By Cameron Woodhead and Fiona Capp
Books to read this week include new titles from Anthony Ham, Sayaka Murata and Frank Chalmers.
Book critics Cameron Woodhead and Fiona Capp cast their eyes over recent fiction and non-fiction titles. Here are their reviews.
Fiction pick of the week
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Life Ceremony
Sayaka Murata, Granta, $34.99
A collection of short fiction from Sayaka Murata, author of the 2016 bestseller Convenience Store Woman, offers some variety, but fans of the ice-cool tone, the wild conceits and the melancholy estrangement of that novel won’t be disappointed.
The title story follows corporate drudge Maho as she’s invited to a “life ceremony” involving cannibalistic funerary practices to honour a deceased manager. The bizarre intimacy of the society’s death rituals contrasts with its alienation from procreation: the story ends with sperm in a jar.
Other striking tales include A First-Rate Material, in which the latest Tokyo fashions have stretched to clothing, accessories and even furniture made from human remains, and Body Magic, which lends a lighter, more affectionate touch to two adolescent girls discovering sexual desire at different paces.
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Time and Tide in Sarajevo
Bronwyn Birdsall, Affirm Press, $29.99
This novel’s portrait of Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, is imagined from experience. Bronwyn Birdsall lived there in the aftermath of the extended siege and horrific war crimes committed during the ’90s, as does her protagonist Evelyn.
The high school English teacher finds a welcoming but fragile city where traumatic history still simmers into social tension. Ev throws herself into preparing her students for a prestigious scholarship, but when the teenage son of a heroic local figure is stabbed to death, she cannot help but become involved.
Fears of a cover-up to protect the perpetrator lead to public protests. A powderkeg situation erupts, and Ev finds herself in possession of crucial evidence that could catch the killer at the risk of igniting violence. Time and Tide in Sarajevo is elegant and finely wrought, achieving an intimate sense of place before ramping up the suspense.
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Conviction
Frank Chalmers, Allen & Unwin, $32.99
Frank Chalmers takes us to the remote Queensland town of Royalton in the mid-1970s. Honest cop Ray Windsor has been banished there for standing up to abuses within the force. This is Sir Joh Bjelke Petersen’s Queensland, well before the Fitzgerald inquiry: corruption is rife, and the new police chief doesn’t seem much interested in solving crimes.
But when two immigrants are raped and murdered, and another disappears, Ray resists the indifference, teaming with a new partner, Arshag, to catch a killer.
Chalmers has written an absorbing period crime novel. A slow burn with elements of police procedural that bleed into a brutal strand of outback noir, Conviction comes drenched in the paranoia and menace of Queensland’s dark days as a police state.
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Friends Like These
Meg Rosoff, Bloomsbury, $16.99
Award-winning YA author Meg Rosoff (How I Live Now) has written a vivid coming-of-age novel set in New York in 1982. Friends Like These sees 18-year-old Beth arrive in the Big Apple for a summer journalism internship, where she meets a range of young New Yorkers and falls under the spell of the rich, wild and charismatic Edie.
An all-consuming friendship develops as they navigate the world of journalism, share the exhilaration of a summer of firsts and misspend their youth, but their relationship sours as the stifling Manhattan summer drags on.
It’s a novel that a broad range of adolescents should find appealing. With its keenly observed characters, retro atmosphere and urban setting, Friends Like These reminded me strongly of the Judy Blume books that used to fly off school library shelves when I was young.
Non-fiction pick of the week
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The Patient Doctor
Ben Bravery, Hachette, $32.99
When 28-year-old Ben Bravery was receiving treatment for bowel cancer, he felt more like a problem than a patient. His body was being well tended but “at some point in the delivery of healthcare, they had forgotten I was a human”.
This insight inspired him to retrain as a doctor and show his patients the compassion he felt the system lacked. It has also enabled him to shine a light on the shortcomings in medical education and the failure to prioritise communicating well with patients. Raised by a single mother, Bravery reflects on how the selection process for medical school favours students from privileged backgrounds, entrenching a lack of diversity and life experience in the profession.
In this spirited and often funny memoir, Bravery shows himself to be the kind of well-rounded doctor that every patient deserves: one who sees the whole person not just the symptoms.
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The Man Who Loved Pink Dolphins
Anthony Ham, Allen & Unwin, $34.99
Given that pink dolphins hardly feature in this suspenseful tale of one man’s attempt to preserve a magical, untouched backwater of the Amazon, one can only assume that someone in marketing dreamed up the title. The shame is that it does no justice to Chris Clark’s audacious, decades-long battle to protect this Edenic place or the larger, urgent story Anthony Ham tells about the forces of development destroying the Amazon rainforest and its Indigenous peoples.
Ham’s initial assumption that Clark was a “benevolent, modern-day Kurtz with a devoted band of friends and followers” evolves into a more nuanced portrait of a dedicated and fearless, if flawed, environmental campaigner, social activist and family-man. Most importantly, his story is a compelling vehicle for drawing the world’s attention to just how dire the threat to the Amazon has become.
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Big, Beautiful Female Theory
Eloise Grills, Affirm Press, $35
In these self-consciously out-there graphic essays, Eloise Grills confronts us with the depths of our fear of the human body, especially the “fat body” that “lives outside the bounds of the discrete body”. She simultaneously celebrates her voluptuousness, skewers society’s prejudice towards bodies that are perceived as excessive, and embodies the conflicting feelings of abjection that these attitudes instil.
In a kind of spoof of the confessional mode, she declares, “I have mined my life for stories, not so much like diamonds but peculiar reams of rock/ Flabby narratives without resolution or order cohered into shape by contour tights”.
One minute playful, the next self-lacerating, Big Beautiful Female Theory defies literary and theoretical categorisation, parodying excess even as it revels in it.
Eloise Grills is a guest at Melbourne Writers Festival. mwf.com.au
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Advancing Human Rights
Michael Mintrom, Monash University Publishing, $19.95
It’s easy to assume that breaches of human rights happen elsewhere, in less democratic nations where citizens have been robbed of their agency. But as Michael Mintrom shows in this essay, human rights can be violated anywhere, even in countries that consider themselves beyond reproach.
Social inclusion is central to his examination of how public policy can promote human rights, with particular attention to the rights of disadvantaged groups. Mintrom points to the benefits for society as a whole in addressing the human rights of the most vulnerable, whether they be Aboriginal children caught in the “school-to-prison pipeline”, newly released prisoners, disabled people in the workplace or LGBTQIA+ children at school. Too often it is not lack of funding but a failure of imagination, he says, that deprives people of their rights.
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