By Cameron Woodhead and Fiona Capp
A recommended therapy read for the festive season.
FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret
Benjamin Stevenson
Penguin, $29.99
Benjamin Stevenson’s meta-whodunits – Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone and Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect – have been worthy bestsellers. Now it’s time for a festive special. In Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret, classic mystery aficionado Ernest Cunningham has a new case to solve. This time, wedding bells are about to chime as Ernest prepares to marry, but when his ex-wife Erin begs for assistance only the master sleuth can provide. She’s languishing in jail, having been accused of the stabbing murder of her partner, philanthropist Lyle Pearse, in their Blue Mountains hideaway. Suspects soon emerge, from a wily magician to twins saved by the intervention of one of Lyle’s philanthropic programs. With an advent calendar full of clues, this slimmed-down version of Stevenson’s comic homage to perfectly constructed, Agatha Christie-style mysteries is most diverting, and recommended therapy for anyone who finds Christmas murderous.
Josh Kemp writes with a Cormac McCarthy-like menace in Jasper Cliff.
Jasper Cliff
Josh Kemp
Fremantle Press, $34.99
Josh Kemp follows his hallucinatory road trip novel, the Ned Kelly Award-winning Banjawarn, with an equally uncanny detour into Australian gothic. Lachlan has travelled to Jasper Cliff, a remote town in the Pilbara with one dying pub, searching for his brother Toby. He is not the only person to have vanished from that place, which is wrinkled by punishing heat and riddled by many other disappearances. When Lachlan learns from locals of the Rift, a deep hole in a ravine in the surrounding country, he becomes as obsessed as his brother with finding and looking into it the abyss … As in Banjawarn, there’s a Cormac McCarthy-like menace in these shadows of human destructiveness set against a landscape of hostile, desolated beauty. Jasper Cliff does work overt horror elements into its psychological suspense, with mysticism and historical violence and eldritch fantasy lurking in the distance. It’ll suck you in like a desert mirage, though don’t expect a neat ending with all loose ends tied.
Bernice Barry’s novel has a Dickensian setting and progressive ethos.
Sarah Evans
Bernice Barry
Echo Press, $32.99
This richly drawn historical novel is based on a real Sarah Evans, tried for murder in 19th-century London. As an illiterate and impoverished woman, she did not have much of a voice in the historical record, and Bernice Barry sets that to rights with a wealth of research. An 18-year-old Sarah and best friend Lucy struggle to survive on the streets of London. After being tried for theft, Sarah falls into the clutches of Thomas Aris, a sadistic prison governor, as Lucy embarks on a new life, sentenced to transportation.
Themes of sexual exploitation, oppression of women, freedom of thought and political dissent emerge as Sarah’s desperate fate at Aris’ hands finds counterpoint in a network of strong women and agitators for all the rights Sarah was born without. Barry’s novel has a Dickensian setting and shares a progressive ethos towards the poor, without the enfeeblement of Dickens’ sentimentality towards younger female characters.
A taut crime novel that also dives into the practice of illegal overfishing.
Cutler
David Whish-Wilson
Fremantle Press, $34.99
Cutler blends bleak crime novel and detective fiction, nautical adventure and espionage thriller. Former spy Paul Cutler has been tasked with investigating the disappearance of an Australian marine scientist on an ocean-going Taiwanese fishing vessel. He infiltrates the ship, only to discover the murder of one scientist is the shallowest of crimes perpetrated above these fathomless depths. The crew members are brutalised, overworked and more or less enslaved – and when Cutler learns of a massacre on another fishing vessel nearby, finding the truth becomes second priority to staying alive to tell the tale. David Whish-Wilson has written a taut and evocative crime novel that’s also a brooding, and increasingly grim, odyssey that dives into the ecological rape of the oceans, and all the inhuman exploitation that goes under the radar when it comes to illicit, and industrial-scale, overfishing in international waters and more.
Dupain’s work is a study in simplicity, but he was a man of contrasts.
NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Max Dupain: A Portrait
Helen Ennis
Fourth Estate, $44.99
Max Dupain’s iconic photographs might be studies in simplicity, but the man himself was anything but, according to Helen Ennis in this penetrating biography. Dupain was given a Box Brownie camera at age 11 and by his mid-teens he was hooked. After a sheltered upbringing, his personal life was turned on its head during the Second World War, when his first wife, photographer Olive Cotton, divorced him, close friends were killed and he remarried. Professionally, he broke with his pre-war modernist work and committed himself to realism. One of the pleasures of this portrait is the series of meditations on key photographs illustrating the development of his artistic sensibility. Ennis also skilfully teases out the disparity between the public perception of Dupain as the quintessential, detached, hyper-masculine Australian, and his inner life of self-doubt, anxiety and drive.
John Safran pursues his subject like any self-respecting gonzo journalist would.
Squat
John Safran
Penguin, $36.99
At first, it seems to be a relatively clear-cut story. Provoked by Kanye West’s praise of Hitler, John Safran goes in pursuit of his subject like any self-respecting gonzo journalist would. For Safran, as a Jew, it’s personal. Unable to get access to West, he squats in one of the rapper’s Californian mansions as a way of getting inside his head. All the antics of trespassing make for a tense and entertainingly bizarre story, but what gives it substance are Safran’s discoveries about West’s unexpected attitudes to Jews and Judaism. He finds an explicitly pro-Jewish quote from the Old Testament chalked on the walls of one room. He learns that West was studying the Torah with a rabbi. In another room, he comes across an art installation creepily reminiscent of bodies piled in a gas chamber. “Is he repulsed by Jews because he’s attracted to them?” Safran asks. Things just keep getting weirder and weirder.
Malcolm Gladwell deciphers the great sociological puzzle.
Revenge of the Tipping Point
Malcolm Gladwell
Abacus Books, $34.99
Coined in the 1960s, “tipping point” became a buzz phrase 25 years ago following Malcolm Gladwell’s eponymous, bestselling book about social epidemics and how they can promote positive change. Revenge of the Tipping Point examines the underbelly or flipside of this phenomenon. “If the world can be moved by just the slightest push, then the person who knows where and when to push has real power,” Gladwell writes. Understanding the process is not straightforward, however. Gladwell deciphers this sociological puzzle through an eclectic mix of case studies ranging from bank robberies in Los Angeles to Purdue Pharma’s role in the prescription opioid epidemic. But his message is clear. The overstories that govern social epidemics are created by us. What drives tipping points can be identified. The tools exist to control them. If we don’t want opportunists to exploit them, we’d better skill up.
The comedian’s delight in animals is infectious and endearingly comical.
My Animals and Other Animals
Bill Bailey
Quercus, $34.99
Over the years, comedian Bill Bailey and his wife, Kris, have opened their house to “a gaggle of waifs and strays”. They’ve had a pair of chameleons named Posh and Becks, chickens in the shower and Madagascan hissing cockroaches in a tank in Bailey’s office. His delight in his family of animals and the animals he encounters while making wildlife shows is infectious and endearingly comical. “Sharing your breakfast with four noisy parrots who love toast … means you start the day with a smile.” In lieu of a parrot to put you in a good mood, this book should do the job. There’s a fable-like quality to many of these vignettes, often with a twist. A classic example is the encounter between the Flemish Giant rabbit and the scrawny fox who came off second best. There are also poignant moments, such as when Bailey finds himself cradling the head of a tranquilised jaguar and is overcome by its wild beauty.
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