This novel offers a bold feminist reimagining of Australian history (2024)

FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
The Mark, Frida Isberg
Text, $34.99

Empathy is no panacea for social ills, as Icelandic author Frida Isberg keenly demonstrates in her dystopian novel The Mark. In an alternative Reykjavik, the Icelandic nation is facing a referendum on whether to make the Empathy Test compulsory.

Two-thirds of the population have taken the test, and those who haven’t face increasing pressure to conform and progressive discrimination if they fail to submit. Four characters with divergent perspectives – a teacher, a psychologist, a businesswoman, and a high-school dropout – canvas the politics of empathy and social polarisation in the lead-up to the referendum.

Confronting the ethical dilemmas in mandating a standardised test for compassion and antisocial behaviour, the novel exposes how preconceptions about empathy can be shaped, how they’re affected by social disadvantage and traumatic experience, and how counterproductive coercion can be as a progressive political tactic.

The Story Thief
Kyra Geddes, Affirm Press, $34.99

Lillian was born in 1892, the same year Henry Lawson’s short story The Drover’s Wife was published.

She attends a convent-run school as a girl and first encounters Lawson’s tale as a teenager. Convinced it is based on her family, Lillian wants to confront the author she believes to be a “story thief” and becomes obsessed with proving Lawson used her mother’s life for inspiration. (Perhaps, while she’s at it, Lillian might ask why Lawson didn’t give the drover’s wife a name, when even the dog gets a name!)

Kyra Geddes’ The Story Thief is a family saga that doubles as a feminist reimagining of Australian history and literature. It delves into the silencing and suppression of women’s stories, the ethics of writing fiction from the lives of others, and the struggle for gender equity in Australian society. It’s an ambitious, expansive but well-paced debut novel, with appealing characters and a boldly imagined historical canvas, though there’s occasional room for stylistic improvement.

All the Beautiful Things You Love
Jonathan Seidler, Macmillan, $34.99

A romance delivered in reverse, from divorce backwards, All the Beautiful Things You Love begins with Elly having to reckon with all the stuff she and Enzo accumulated over the course of their decade-long relationship.

She decides to sell possessions with too many memories attached on Facebook Marketplace. As Elly does this, we learn the story behind how each item was acquired and observe how Elly and Enzo came together and fell apart.

Jonathan Seidler’s prose is vivid and full of (often ruefully) comic observation, but it does have a structural kink. The novel weaves between omniscience and perspectivism in a way that can initially confuse, and although Seidler is sharp on material things evoking unbidden memory and emotion, the all-knowing narrator sometimes undercuts the effect of the book’s Proustian madeleines.

A Woman in Sardinia
Valeria Usala, Text, $34.99

Opening with a choric prologue written as if in whispers from a Sardinia past, Valeria Usala’s latest novel tells us flatly from the outset that every village has a martyr, and that its main character Teresa has been murdered and forgotten.

A Woman in Sardinia traces three generations of women across 19th- and early 20th-century history, focusing on a fatal act of male violence and its repercussions.

Teresa’s mother Maria was ostracised by the village. Teresa herself is fiercely independent, a mother and businesswoman who has no time for the noxious web of superstition, gossip and misogyny that keeps women in line. When she refuses a marriage proposal, her suitor becomes enraged, but most of the village is complicit in her fate. Resilience and unlikely forgiveness must await Teresa’s daughter, who witnesses her mother’s murder as a child. It’s a moving, timely novel that suffers slightly from imperfect English translation.

NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
John Busst
Iain McCalman, NewSouth, $36.99

Those familiar with the campaign to save the Great Barrier Reef from mining in the 1960s will know of the role played by Australia’s foremost poet and conservationist, Judith Wright.

Few, however, will be familiar with the name John Busst, the artist who was the campaign’s spokesman and tactician. Wright called him the Barrier Reef’s first martyr as he died before the reef’s future was secured. After dropping out of university, Busst helped build the bohemian artists’ colony Montsalvat in Melbourne, before falling in love with the natural bounty of the coast around Mission Beach in Queensland where he spent the rest of his life.

As he learned about the acute peril faced by the rainforest and the reef, he underwent “a conversion ...that transformed his psyche”. This stirring portrait tells of how Busst discovered his life’s purpose in galvanising others to protect this natural paradise.

Blindness: October 7 and the Left
Hadley Freeman
The Jewish Quarterly, $22.99

The image at the heart of this anguished essay is that of posters about Israeli hostages in London being torn down and ripped to shreds.

It speaks, argues Hadley Freeman, of how polarising the war in Gaza has become, stoking antisemitism and turning this tragedy into a simple matter of good versus evil. As a progressive, she is horrified by the way that some on the left have walked, as has Netanyahu, into Hamas’ trap. “Why is Israel so entirely blamed for attacking Hamas, and Hamas give a free pass for using their own citizens as human shields?”

The story of Israel and Palestine is far more complex than that painted by Western activists, she says in this critique of uninformed self-righteousness. ‘It is entirely reasonable to sympathise with the Palestinians’ sense of aggrievement at losing their land in 1948 ... but not to the point of condoning Palestinian terrorism against Israelis.”

AI Needs You
Verity Harding, Princeton University Press, $39.99

It’s all too easy to feel powerless in the face of the juggernaut that is artificial intelligence (AI). The jocks and entrepreneurs behind this technology are so co*cksure that only they are capable of deciding its future.

Verity Harding argues against this hubris and draws on examples from recent history to show how and why ordinary citizens and governments can play a role in regulating this Wild West. The transformative technologies of the space race, IVF and the internet serve as case studies in the importance of oversight and governance bodies to set ethical limits and ensure global collaboration.

Harding persuasively and eloquently argues that “the lack of humility amongst those building the future and the credulousness with which their claims are treated on matters beyond their expertise” robs us all of our voices and our values.

Mickey
Helen Brown, ABC Books, $34.99

Helen Brown is on the verge of adolescence. To help her through the pain and awkwardness of an eye operation, her father gives her a feral kitten she calls Mickey. The only problem is that Brown’s highly strung mother, Noeline, can’t stand cats.

This memoir, written with lashings of poetic licence, garners much of its narrative tension from the fear that Noeline will discover the feline hidden in her daughter’s bedroom. As the bond between Brown and Mickey deepens, family dramas unfold with Mickey eventually playing a heroic role. A lover of stories about noble animals and their human companions, the young narrator is frustrated that nobody writes “about the lives of ordinary New Zealand girls”. Brown has since made her name as the author of books about the healing presence of beloved pets. In Mickey, she has created the book that her 12-year-old self longed to read.

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