The late-summer reading pile is an eclectic one this year. Reviewed by the Sydney Morning Herald's team of critics, this month's ten new releases range from a thundering World War II-era historical epic to the quiet philosophical wisdom of a man who has lived more than a century. There is psychological tension, suburban comedy-drama, memoir raw enough to sting, and at least one book that seems destined for the screen.
Fiction
The Winter Warriors by Olivia Norek (Scribe, $35) is the fiction pick of the week, and it earns the distinction. Norek plants her reader in Finland in November 1939, as the Soviet Union launched its invasion expecting swift capitulation from a small, lightly armed neighbour. What the Red Army encountered instead was ferocious, organised resistance: farmers and workers fighting alongside soldiers in some of the most brutal winter conditions imaginable. Norek captures both the horror of the battlefield and the deep bonds forged under fire. The figure of Simo Häyhä, the Finnish sniper whose lethal precision earned him the name "the White Death", looms large among the legends the novel conjures. With the war in Ukraine still grinding on, this account of past Russian aggression and the courage of those who resisted it carries a weight that goes well beyond historical fiction.
Jennie Godfrey, who drew wide praise for her debut The List of Suspicious Things, returns with The Barbecue at No. 9 (Hutchinson Heinemann, $34.99). Set in 1985 around a neighbourhood gathering staged to watch the Live Aid broadcast, it is a tragicomic portrait of suburban aspiration and hidden pain. Domestic perfectionist Lydia Gordon hosts; her guests arrive carrying secrets that gradually surface through the afternoon. Among them is Rita, an Australian who has fled a history of abuse she cannot bring herself to share. Godfrey has a sharp eye for the gap between how people present themselves and who they actually are, and she uses the period setting with real skill.
Matt Dinniman's Operation Bounce House (Michael Joseph, $34.99) will find its audience among readers already devoted to his Dungeon Crawler Carl series. In a far future, gamers on Earth pay to remotely control combat robots on a colonised planet, believing the carnage is just entertainment. The premise borrows heavily from Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, and the novelistic structure is loose at best. Still, the world-building develops an odd momentum, and Dinniman's talent for slacker humour keeps things moving.
Australian author Susi Fox, a country doctor turned novelist, has written another psychological thriller in The Other Child (Penguin, $34.99). Obstetrician Lauren returns to work after the birth of her second child, still carrying grief over the drowning death of her firstborn. Her anxiety about leaving her baby in her partner Alex's care builds steadily through the novel. Fox keeps the central question alive with real skill: is Lauren's fear a reasonable response to trauma, or is something genuinely wrong? The novel engages seriously with both mental illness and the quieter, more insidious forms of control that can operate within a relationship.
Kate Alice Marshall's The Girls Before (Macmillan, $34.99) is a folk-horror inflected thriller about child abduction. School counsellor Audrey has never stopped thinking about her childhood friend Janie, who vanished without explanation. When she suspects a local girl's disappearance is not the runaway case authorities have assumed, her investigation leads toward a prominent family. Alternating with Audrey's chapters are sections narrated by a girl imprisoned underground, who calls herself Stranger and knows she must escape before she becomes another name in a grim pattern. Marshall, better known for YA fiction, handles adult thriller territory with confidence, even if some plot elements strain credulity.
Non-Fiction
Letter From Provence by Sheryle Bagwell (Allen & Unwin, $34.99) is the non-fiction pick of the week. Yes, Bagwell and her husband did buy a house in a Provençal village in 2017, but this is not the breezy relocation memoir the category usually produces. Bagwell discovers that Madame de Sévigné, the 17th-century letter writer celebrated by Proust, lived out her final years in a nearby chateau. That historical presence gives the book its structural spine. Running beneath it is something more personal: Bagwell looks back from her room in Provence to her suburban Sydney childhood, to a mother who died at 42 and never made it to Paris, and to the weight of an unhappy, violent household. The book becomes, quietly and powerfully, a daughter's letter to the mother she lost.
Kim Hyung Seok is 105 years old and a former Harvard professor. His A Theory of Happiness (Bloomsbury, $29.99) is less a formal philosophy than a series of stories and the lessons drawn from them. In one, he and a friend wait outside a sold-out Beethoven concert in Boston and eventually get in through a back entrance, courtesy of a cleaner. What he takes from the experience is not just the music but the image of the conductor at the end, quietly thanking his orchestra. Happiness, for Kim, is less an achievement than a posture: present, attentive, grateful. The book is modest in its ambitions and better for it.
Comedian Bron Lewis's I'm Not Mad (Anymore) (Affirm Press, $36.99) covers the full span of her life as a woman: childhood in a chaotic household, adolescence, early motherhood, and menopause. It is by turns very funny and genuinely raw. Lewis has the comedian's gift for finding the absurd inside the painful, but she does not let the jokes soften the harder material. The pressure to manage distress quietly, without inconveniencing anyone, is a thread running through the whole book.
P.E. Moskowitz's Breaking Awake (Bloomsbury, $34.99) begins in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, where Moskowitz, then 29, was nearly killed when a far-right protestor drove into a crowd. The trauma that followed produced a complete psychological collapse, and from that collapse a new identity: Moskowitz, previously identifying as gay, emerged through the experience as trans. The memoir contextualises personal crisis against the political convulsions of the Trump years and the author's earlier experience running from the collapsing Twin Towers on 11 September 2001. It is an intense and demanding read.
Readers who want to keep across the best new releases each week can subscribe to The Booklist newsletter, delivered every Friday. For reprint and licensing enquiries regarding this review collection, see the Copyright Agency's republication page. Australian readers looking for independent assessments of new literary fiction and non-fiction can also consult the Wheeler Centre, which regularly publishes criticism and author interviews alongside its Melbourne events programme.