Obsession, a scandalous separation and the new Helen Garner: Twelve new books in time for Christmas

It’s hard to believe but, yes, we’re in the final month of the year. It’s all gone so quickly and there have been so many books published in the past 11 months. The lead-up to Christmas is peak book-buying time, and here are another 12 that will keep readers entertained, provoked and reflecting.

The Season
Helen Garner
Text, $34.99
Quite a change for Helen Garner. No courtroom, no death, no trauma. Rather, a tender, detailed observation of her grandson’s season with a local football team. Indeed, she actually wondered whether she could do happy, as she told Jake Niall in The Age: “How am I going to write this?” Well, she did, and the result is a delight – an unusual footy story that has her a regular attendee at training and matches ... and worrying: “Every time I see him quiet and pale and sore, sitting at the table with us, eating but in another universe, my heart gives a lurch.”

The Defiance of Frances Dickinson
Wendy Parkins
Affirm Press, $34.99
Wendy Parkins used to be a professor of Victorian literature in Britain and she has clearly put that to good use in her first novel. It’s based on the disintegrating marriage, scandalous separation and then divorce proceedings involving Frances Dickinson and her husband, the brutish John Geils, with whom she had four daughters. Parkins’ multi-voiced historical novel makes good use of court documents in a book that bristles at the humiliations inflicted on women in a 19th-century marriage.

A Political Memoir
Robert Manne
La Trobe University Press, $59.99
This is a riveting account of the intellectual development and unusual path of one of Australia’s leading cultural and political commentators. Robert Manne shifted from right to left (not quite as bald as that), edited and then fell out with Quadrant, and championed the stolen generations − remember that famous public debate with Andrew Bolt? It’s a personal account from a man who believes “there was almost nothing more central than the belief that where moral questions were concerned, it was vital that both head and heart were fully engaged”.

An Unlikely Survival
John Murphy
MUP, $50
John Murphy points out in his introduction that younger Australians, particularly today, question the very existence of a welfare state, believing it has been demolished. Not so, he argues. And so this book becomes a history of government, liberalism and neoliberalism and their effects on society, the impact of the so-called “welfare lobby” and people’s attitudes. While the system is resilient, he writes, the challenges it faces include “resentment and downward envy”. What’s needed is “more compassion and respect ... and less contempt and division”.

The Wild Reciter
Peter Kirkpatrick
Miegunyah Press, $34.99
Peter Kirkpatrick’s title refers to the long-gone reciter of verse, “a symbol of a time long ago when poetry had mass appeal, and was everywhere read, memorised and performed”. He’s interested in why the figure of the reciter has disappeared and the changes that poetry has undergone since 1890 − how it is “created, communicated and consumed”. He notes that of the 69 per cent of us who read books, only 8 per cent read poetry, and of the 10 top-selling poets over the four years to 2023, the bestselling Australian poet was Indigenous writer Evelyn Araluen, while Canadian Instagram poet Rupi Kaur had the top three books.

Saltwater Cure
Ali Gripper
Murdoch Books, $29.99
I remember interviewing Tim Winton around the time Breath was published and discussing the difficulties of his teenage years and how he survived intact compared with some of his friends. It was because of his obsession with the sea: “I think in some strange way ... I just felt that being in the ocean I was availing myself of the world’s greatest poultice.” The sea has been transformative for Winton and many others − including James Pittar, Valerie Taylor and Yusra Metwally − to whom Ali Gripper has spoken for this collection of true stories that show the power of the ocean in so many ways.

Why Do People Queue for Brunch?
Ed., Felicity Lewis
Allen & Unwin, $32.99
If you could have a book that answers all the perplexing questions about life today, this is surely it. The Explainer team, who write for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, get to grips with such life and death topics as why cancer is a bastard to cure, and what happens in an autopsy, and practical matters such as learning the art of conversation and whether we still care about handwriting. If you’re about to head to the beach for a break, you might want to turn to the item about building a great sandcastle. Read that and you’ll really impress the kids.

Memories of Distant Mountains
Orhan Pamuk; trans., Ekin Oklap
Hamish Hamilton, $39.99
If you’re a fan of the Turkish Nobel laureate, then this charming, idiosyncratic book is an absolute must. And even if you’re not, getting an insight into the thoughts, dreams, life and creative practice of a great writer is fascinating. Each double-page spread holds the equivalent from the notebooks in which he illustrated and wrote between 2009 and 2022, with translations around them. Getting used to the format can be tricky, but there’s no doubting Orhan Pamuk’s talent as an illustrator – for many years he wanted to be a painter but gave it up to concentrate on literature.

The Sunbird
Sara Haddad
UQP, $19.99
Sara Haddad originally self-published this novella – she describes it as a parable – about an old Palestinian woman living in Sydney but recalling life in Palestine in the late 1940s. It’s partly set at the formation of Israel, when Nabila Yasmeen’s innocent childhood is suddenly and violently disrupted with the coming of war, and also partly set last year. As our review said when the book first appeared in May, it’s “a contrast that gives aching resonance to the loss and longing, and ultimately the resilience, of the Palestinian people”.

Tomorrow There Will Be Sun: A Hope Prize Anthology
Simon & Schuster, $24.99
December 4
The world could do with more hope, resilience and courage. That’s what the Hope Prize is looking for – writing, fiction or nonfiction, that celebrates the strength of the human spirit. It’s an international award and the winner receives $10,000. This year it was Edinburgh-based John Merkel for Shadows Cast By the Moon, a tender piece about a woman who emerges from six weeks in hospital after some sort of breakdown and finds, through friendship with a man who has suffered a traumatic accident, and his family, reason to carry on and reconnect with her own family.

Murriyang
Stan Grant
Bundyi, $39.99
December 4
We’re used to Stan Grant’s more political writing – after all, his previous book was The Queen is Dead: The Time has Come for a Reckoning – but here the Wiradjuri man gets personal, spiritual and theological. He has turned his back on the media and politics and writes about love and time – the love he sees in his parents, his relationship with his father, Stan Grant snr, and the ideas and meanings of time from Einstein, Bergson and the Dreamtime. His Wiradjuri people have a phrase, Yinyamarra Winanghana, which means “to live with respect in a world worth living in”, which is what Grant wants.

On This Ground
Ed., Dave Witty
Monash University Publishing, $34.99
December 10
Dave Witty has assembled a wide-ranging collection of Australian nature writing, a genre he reckons “has been unfairly neglected over time”. But this is not an attempt at a history of such writing. Rather, the pieces, which have been published in books, magazines and elsewhere, show how the genre has bloomed as fear for our environment has grown. Witty coins the term “unsettler anxiety ... The realisation we have altered the natural world to such a degree that the future is a dark and frightening place. Life is no longer predictable.”

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