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Literary editor Mark Broatch picks the Listener’s best books of the past month.
Lioness, Emily Perkins (Bloomsbury)
Emily Perkins’ first new novel in a decade is “a refreshingly honest, piercing take” that’s less about how to navigate ageing as a woman and more about how to navigate hypocrisy.
We said: “Therese and Trevor Thorne are a wealthy Wellingtonian couple. We meet them just before their life of unchecked affluence begins to unravel. Therese is a woman in her early fifties, but what she is experiencing is more than a few hot flushes. While playing the devoted wife to her husband, and the serenely disinterested observer to the people around her, Therese is gradually coming to question everything in her world. Owner of a homeware brand, queen of bougie Instagram décor and Pinterest boards, champion of constant consumerism, she’s inspired and somewhat awestruck by her downstairs neighbour, Claire, who has given away her furniture, thrown out her makeup and skincare, stopped dying her hair, and started hosting spontaneous dance parties in her apartment. Is Claire having a midlife crisis, or undergoing a genuine spiritual quest? Possibly both.” Read our full review here.
Soldier Sailor, Claire Kilroy (Faber)
Kilroy, one of the terrific recent surge of Irish authors, writes in her fifth novel full of searing detail and dark humour, about the relationship between a mother and her young child.
We said: “Leaving an adult, autonomous professional existence among colleagues and friends for the lonely and unrelenting territory of first-time motherhood is a change both shocking and profound. This experience has been portrayed in many different ways, but Irish writer Claire Kilroy’s riveting novel, Soldier Sailor, must be among the most extraordinary and honest… Kilroy is a superb writer. Over and over again, the absolutely right sentence appears, begging to be reread and savoured. Apparently without effort, though there will surely have been plenty, she recreates, in often searing detail, the existence of a stay-at-home mother living with a largely absent working husband who cannot, and apparently does not wish to, take a step into her world. Your father was there initially, she tells Sailor, but then he ‘wandered off, stepping out to make a phone call from which he never fully hung up’. And yet the father is not demonised, and though the relationship buckles, it holds.” Read our full review here.
Head On, by Carl Hayman and Dylan Cleaver (HarperCollins)
The subhead for former All Black’s sad memoir says it all: Rugby, dementia, and the hidden cost of success.
We said: “Head On is a bleak, unsparing rise-and-fall story of a superstar whose life has gone tragically wrong – from being one of the game’s highest-paid players, widely regarded as the best tighthead prop in the business, to an emotionally broken, fearful man who forgets his son’s name and can find himself driving on a road to nowhere, his destination and purpose lost in impenetrable brain fog.
“Hayman has early-onset dementia and probable chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a neurodegenerative disease. He’s one of almost 400 athletes, mainly ex-rugby players, engaged in a lawsuit asserting that the sporting authorities ‘were negligent in failing to take reasonable action in order to prevent players from permanent injury caused by repetitive concussive and sub-concussive blows’. Another high-profile litigant is former England hooker Steve Thompson, who has no recollection of winning the 2003 World Cup.” Read our full review here.
Blue Machine, Helen Czerski (Penguin)
A persuasive and entertaining account of our precious oceans through their huge influence on the planet, human exploration of the seas and fascinating tales of the marine world.
We said: “British physical oceanographer and television presenter Helen Czerski introduces an ocean that is at the heart of our planet’s energy system. The term machine is not entirely metaphorical. With the passion of someone drawn to oceanography by sheer awe of the ocean’s power, Czerski describes it as our liquid battery, with an enormous capacity to store heat energy, and a life-support engine, responsible for producing half of the oxygen we breathe.
“This is an exceptionally readable book thanks to Czerski’s skill in making unexpected connections between ocean physics, culture and history – such as when the first comprehensive ocean wave models were used to determine that June 6, 1944 was the best, or rather least dangerous, date for the D-Day landings in Normandy because they correctly predicted huge waves a day earlier that ‘could have caused one of the greatest wartime disasters for the Allies’.” Read our full review here.
All the Sinners Bleed, SA Cosby (Headline)
How do you follow two of the best crime novels of the past decade, Blacktop Wasteland and Razorblade Tears? With another than might be the writer’s best yet.
We said: “Cosby’s fourth novel offers fans his now-expected blend of poetic ferocity and richly developed characters, further seasoned with a James Lee Burke-ian exploration of religious fervour and white supremacy. Titus Crown is an ex-FBI agent who’s now the first-ever Black sheriff of his hometown. Murders seem rare: two in recent decades. But when a high school teacher is killed by a former student, who’s then shot by Crown’s deputies, the lid is ripped off a Pandora’s box of festering secrets and horrific crimes. Meanwhile, a far right group is keen to honour the town’s Confederate history. Cosby soaks readers in the complexities of the American South while delivering a powerful tale of a man under siege.” Read our full review here.
Kala, Colin Walsh (Atlantic)
This terrific debut from another Irish writer is a thriller, but also demonstrates great understanding of character and insight into small town life, the influence of the internet and consequent changing mores of friendship and love.
We said: “He sets his novel in the town of Kinlough in the north-west and introduces friends and family who are reuniting after some 20 years. Close friend Kala was a teenager brutally murdered in 2003, the case unsolved, and coincidentally her remains have just been discovered at a development site… Although the tense narration spins around solving the mystery surrounding ill-fated Kara, it’s Mush who is the beating heart of the story. He has stayed in Kinlough, running a café with his mother, and is closely related to the thuggish and scary Lyons. Kara’s murder has had fallout during the two decades, most miserably the suicide of one of their gang, and the appalling damage done to Mush himself.” Read our full review here.
Audition, Pip Adam (THWUP)
Pip Adam’s fourth novel is a tale about giants being confined in a spaceship heading away from Earth, using the ideas and techniques of science fiction to look at how society treats people who don’t fit the mainstream idea of humanity.
We said: “In Audition, Stanley, Drew and Alba are human giants in a not-too-distant future. How did they become giants? Nobody knows; they just started to grow one day. As the novel opens, they are in ‘this very beautiful spacecraft called Audition and [they] are all lucky to be inside her’ as it heads away from Earth. To keep the ship moving, they have to talk; if they stop talking, they keep growing, and they are already uncomfortably too big for the rooms they are in. So, they talk… If you are craving a straightforward narrative, this is probably not the book for you. If, however, you want an immersive experience, a slow unpuzzling and reworking of what you know and what you think you know, this novel will challenge and enthral you.” Read our full review here.
The Waters, Carl Nixon (Penguin)
Carl Nixon’s fifth novel is less a typical novel about the troubled Waters family from near Christchurch, and more a collection of Waters-adjacent short stories that jump between characters, points of view and decades. We said: “Through his multiple points of view, Nixon explores the diversity of human nature, the many dimensions that a person relegated to the role of villain may contain. Pat may be a philandering alcoholic, but he is also very protective of his children. Mark is unstable, and also a successful businessman. Despite our best efforts to paint people in ‘a single ugly hue’, this is often not the full story. In The Waters we see the complexity of a family, the many important and secret stories that combine to create a bigger picture.” Read the full review here.
The Wager, David Grann (S&S)
Where does duty end and survival begin? These are the questions New Yorker author David Grann asks in his tense and evocative account of British Royal Navy ship HMS Wager, which left Britain in 1740 as part of a fleet on a secret assignment during the conflict with Spain. The ship was separated from the fleet and wrecked among remote islands off the coast of Chile.
We said: “The shipwreck was horrific – much of the crew got drunk, determined to die in ‘an orgy of revelry’ – but what followed was even worse. Acting captain Lieutenant David Cheap’s command of his surviving crew collapsed in a Lord Of The Flies-style breakdown of all polite society’s rules and ended in a mutiny that’s still debated centuries on… Only 10 men from the Wager’s crew of almost 300 ultimately survived to return to England. The deposed captain and the gritty gunner both survived on opposite sides, in a case that ended up in a military court martial to determine who was at fault for the disastrous mission. After risking everything, the pathetic survivors faced a trial for their lives.” Read our full review here.
