Ten new books to read this January 2026
This week’s reviews cover everything from literary coming of age and experimental fiction to the history of palmistry and celebrations of lesser-known Australian war heroes.
FICTION SELECTION OF THE WEEK
Bitter Water of the Lake
Guilia Caminito
Indigo Press, $34.99
Few coming-of-age stories deal with the psychology of growing up poor with the sharp wit of Guilia Caminito. Bitter Water of the Lake. Narrated by teenage Gaia, the film tells the story of a poor Italian family moving from abandoned houses on the outskirts of Rome to a picturesque lakeside town in the 1990s. Upgrading cannot change deeply ingrained internal dynamics. This even reinforces Gaia’s profound sense of difference from her wolf mother, whose dramatic attempts to improve her children’s situation are a source of shame for her daughter; from his disabled father; of the friends he made in a world very different from the one his family knew. Gaia is a born writer, coolly bearing witness to familial disintegration and giving a sharp poetic voice to her own intuitions of not belonging. On the MSN chats her friends obsessed over: “I didn’t know how to participate, what to share. Because I couldn’t participate, I felt hurt, hurt by my unspoken but obvious, boundless humility.” This is a literary portrait of the outsider, marked by an unrelenting sensitivity to the harsh but complex emotional values of childhood poverty.
Queen Esther
John Irving
Author, $36.99
John Irving in his heyday The World According to Garp And Cider Rules. This late-career novel revisits the setting of the latter, though it is not significant enough to be considered a prequel. We begin decades before the events, in the orphanage of St. Cloud, Maine. Cider RulesDr. Wilbur Larch is trying to find a family to adopt a Jewish teenager named Esther. The blue-blooded Winslows appear on the scene, but they worry that, as non-Jews, they cannot help Esther discover her Jewish identity. The fascinating plot that leads Esther to Palestine and membership in the Haganah is unfortunately untracked by Irving’s focus on her son Jimmy, whose coming of age dominates the narrative until Esther is revealed as an old woman in the epilogue. Queen Esther It’s not as complete a novel as you’d hope. It feels like a wasted opportunity to explore a strong character immersed in Zionism, and leaving Esther’s story behind, the Bildungsroman veers into predictability in terms of the author’s preoccupations, despite having a characteristic streak of humour. One of Irving’s lesser works, it is best read for completeness.
Another
Rose Michael
Es-press, $29.99
Rose Michael’s Another It is experimental speculative fiction set in Boon Wurrung Country on the Mornington Peninsula south of Melbourne. That’s where I grew up, so I expected a stronger sense of emotional attachment. But this is a deliberately difficult work that tumbles familiarity into deep alienation on many levels. Local environments, languages, and literary traditions are being reshaped in a near-future world ravaged by climate catastrophe. As Leisl and her neurodivergent daughter Else escape the flood in “Ninch,” other extreme weather events loom on the horizon and a role reversal transforms the intimate central relationship. The spaces, bold poetic strokes, eccentric syntax, and unusual writing all create a sense of rhythm and fragmentation. They are so prevalent that I wondered whether this book might have been a more accessible, aesthetically liberated book if it had abandoned prose altogether and been reimagined as a climate poetry novel. In its current form, Michael’s radical vision may feel confining, if not illuminating. It attempts to portray a kind of colonial-settler dream, then to reshape language and decenter and expand our understanding of the human. Such ambition requires almost the full flight of poetry.
Dirt Trap
Michael Burge
Midnight Sun, $34.99
continued Tank WaterMichael Burge Dirt Trap continues the series of rural noir imagined from a whimsical perspective. Journalist James Brandt revealed homophobic attacks in his hometown of Kippen in his first book. Nobody wants to talk about it anymore. Although James and his partner Dylan live quietly, old wounds are reopened with the official investigation into historical hate crimes against LGBTQ+ people. At the same time, Bobby Jones, from a homophobic family who James believes is the murderer, returns to Kippen. Bobby has a non-binary child and claims to have transformed from bigot to gay ally. James doesn’t believe this, and when a member of the Jones clan dies and the bodies start piling up, it looks as if someone in the gay community is taking revenge for past hatred and violence. James is the prime suspect and, while facing media scrutiny himself, investigates alongside Theresa Lin, an under-resourced cop. Burge strives to write progressive, socially conscious fiction, and although the sleeper nightmare of prejudice is a dark spur to his rural noir, a lack of subtlety permeates this novel, undermining the atmosphere.
To capture
Sarah Brill
Allen and Unwin, $24.99
YA fiction featuring a young heroine may be a dime a dozen, but Sarah Brill’s To capture It imbues its main character with a rather strange superpower. Beth has turned 16 and the growth spurt that comes with it will see her selected for a basketball team. However, his newfound height brings with it an obstacle. Begins to experience intense bouts of nausea; it is a strange sixth sense that unfailingly directs him to someone falling from a high place. Beth can always catch them and prevent strangers from having accidents and deliberately hurting themselves. But her sacrifice is tested when it becomes clear that helping costs her academic performance at school, her basketball team, her friendships, and her budding romance. Can she balance caring for others with self-care? Brill’s fast-paced, dramatic storytelling should appeal to young readers. (It all begins when Beth’s older sister, Meg, in her 12th year, announces her pregnancy to her parents over dinner.) Typical teenage themes – friendship, identity, first love – are wrapped up in a story that refuses to patronize its readership, exploring the mature question of making judgments between worthy and conflicting goals.
NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Decoding the Hand
Alison Bashford
University of Chicago Press, $79
Over the centuries, some of the best minds of a particular era have taken an interest in reading palm writing and what the lines mean. Alison Bashford, a history professor at the University of NSW, traces the long and colorful story of palm reading in her book, which she calls “the history of bodily semiotics”, and tells us what these signs can tell us medically, scientifically or psychologically. For example, Simian Wrinkle may or may not indicate the presence of Down syndrome. Of course, this is also a story of magic, quackery and public suspicion; but Bashford examines, among other things, the modern arrogance of belittling the practice even in the respected medical journal. lancet “Interpreting palms is now a respected science,” he said in 1964. And people like Newton, Darwin, and Francis Galton (inventor of the fingerprint) agree. An intriguing history of the human quest to discover the inner life in external signs through the prism of palmistry.
Bravery
Melissa Leong
Murdoch Books, $34.99
James Joyce’s offal-loving character Leopold Bloom may have eaten the innards of animals and fowl with great relish; But he doesn’t know anything about Melissa Leong, who boasts that she will eat anything once. Including tarantulas. Memoirs of her career as a food writer, TV presenter and first female judge MasterChef Australia This is what we call a success story. But it’s an intimate memoir – she suffered from anxiety and severe depression for much of her life, and was raped in her twenties – that takes the reader behind the scenes to see the sensitivity and vulnerability behind the flamboyant performance. It also describes the impact of growing up in a tough-love Chinese/Singaporean family in 1980s Australia (detailing severe corporal punishment) and negotiating these two cultures at school and in the workplace. But among all this, there is the smell and taste of the food; this becomes more than just a source of income for him, it becomes a life-sustaining art. Describing himself as an outsider, he talks, among other things, about his philosophy of life and, among all this, his favorite recipes. Passionate and as straightforward as the title.
Australian Heroes of the Second World War
Mark Johnston
New South, $39.99
VC winner Tom “diver” Derrick, the typical heroic digger featured on a postage stamp, is the most famous of the hundreds of cases of heroism documented here by veteran World War II commentator Mark Johnston. But Johnston is primarily interested in bringing to public attention the heroic achievements of lesser-known individuals such as Bren gun carrier driver Jack Spavin, who was part of an action in Tobruk in which 800 Italian prisoners were taken, while also emphasizing that the “spectacular” achievements of individuals depended on the fighting effectiveness of their units. In fact, many soldiers complained about the army’s stinginess in awarding decorations and its failure to recognize soldiers who consistently fought well, if not spectacularly. He does not glorify or romanticize the hero type, quoting at one point U.S. Army psychologist Eli Ginzberg: “Many extraordinary combat soldiers [had] unstable personalities who might be clinically termed ‘psychopaths’.
Class Cricketer
Sam Perry and Ian Higgins
Allen and Unwin, $34.99
Anyone who has given up Saturdays and midweek training evenings for their local club will recognize the characters as well as the rituals explored here. Self-titled cricketer Perry and Higgins (based on their podcast) take the reader on a lovingly satirical journey into the absurd world of clubs and its “unwritten” rules. Take, for example, the art of parking your car during practice. I suggest to our two brave guides that you swing into the void with the right “sign of aggression” and “intent”. Often seeing cricket as real and life as a reflection of it, the authors cover a wide range of dos and don’ts, from changing the scorebook to get your ex-girlfriend back to flaunting the club’s achievements on social media. Sometimes they try a little hard for comic effect, but this is a fun summer cricket dish.
just go
Saya Sakakibara
Simon and Schuster, $34.99
Winning might then seem like destiny, but it’s the worrying and uncertain nature of the journey that Australia’s 2024 BMX Olympic gold medalist Saya Sakakibara documents here. His memoirs are not a record of overcoming fear, but harnessing it and using it positively so that the demons of doubt do not prevail. The years leading up to the Olympics were marked by a series of traumatic events: His brother and BMX racer nearly died after a racing accident and suffered a painfully slow recovery; It was also bad enough that Saya had multiple crashes and consecutive concussions, forcing her to quit BMX racing for a while before clearing her doubts and eventually winning in Paris. Along the way we get a family portrait (and the importance of his family in achieving his goal), as well as learning about his early years growing up in Japan (Japanese mother), his return to Australia, and learning English, his second language. An elite athlete but with a down-to-earth, easy-to-read style.
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