The Matildas, Murakami and the inside scoop on Qantas: What’s new in books for November

So here we are deep into the Christmas book season, when booksellers make a significant chunk of their annual revenue and publishers put out some of their most attractive offerings for the year. And there are plenty to choose from. Here are just 14.

The Chairman’s Lounge: The Inside Story of How Qantas Sold Us Out
Joe Aston
Scribner, $36.99
The sorry decline in reputation and performance of the national airline under the turbulent stewardship of Alan Joyce has been well chronicled, but no one has had their teeth into the story quite like The Australian Financial Review’s former Rear Window columnist, Joe Aston. Not only does he write superbly, but he really knows where the dirt lies. Joyce is said to have earned $125 million while running the airline, and Aston’s book will batter his already tarnished reputation.

Molly
Rosalie Ham
Picador, $34.99
You may recall that in Rosalie Ham’s first and most successful novel, The Dressmaker, her character Tilly Dunnage, who was packed off to the city after a run-in with a bully at her school, returns to the town of Dungatar to look after her ailing mother, Molly. In this prequel, Ham turns her attention to Molly and her time in Melbourne in the lead-up to World War I, and the rise of the suffragette movement. Who could resist another book in what is now a delicious trilogy?

Karla’s Choice
Nick Harkaway
Viking, $34.99
It’s a brave writer who steps into the shoes of John le Carré to create a new story featuring his Cold War warrior, George Smiley. But it helps that Nick Harkaway is le Carré’s son, a successful novelist in his own right, and knows the world of the Circus and its spies almost as well as their creator. Set after The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and before Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Harkaway does an impressive job and, appropriately, his prose echoes his father’s style.

Theory & Practice
Michelle de Kretser
Text, $32.99
The two-time Miles Franklin winner’s last book, Scary Monsters, had a reversible structure so you could start from either end of its story of two protagonists, Lili and Lyle. Now her willingness to play with form, genre and structure goes further with an intriguing book that blends story, memoir, essays and consideration of what fiction actually is as she follows a student in the mid-1980s trying to write about Virginia Woolf. Michelle de Kretser is always a rewarding read.

Leave the Girls Behind
Jacqueline Bublitz
Allen & Unwin, $34.99
Jacqueline Bublitz’s first book was a cracker – yes, crime, but so much more as it undermined, and reassessed the traditional conventions of the genre and gave a strong voice to women victims. Her second novel sprang from a line in that first – “It’s never just one life these men destroy” – and looks at the enablers of a serial killer and the consequences of his actions. The ripples of a crime spread far and wide and Bublitz has written another thought-provoking novel.

Cricket: A Portrait of the Game
Mark Ray
Hardie Grant, $70
As former England captain Michael Atherton writes in this collection of striking photographs, Mark Ray has been both first-class cricketer, and “a photographer of skill, empathy and imagination, the first giving rise to and informing the second. It is a rare combination.” These pictures (with commentary by Gideon Haigh) from a seemingly different era beautifully capture a sport in flux. But there are gems galore such as star-struck boys in South Africa waiting for Warnie to sign autographs.

Australia at the Movies
David Stratton
Allen & Unwin, $39.99
I miss David Stratton (and Margaret Pomeranz) on the telly. And Stratton is no longer a newspaper film critic. In this critical and affectionate assessment of Australian films between 1990 and 2020, Stratton adopts a thematic approach while covering 600+ films, from Struck by Lightning (1990) to Penguin Bloom (2020). Chapters include Romance, Black Like Me, The Haunting and many more. And it’s not just criticism – there are anecdotes galore.

Max Dupain
Helen Ennis
4th Estate, $55
October 30
Perhaps it was inevitable that having written the life of Olive Cotton, the brilliant photographer who virtually turned her back on her art for the love of her second husband, Helen Ennis should focus on Cotton’s first husband, Max Dupain. Famed for his distinctive photographic chiaroscuro, he sought “a synthesis of head and heart” in work that is now seen as iconically Australian. Dupain got his first camera at 13 in 1924, so the timing for a new biography is perfect.

Unleashed
Boris Johnson
HarperCollins, $49.99
October 30
It was inevitable the former British PM with the studiously dishevelled hair would write his memoirs: his main interest has always been himself. But like him or loathe him, there’s no denying the man who has been caught out fibbing almost as much as Pinocchio has quite a story to tell: COVID, Brexit, Boris Bikes and, to his credit, steadfast support for Ukraine. This book may be the UK’s top seller (pipping Osman and Rooney), but it’s hard to see that happening here.

The Rise of the Matildas: Inside the Women’s World Cup Campaign
Fiona Crawford
MUP, $34.99
November 5
“The Matildas are arguably the country’s highest-profile and most valuable brand right now,” Fiona Crawford writes in her account of those inspiring events in winter 2023, when for the first time the women’s World Cup was staged in Australia, the Matildas reached the semi-finals and the nation fell in collective love with them. Remember that penalty shootout against France? When Cortnee Vine won it, Dylan Alcott said, “My god that was the closest I’ve ever been to standing up.”

Australian Gospel: A Family Saga
Lech Blaine
Black Inc., $36.99
November 5
What an extraordinary family story Lech Blaine tells. His own parents fostered three children and were then for years plagued by their biological parents, a self-appointed Christian fanatic and his equally paranoid wife. That went on for years, despite intervention orders, arrests and jail time. That the family survived is a testament to Blaine’s remarkable parents, who were utterly committed to loving those children, and to the acceptance of that love by his siblings.

Taboo
Hannah Ferguson
Affirm Press, $34.99
November 12
Hannah Ferguson has written a follow-up to her debut, Bite Back, which fired out her opinions about society, women and the patriarchy. Here, she considers the nature of taboos, the impact they can have on women’s lives and how they should be confronted. It’s all done in a confessional and chatty tone. Her conclusion? “Critical and individual rethinking is our greatest weapon against archaic ideas and institutions; healthy conversation is our vehicle of change.”

Essays That Changed Australia: Meanjin 1940 to Today
Ed., Esther Anatolitis
MUP, $34.99
November 12
Clem Christesen started Meanjin 84 years ago, since when it has been central to our literary and political culture. He wanted writers to “reveal and clarify our life by showing it to us through a vision different from ours and deeper”. This collection of incisive essays features great names from the magazine’s past and present, including Manning Clark, Chelsea Watego, Tony Birch, Arthur Phillips, Hilary Charlesworth, Amy McQuire and more. Plenty, in fact, to make you think.

The City and its Uncertain Walls
Haruki Murakami
Harvill Secker, $49.99
November 19
If you’re a Haruki Murakami fanatic – there are a lot of you – you may have read his early story, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, so you’ll have an idea of what’s to come. During the pandemic he rewrote it to become the first part of his latest novel that features characteristic emotional yearnings, books, libraries and more. Here, a young man’s teenage love tells him her real self lives in the titular, imaginary city. As an adult, will he try to find her?

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