REVIEWS DIANA CARROLL, SHELLEY ORCHARD, PENELOPE DEBELLE

MEMOIR Only Caroline Baum Allen & Unwin, $32.99

An homage by journalist Caroline Baum to the extraordinary lives of her parents. Growing up in 1960s London, Baum enjoyed a life characterised by material privilege and emotional deprivation. Her European parents, damaged by the horrors of World War II, were distant and demanding. Absorbing many of their worst traits, she became “an unappreciative, ungrateful, obnoxious snob”. By her teenage years, Baum was “a geyser of contempt and hatred”. Only later did she learn to negotiate difficult family relationships and temper her bitterness and frustration. The later sections of the book, as they face the traumas of illness, old age, and bereavement, are especially powerful. She creates a vivid, but not flattering, family portrait written with honesty and grace. Verdict: compulsively readable

THRILLER The River at Night Erica Ferencik Bloomsbury, $24.99

Four friends holiday each year together, chugging cocktails on beaches while battling disintegrating marriages, stalled careers and sickness. This year exercise junkie Pia persuades them to go to backwoods Maine instead for a whitewater rafting trip. The narrator, magazine artist Win, is doubtful; suffering a crisis as 40 approaches, she “doesn’t speak nature’’. But Pia wants adventure — and adventure is what she gets. A freak accident strands them on an unforgiving river, their relationships fracturing as they fight for survival and, in Win’s case, the seductive lure of death. This is Ferencik’s debut novel. Wonderfully adept at descriptive prose that brings a unique environment to life, she also handles the action scenes with ease. Verdict: vivid

FICTION Another Brooklyn Jacqueline Woodson Oneworld, $18.99

Woodson is a writer of young adult and children’s books, but this is a very grown up story about being black and underprivileged in Brooklyn. Her heroine, August, is motherless — she and her brother managed to be halfway whole, she says — finding family among friends who are full of life and hope, dancing and music, before the eating disorders, religious fervour, drugs, sexual assaults and deeper grief for a mother who heard voices in her head. Locked arm in arm with Sylvia, Gigi and Angela, she, like them, thought the future was hers. August runs into Sylvia years later; it’s awkward and they’re no longer in touch. But it triggers poetic reflections on a time that shows how beauty can exist where the eye sees none. Verdict: beautiful