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FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
The Interpreter
Brooke Robinson, Harvill Secker, $32.99
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The usual suspects for protagonists in crime novels are private detectives, or police, or lawyers, and occasionally criminals themselves. Brooke Robinson’s The Interpreter offers a twist by focusing on an unassuming but vital cog in the machine of justice – a court interpreter. Revelle Lee speaks 10 languages and she’s supposed to translate testimony – from the accused, victims, and witnesses – unadorned, without letting her opinion sway her judgment. When she detects a lie that will allow a guilty man to walk free, Revelle makes a subtle adjustment to her translation. It’s a fateful decision. Someone discovers the manipulation, and the consequences for our translator, and for her plans to adopt a six-year-old boy, could be dire. Robinson delivers an intricate debut thriller that plays with the tangled relationship between language, truth and justice in ways that will surprise even veteran readers of crime fiction.
I Look Forward to Hearing From You
Nick Bhasin, Vintage, $32.99
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This scathing Hollywood satire is set in 2002, though it feels awash with the social obsessions and mores of the present moment to the point of anachronism. Aspiring screenwriter Hector Singh is mixed race – with Puerto Rican and Indian parents – and the death of his mother provides an emotional core of grief to a spiral of self-loathing (Hector is a comfort eater who hates his body) and the hyperactive wit this book brings to its skewering of celebrity culture and institutional racism in the film industry. The author depicts a cruelled wonderland of fakery, and much glossy monetising of diversity, without enough action towards genuine equality. Hector would prefer to think of himself as “post-race”, but the brutal realities of workplace culture – and a discovery about his own mother – make that wishful thinking. Luckily, the camaraderie of his diverse circle of friends provides some relief from the wild and pitiless black comic satire.
The Heart Is A Star
Megan Rogers, Fourth Estate, $32.99
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Anaesthetist Layla Byrnes is juggling the tense and conflicting demands of midlife – a strenuous career, a marriage that has fallen apart, her young children, and a needy lover. But it is her mother who upsets the delicate balance. Layla has grown used to her mum’s histrionic suicide threats, but when she phones before Christmas with a secret about Layla’s late (and revered) father, she’s pressing a panic button that will take Layla back to the wilds of western Tasmania, where she grew up, to confront some hard truths behind family mythmaking. Megan Rogers’ debut does have lyrical descriptive passages, but it isn’t bogged down by them. The main draw of The Heart is a Star is the emotional complexity of the intimate relationships it portrays, the maturity of its protagonist, and the psychological intricacy of navigating revelations that change not only the present, but one’s own past.
Che’s Last Embrace
Nicholas Hasluck, Arcadia, $32.95
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Truth may be as elusive in art as it is in politics, and in Che’s Last Embrace, an archaeologist in Bolivia is led into a garden of forking paths. Ian tries to track down – at the behest of his sister Anita, who wants to win an art prize – a journalist and follower of Che Guevara, one Marvic Loredo (aka El Australiano). This mysterious and heroic figure is reportedly descended from Australians who founded a utopian socialist community in Paraguay in the 1890s, and stood alongside Che as he fomented revolution. Nicholas Hasluck has written an elaborate detective story that’s also a magical realist search for truth in art and life. It rollicks along as genre fiction, the unruly yarn picking up traces of South American literary masters – the indeterminacy and mythic air of a Borges short story, or the mad quest for poetic truth in Roberto Bolano’s The Savage Detectives – along the way.
NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Voice of Reason
Megan Davis, Quarterly Essay, $27.99
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Megan Davis, Professor of Constitutional Law at UNSW, was the first person to read out the Uluru Statement from the Heart in 2017, and this essay on the upcoming Voice referendum – a cogent mix of passion and clarification – speaks not only of her deep knowledge of the proposal but her involvement in the 12-year process that has led to this nation-defining moment. Inevitably, there is intricate legalistic talk, but for the most part she cuts through with utter clarity on key issues such as why the Voice (advisory, non-binding) needs to be in the constitution so that it is not at the whim of changing governments. She also takes on the No case, especially the Coalition, and its “cosy stereotypes” of Canberra elites. What comes through is the huge effort taken to get this far, and her hope for a “vibrant, new” Australia.
Pax
Tom Holland, Abacus, $34.99
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What did the Romans ever do for us? According to Roman history specialist Tom Holland (and many others, including Gibbon), it produced one of the longest periods of relative peace the Mediterranean world had ever known – Pax Romana, Rome’s glory days. He dates it roughly from the death of Nero in 68AD to the death Hadrian in 138AD. Of course, it was a peace imposed by an imperialistic power, and underpinning that golden age (by some estimates living conditions being the best anywhere until the industrial revolution) was the grim reality of what the Romans did best – killing people. Holland brings this epic tale alive often by concentrating on details such Hadrian’s visit to Newcastle-upon-Tyne and the construction of his wall, but he’s also very much alert to the moral complexities, paradoxes and contradictions of Pax Romana.
The Matilda Effect
Fiona Crawford, MUP, $35
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When the Australian women’s football team steps out to play in the World Cup later this month, they will, as this engaging, informed and sometimes moving study demonstrates, bring with them decades of determined perseverance from past players and organisers. Like the best of sports writing, Fiona Crawford’s history of the Matildas is about more than football, incorporating the political, social and cultural obstacles they had to overcome – selling lamingtons to pay their way to early, international tournaments, for a kick off! As Crawford says, two images, projected onto the Sydney Opera House when Australia won the bid to host this year’s tournament, best capture the journey – on one side inaugural captain Julie Dolan in “billowing, second hand uniform”, on the other current captain Sam Kerr’s iconic backflip.
Broke
Sam Drummond, Affirm Press, $34.99
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Pseudoachondroplasia is a mouthful for anybody, let alone a kid. But it’s the form of dwarfism that, among other things, defined Sam Drummond’s upbringing – resulting in operations, casts, wheelchairs and steel pins. The “broke” of the title works on a number of levels, not just the bones of his bowed legs that had to be re-cast to keep him walking, but his broken family life (parents divorced), and a kind of broken continuity when growing up that saw his mother, brother and him frequently moving. But the constant running through it all is the strength and resilience of the mother/child bond. Although delivered with an admirable lightness of touch, these impressionistic depictions of growing up in a single-parent home (father supportive), with distanced, often ironic commentary, have power. Broke, but never broken.
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