Eight books for every reader, from a romcom to essays on big ideas

This week’s reviews range from a book that contains everything from micro-fiction to poetry and internalised meditations, to an intriguing historical mystery and a history of Jane Austen – in objects.

FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK

The Theory of Everything
Yumna Kassab
Ultimo, $34.99

The back cover of Yumna Kassab’s The Theory of Everything features a sly deconstruction of the art of the blurb. This book is reportedly, among other things, “either a monologue or a dialogue, a testament, travel guide, handbook, textbook, potential encyclopaedia; it is five mini-novels or else five post-novels, an epic, a drop in the ocean, a homage, a reference, one long secret handshake, an agreement, a wink ...” Like the world itself and the future we’re all hurtling towards, Kassab’s fiction is a morass of contradictions, an emergent and speculative enterprise with themes which seem timeless, though the particulars are always a surprise. It’s a book with the lot – epigrams, micro-fictions, poetry; panaromic dystopia and literary manifesto; sharply observed, socially engaged vignettes and purely internalised meditations. Kassab tackles almost everything, from gender and social inequality to love and war, and whatever else it is, this is stylish and searching writing, with an exquisite command of language holding fast through unstable experimentation with form.

The Oasis
Anne Buist and Graeme Simsion
Hachette, $32.99

Sequel to The Glass House, The Oasis is the second book in the Menzies Mental Health series from psychiatrist Anne Buist and author Graeme Simsion (The Rosie Project). It follows Dr Hannah Wright – a registrar in the first book, now a trainee psychiatrist – as she navigates our overburdened, understaffed mental health system. This time, she’s been thrust into the outpatient clinic, and the novel opens with a caper, as one of the colourful cast of patients seeks to escape care. The Oasis deals with difficult issues facing the mentally ill, from ice addiction to child abuse. Refreshingly, it presents the flaws and frailties of first-year trainees in psychiatry, too, with Hannah’s cohort encountering professional and personal challenges. The novel poses big questions about the practice of psychiatry itself, but it’s written with a healthy dose of comedy and melodrama, an inside eye on the experience of young doctors, and a compassionate lightness of touch that readers should find endearing.

Half Truth
Nadia Mahjouri
Penguin, $34.99

This illuminating family drama moves from Tasmania to Morocco, telling the intersecting stories of two women, both tormented by a lost male member of their family. For Khadija, it is her son Ahmed, who’s been missing for more than 20 years. As she packs up her home in Marrakesh, Khadija finds all that remains of him in her Thuja box of precious memories. She reflects on an eventful life that saw her move to the city and fall pregnant when she was barely a teenager. Meanwhile, Zahra isn’t coping with new motherhood in a remote Tasmanian community, and decides to travel to Morocco with her baby, hoping to find a father she has never met. Half Truth is a wise and beguiling novel which evokes a vivid sense of time and place, though it’s the depth of character and emotional complexity that make it shine. As Mahjouri draws the two women’s perspectives together, a simple but profound answer emerges to the obstacles of grief and identity they face.

Would You Rather
Maggie Alderson
HarperCollins, $14.99

An Insta-perfect life comes unstuck in Maggie Alderson’s Would You Rather. Food stylist Sophie Crommelin is married to acclaimed artist Matt and now her two sons are adults, they’ve sold their house for a sea change on England’s fashionable south coast. When Matt dies suddenly, less stylish and palatable truths about their family come out. Sophie finds herself staring into the eyes of her dead husband’s mistress, just as she’s about to read the eulogy. And then her son Beau – a hot and charming jewellery designer everyone seems to like – finds himself embroiled in a scandal, amplifying the sense of crisis. Personally, I found this novel pedestrian in the extreme. It’s hard to get too invested in characters without terribly much going on inside. Shallow people are the most difficult to portray accurately, and the dialogue here is eye-wateringly trite, a flaw worsened by a formulaic plotline mixing soapiness with unearned uplift.

NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK

Searching For Charmian
Suzanne Chick
Summit Books, $36.99

If the writer Charmian Clift’s life had the lineaments of a Greek tragedy, the daughter she gave up for adoption was blessed with a happier fate. Suzanne Chick’s childhood was stable, she went on to have a happy marriage, three daughters and a satisfying career as an art teacher. When, in her late 40s, she discovered the identity of her birth mother, it was as if she had stepped through a door into a parallel life that might have been hers. Searching For Charmian traces the intoxicating experience of suddenly finding herself with the dramatic back story of a famous mother whose face mirrors her own. As she meets Clift’s friends and relatives and learns more about her birth family and her talented and tormented mother’s past, Chick also pays tribute to her adoptive parents and to the solidity of her upbringing. An immersive, accomplished tale of the road not taken.

Noble Fragments
Michael Visontay
Scribe, $36.99

A canny business move or an act of desecration? There’s no simple answer whether New York rare book dealer Gabriel Wells should have broken up the precious Gutenberg Bible in his possession and sold its pages as “the Noble Fragments”. To some, it was “an act of bibliophilic vandalism”; to wealthy collectors it was a chance to cash in on the cache of the first printed book in the Western world. In some cases, it helped institutions replace pages missing from their editions. For Michael Visontay, the story of the fragments is more than an intriguing historical drama. His grandfather married Wells’ niece, whose inheritance from Wells helped the Visontay family establish themselves in Australia after fleeing the horrors of the Holocaust and postwar Europe. Visontay deftly unfolds his moving family story as he tracks down what became of the fragments.

Jane Austen in 41 Objects
Kathryn Sutherland
Bodleian Library Publishing, $49.99

For Jane Austen, objects were telling. Her much loved piano, she wrote to her niece, “talks of you – in various keys and expressions”. Owning little and being financially dependent on her brothers, Austen even “practised thrift” in referencing objects in fiction, which made those mentioned even more telling. Some of the objects Kathryn Sutherland has chosen to illuminate Austen’s life belonged to the writer – an elegant silk pelisse, a lock of her hair – or were created by her, such as the “spoof tales” penned when she was 12, or the Windsor House copy of Emma dedicated to the Prince Regent. Others belong to Austen iconography: a commemorative plate from the Famous Women Dinner Service, and perhaps most famous of all for audiences of the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, Mr Darcy’s shirt. This is a scholarly yet accessible addition to Austenography.

What’s the Big Idea?
Edited by Anna Chang & Alice Grundy
Australia Institute Press, $34.99

Observing Australian politics, says journalist Amy Remeikis, “is like watching a bucket of crabs”. Those who try to rise above the fray to promote change are “pulled back into the bucket by their peers”. What is needed, she argues, is bravery. But it’s a virtue in short supply right now. As the title suggests, these essays are concerned with the big issues in public life – climate change, energy policy, housing, safeguarding democracy and more – that must be tackled if future generations are to have a sense of hope and security. Above all, the kind of bravery they call for is not beholden to ideology. This point is powerfully made in Clare Wright’s essay on the radical gesture of the Bark Petitions of the Yolnu which “failed” only because of Australian leaders’ “sheer incapacity to read the message”. The petitions were not a plea for mercy but “one sovereign nation’s gift to another”.

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