through a frozen Paris, an exclusive Greek art camp, wartime Melbourne and the Australian desert. On the non-fiction side, democracy and Australian exceptionalism are put under the microscope, alongside ADHD, masculinity and a forgotten chapter of Jewish history.

Six Days by Amanda Curtin (Upswell, $35)
With wildfires burning through France and Spain over this European summer, it’s easy to forget the deep freeze that descended on Paris in the winter of 2012. Amanda Curtin’s latest takes place over six days during that extreme weather event, which brought sub-zero temperatures to the French capital. It unfolds through Daniel, an Australian expat who’s gone native after four decades in Paris. He’s having a dark night of the soul and seeks a road back to the good. Daniel’s perambulations around the Latin Quarter, with an old dog in tow, spawn myriad vignettes, as the hidden interconnections between citizens, and the forces that divide them, emerge.

Anyone who loves Paris will be struck by this beautifully written love letter to the city, and the constraint of the premise seems to liberate the author’s imaginative ambit. Walking novels have a strong pedigree as vehicles for literary and philosophical meditation – think W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, or Teju Cole’s Open City – and this essayistic anatomy of Paris is elevated to that level by the clarity, sophistication and lyricism brought to pressing concerns, from sexual assault to homelessness, that lie in the city’s shadows.

Contrapposto by Dave Eggers (Canongate, $35)
Dave Eggers has a thing for highfalutin titles. I remember reviewing his memoir – A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius – back in 2000 and thinking, “With a title like that, it had better be”. It was, and if his fiction since then has been less inspired and ambitious, Eggers has made up for it in other ways, notably as founding editor of the literary journal Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, among other projects. “Contrapposto” is a term of art. It refers to figures leaning their weight mostly on one foot – an imbalance that creates an aesthetically pleasing asymmetry.

Two young teachers, Olympia and Cricket, sign up to work at a private art camp on a small Greek island. They’ll be instructing an exclusive cohort of children from the international elite, and their vaulting idealism soon runs into unnerving truths about privilege and the cult-like environment of the world they’ve entered. There’s more than a splash of art-world satire and some creepy, unpleasant truths about the psychology of wealth running through it, but Eggers has always written best at his most unguarded, and the chief appeal of this big-hearted book is its unjaded devotion to love, and the pleasures and pains of a creative life.

Quite the Pair by Tobias Madden (Penguin, $35)
Stepping out from queer young adult (YA) fiction, Tobias Madden’s debut novel for adults explores the kind of close friendship that can develop between gay men and women. Austin and Sydney are best friends in their 30s, having lived together in a tiny New York City apartment when they were bright young things. Now, he’s an actor on Broadway, and she’s kicking goals in a marketing career. Both have stable romantic partners, but when their relationships unravel on the same night and their seemingly perfect lives come unstuck, the two friends move back in together. Notorious for falling in love at the drop of a hat, Austin swears off romance for a year – a challenge made more difficult when he meets yet another man of his dreams. Sydney has the opposite problem. She’s chronically self-abnegating, and vows to make decisions that prioritise her own needs. (Easier said than done with Austin hogging the limelight.)

Quite the Pair is a charming platonic romcom with relatable characters and a fun Sex and the City vibe. It also draws on the strengths of Madden’s YA fiction and can read rather like a coming-of-age novel for late bloomers.

And in the Morning by Lenny Robinson (UQP, $33)
Told across three world-changing wars in the 20th century, Lenny Robinson’s debut reflects on the terrible human cost through the eyes of three Melburnian women. In 1919, Lily rushes through the streets to welcome her husband, Bert, returning from four years’ fighting in the Middle East with the Light Horse Brigade. In 1942, Frankie meets an airman, Ed, at a dance hall while fears of Japanese invasion run high. Finally, there’s Fran – mourning the loss of her only son, a conscript killed during the Vietnam War, as anti-war protests swell. Each story homes in on a different perspective, with chapters jumping around chronologically between World War I, World War II and the Vietnam War.

It’s well-researched historical fiction, thoughtfully structured and thematically rich, that draws an intimate triptych of wartime Melbourne, tracing the long shadow of war trauma and how it affects the characters’ lives. And in the Morning joins a long line of Australian war fiction. Research into the history is fascinating, and over-realisation common enough in novels on the subject, but this one stands out for its slender and condensed qualities.

Eye of the Needle by Christopher Raja (Text, $35)
Novelist Christopher Raja migrated to Australia from India and now lives in the Northern Territory. Both strands of this lived experience inform Eye of the Needle. The book hops between two narrative strands. In the first, a young Afghan, Kadir, arrives at Port Augusta by ship in the late 19th century. He has six camels in tow and soon joins a scientific expedition into the red desert, bearing witness to the impact of colonialism on the First Nations people who’ve lived there for thousands of years. The second thread takes us to Melbourne in the 1990s, where Kris – who emigrated from Calcutta as a boy with his family – becomes involved in the gritty underworld of heroin users in St Kilda, a scene from which he’ll have to extricate himself if he’s going to achieve his writing ambitions.

Although Eye of the Needle touches on a lot of complex issues – migration, drug abuse, mystical and spiritual experience, racism and the treatment of Indigenous people, the power of art – the novel doesn’t quite work. Certainly, the mash-up of grunge lit with colonial-era historical fiction has potential, but the prose is too often clipped, underdrawn, glib. A freer, grander writing style may be required to convey the ecstatic convergence underlying the novel’s disparate threads.

Non-fiction

Here Where We Live is Our Country by Molly Crabapple (Bloomsbury Circus, $37)
The prewar Jewish Bund of Eastern Europe is little known today. Not only, Crabapple forcefully argues, because the Nazis and the Soviet Union virtually obliterated it, but also because the democratic socialist Bund was anti-Zionist and opposed to establishing the state of Israel, which it saw as an imperialist undertaking doomed to perpetual conflict. Crabapple, an American Jewish writer and visual artist, first discovered the Bund through the paintings of her great-grandfather, who was a member. It ultimately led her into this epic history of the Bund, which takes in some of the most significant events of the 20th century – including the Russian Revolution, Nazism, World War II and the Holocaust – and figures such as Trotsky.

But this is so much more than a study confined to the past, and Crabapple (who is deeply sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, even joining the protests) sees the Bund as having contemporary resonance, writing: “The more I dug into the Bundist past, the more I realised it was not past at all. It was, rather, a candle to illuminate the tumultuous present … in the story of the Bund … I found the story of our own time.” Timely, evocative and passionately written act of historical retrieval.

The Twilight of Exceptionalism by Paul Kelly (MUP, $40)
The age of Australian exceptionalism, argues veteran political writer Paul Kelly, began with the “bold” government of the Hawke-Keating era and continued under Howard. But the reform project succumbed to generational and global change – notably, the GFC, climate change, the rise of China, social media and COVID-19. Woven into this was the retreat of Trump’s America and emerging populism. Kelly contends that successive Liberal-National Coalition governments, marked by underperformance and failure (e.g. robo-debt), struggled to meet these challenges, and we are now living through the twilight of exceptionalism – his voluminous study concentrating on the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison era. All of which is globally contextualised in terms of the wider Western malaise ushered in by the disintegration of a “shared morality”, tied to the “decline of the Christian compact” and the rising “progressive” storm.

Whether you agree with his thesis (and I disagree on several issues), there’s no question that this is big-picture stuff, backed by formidable knowledge of the times and a kind of historical awareness not often found in political journalism. Highly informed and accessible examination of heady, complex days – albeit with the occasional touch of the grumpy and crepuscular.

What Happened to Liberal Democracy by Daron Acemoglu (Profile, $37)
When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, and Francis Fukuyama pronounced it the triumph of Western capitalist democracy and the “end of history” – history had other ideas. As Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu argues, crisply and clearly, exactly the opposite happened, and the ongoing crisis of liberal democracy followed.

Liberalism, always a problematic term, made three promises: a democratic voice, proper public services, and, most importantly, “shared prosperity”. For a long time it delivered, its golden age being the postwar period. But by the late 1980s, the system began to falter and broke its promises. Pivotal to this was the broken promise of shared prosperity, to the extent that by 2019, 1 per cent of US households owned 35 per cent of the national income. There were cultural factors at play, as well as the impact of computer technology, but the crisis of liberal democracy is, in its essence, economic. Staggering inequality and electorates that don’t trust governments any more. But, for all that, he’s upbeat, saying the system can be reinvented in the spirit of Roosevelt’s New Deal to become once again a “working-class liberalism”.

This Explains Everything by Dr Kieran Kennedy (Simon & Schuster, $35)
Whenever psychologist and ADHD specialist Kieran Kennedy is at a party and the question of what he does comes up, a common response is, “But everyone struggles with this stuff, it’s normal”. His plain-speaking introduction to the condition (based on years of practice and incorporating multiple case studies) explodes that myth. ADHD has three basic symptoms: inattention, hyperactivity and impulsivity. While everyone, to an extent, displays these symptoms, to an adult with ADHD (2 to 3 per cent of the population), it’s on another level altogether.

Savvy, successful 28-year-old “Britt”, for example, after years of not being able to manage time – chronically late for appointments, etc – went to Kennedy. Her response to his diagnosis supplies the title. In another case, a young woman talks about listening intently to a lecture – but not registering anything that’s said. To an extent, he puts the reader inside the head of someone with ADHD, with its intensity and pervasiveness. Remarkably, treatments – exercise, diet, sleep and managing stress – can be simple “game changers”.

Boys by Dr Justin Coulson (ABC Books, $37)
When TV presenter Justin Coulson published his previous book about bringing up girls (he’s father to six), he says he was “inundated” with requests for a book about raising boys by parents at their wits’ end dealing with warped notions of masculinity. While he readily agrees there is a masculinity problem – in one 2024 TikTok survey, women were asked if they were alone in the woods, what would they rather encounter, a bear or a man (most said a bear) – he argues that “we need to shift the conversation from all males being a problem to a percentage of males having a problem”. His parenting guide addresses this with what he calls a positive vision of masculinity, providing step-by-step approaches to such issues as the “porndemic”, sexual consent and building a boy’s character from the “inside out”. And he confidently says that his suggested solutions “work. Really well”.

What else is happening in the book world?