Viva’s Julia Gessler takes a literary look at some new and notable books.
The thing is, literature is as comforting and intimate as it is eye-opening and unnerving. I subscribe to the belief that there is so such as thing as a winter read in so far as there is
Yellowface by R.F. Kuang
HarperCollins, $35. Out now.
When June Hayward sees Athena Liu — gorgeous friend, wildly successful author — die in a freak accident, her first impulse is to try to save Athena. Her second is to steal Athena’s never-before-seen manuscript, a magnum opus centered on the Chinese labourers who supported the British army during World War I. What follows is anxiety-inducing, an uneasy tangle operating on that classic heist pairing (will they get caught and what will they do to prevent that from happening), written from the perspective of thief June. “This whole project is beautiful, in a way,” she says, justifying lifting the novel “wholesale” as it becomes a bestseller. “A never-before-seen literary collaboration.” In venomous, manipulative prose, R.F. Kuang pens a fast-paced satire that lays bare the publishing industry, confronting racism and cultural appropriation.
Pet by Catherine Chidgey
Te Herenga Waka University Press, $38. Out now.
This novel follows two storylines — 12-year-old Justine and adult Justine, a kind of Yellowjackets-style doubling — as it peers keenly into her time at a Catholic primary school in Wellington. As a child, Justine is infatuated with her glamorous, corvette-driving teacher, Mrs Price. So too are her classmates, who vie to be Mrs Price’s “pet”, currying favour as part of a privileged inner circle who run small errands, are taken for splashy convertible drives and receive invites to her house. In nerve-fraying increments, Catherine Chidgey, whose novel The Axeman’s Carnival took home this year’s Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction, crafts a meditation on power’s lambent surface and disturbing underside, and the reliability of memory. The greater drama in this novel is just what, exactly, happened in the year 1984.
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Everything is Beautiful and Everything Hurts by Josie Shapiro
Allen & Unwin, $37. Out now.
There was nothing to indicate that Mickey Bloom would become a runner. Her mum, an intensive care nurse, and her dad, a journalist “who fancied himself an eloquent man of letters”, offered an admixture of ambivalence and simmering hostility to sports. But the book’s protagonist — a rocket of a slight girl in plimsolls — pursues her dream. She joins a running club, gains a trainer. In this debut about realising your goals and realising they sometimes aren’t what you’d thought they’d be, and about being on top of the world when the world turns, author Josie Shapiro’s tone is gentle but assured. “My brain melted into the blue, sweet and soft,” says young Mickey, after winning a race, calming her body. But the delight of the novel isn’t just its often butter-smooth prose but also its brutal vision of endurance, of joining (and breaking free from) the turbulence of the pack, in life as in long-distance racing.
The Witching Tide by Margaret Meyer
Moa Press, $38. Out now.
In 17th-century East Anglia, mute midwife Martha Hallybread roils with the loss of her fellow servant, Prissy, a golden-haired cook suddenly taken by men hurtling “unconscionable” accusations: that she’s a witch. In a tale of persecution against women in the coastal village Cleftwater, at the mercy of witchfinder Silas Makepeace, Martha contends with the unsettling possibility of sorcery. “The thought spread, consuming, eclipsing all things of grace in the world, dawn light on pearly seas, the various golds of the autumn harvest, the miracle of a newborn, the kindness of neighbours. Which of them was it?” This is as much a story of Martha as it is of many women; each attempts to survive the scourge (Martha lays her hope in a charm, a lumpen doll made from a stump of candlewax); some, inevitably, fail.
August Blue by Deborah Levy
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Advertise with NZME.Hamish Hamilton, $40. Out now.
Deborah Levy’s own catalogue of her life, in her triparted autobiography (Things I Don’t Want to Know, The Cost of Living, Real Estate), is rich and ruminative, but her fiction is worth investing in too. Her latest, August Blue, about an orphaned concert pianist and former prodigy, Elsa M. Anderson, who sees her doppelganger at an Athens flea market, buying mechanical dancing horses, is an exploration of that gothic tradition, the uncanny. But it is also about transformation, a woman who dyes her hair blue in the wake of catastrophe (messing up a performance of Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2 and walking off stage) and who must grapple with what her identity means outside of her talent. “Blue was a separation from my DNA,” Elsa explains. In this slender work, Levy weaves a wonderfully dense narrative from humour and surrealism; its prose precise, its detail alive and crackling.
Close to Home by Michael Magee
Hamish Hamilton, $37. Out now.
Michael Magee’s debut adeptly depicts working-class Belfast in this tender, heavy novel that can be felt by anyone under the pressure of compounding socioeconomic crises. Readers of Sally Rooney will find vague similarities — the protagonist, Sean Maguire, is 20-something with an affinity for literature — yet the novel, wending its way through his coming-of-age (the bars, the brawls, the bookstores), arguably carves out more sensitive territory. From a heady blend of slang and machismo interiority, of class and violence, emerges an affecting story that sees Sean return to his hometown after studying English at university, unable to find a job in the wake of a recession. This is one that will leave you wincing and wanting more.
The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese
Grove Press, $38. Out now.
One family, one strange, curse-like condition: in every generation, someone drowns. For a group of people living in South India’s water-dense Kerala, “a child’s fantasy world of rivulets and canals, a latticework of lakes and lagoons”, it’s an affliction no one can explain but which they hope a doctor will one day cure. Published 14 years after his bestselling Cutting for Stone, Abraham Verghese wrestles with life’s uncontrollable endings and motley beginnings in this sprawling, 700-page doorstopper of discovery and community and connectedness, rendered against calamity. It’s every bit remarkable for its scope and its storytelling appetite.
Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Harvill Secker, $37. Out now.
If Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s previous work, Friday Black — a brilliant, strange, sword-sharp collection of short stories that call to mind George Saunders — communicated anything, it was that this was a writer who could go headlong into sci-fi-fantasy-horror and craft a condemnation. His debut novel, Chain-Gang All-Stars, is a vivid continuation of this, a dystopian present where prison inmates take part in live-broadcast death matches in the hope of a tantalising reward — freedom (“clemency, commutation of sentence, or a full pardon”). A deft indictment of the American penal system, reality television and the digital age, Adjei-Brenyah’s novel shares its lineage with the likes of pop culture’s other battle royals, Squid Game and The Hunger Games.
The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donoghue
Virago, $38. Out in June.
Caroline O’Donoghue is best known as the host of a podcast called Sentimental Garbage, and as the author of a paranormal YA series about teens who unwittingly become embroiled in a tarot card mystery. She’s also written The Rachel Incident, a distinctly adult offering that’s a portrait of college student and bookstore employee Rachel Murray in the insular city of Cork, as she navigates friendship, love and morally questionable behaviour (read: romantic deceit and a messy confetti cannon of drama involving her professor, Dr. Byrne, and his wife, Deenie). Narrated with the emotional wherewithal of Rachel’s older self, it’s a bittersweet foray into a woman wadding nostalgically through her past, oxygenated by her present.
Biography of X by Catherine Lacey
Granta, $45. Out in July.
Catherine Lacey’s forthcoming book is fiction masquerading as non-fiction: a simulacrum of a biography, written by widower and retired journalist C.M. Lucca, on her late wife, an anonymous art sensation who assumed the pseudonym ‘X’, as well as several other nom de plumes. It’s death (sudden, in an office) that forces Lucca to confront the problematic woman she was enamoured with in this alternative America, one that takes her to the Southern Territories, a kind of dictatorial theocracy that sits in seismic contrast to the progressive north. It takes a certain kind of guts — and skill — to write a work so much like a matryoshka doll, where interview transcripts sit tight against pseudo-historical footnotes, and where the protagonist is the writer of avant-garde fiction as much as she is a performance artist akin to Marina Abramovic and a friend of David Bowie.
Lady Tan’s Circle of Friends by Lisa See
Simon & Schuster, $38. Out in July.
Lisa See’s forthcoming novel is a tale of inheritance: Tan Yunxian’s grandmother Ru, one of only several female doctors in 15th-century China, teaches her granddaughter the foundation of Chinese medicine. It is a newfound freedom Yunxian finds in life, one inspired by that of a once-very-real Ming dynasty female physician, but she is unable to escape the fate of her position and her era: a high society melange of must-birth-boys rhetoric and constrictive slippers owing to her arranged marriage. There’s a network at play here, a women-helping-women support line that is the most familiar and timeless quality of this novel, capturing something essential about what it means to be hungry for something beyond the seemingly unbudging fortress of circumstance.
The List by Yomi Adegoke
HarperCollins, $40. Out in August.
When an anonymously crowdsourced amalgam of names called The List — a compendium of industry harassers, abusers, et al — is published via a Google Doc on Twitter, by-all-metrics successful Ola Olajide is thrown into a dilemma. Her poster-perfect fiancé Michael’s name is on it. This buzzy book about an influencer journalist at a feminist magazine who must now mine her relationship and its popular online interface is a twisty potboiler with clout (it’s endorsed by Bernardine Evaristo, who branded it “the ultimate millennial novel”). Cue secrets, social posturing and a skewering of contemporary internet culture.
