Jennifer Byrne
Jennifer Byrne is the host of The Book Club on ABC TV.
MUSIC AND FREEDOM, by Zoe Morrison, Vintage.
Alice grows up in country NSW, in a ramshackle farm surrounded by orange trees. A happy child of unhappy parents, she has a rare and marvellous gift for music, and at seven, wins a full scholarship to England’s Royal College of Music. It should be the first step to achieving her dream of becoming a concert pianist – and when she captures the interest of the handsome Edward, a brilliant Oxford economics professor, she seems on the brink of achieving all she could hope for.
Yet things go terribly wrong for Alice; it’s painful to read the story of her unravelling as Edward’s vicious character emerges. Zoë Morrison is a musician and an authority on gender violence, melding her themes so skillfully it’s hard to believe this is a first novel.
MAN IN THE CORNER, by Nathan Besser, Vintage.
This intriguing Australian fiction debut is hard to define, but probably speculative psychological thriller comes closest. It’s about a regular, everyday husband and father, David, who blacks out one day with a rare brain disorder. He recovers slowly, but remembers nothing of what happened during his collapse – except his personality seems to have changed.
And, when a smooth-talking businessman, Ben, approaches him to take part in a scam involving identity-theft, David agrees. Yet who is David now? Is it possible he lost grip on his own identity during the blackout and now carries more than one person inside him? What grounds the book is the crime itself, which leads David into ever greater danger – and the truth about the manipulative Ben as it starts to emerge.
THE SELLOUT, by Paul Beatty, Oneworld.
The opening line of this Booker Prize-winning novel reads, “This may be hard to believe, coming from a black man, but I’ve never stolen anything.” Edgy then.
Yet mild compared to what’s coming: a scabrous, comic assault on US race relations, designed to leave you gasping. For air because it’s wickedly funny and in admiration because Beatty says the unsayable things about how it feels to be a young black man in America. His chief character, Me, is locked in a court battle to save his neighbourhood, written off the LA maps, by reinstating slavery and segregating the high school. Yet the satirical plot matters less than Me’s rap-style commentary, taking aim at every assumption shared by black, white and brown Americans. A challenge, a circus and a brilliant shake-down of a book.
THE GIRL FROM VENICE, Martin Cruz Smith, Simon & Schuster.
Cenzo is a charming, middle-aged fisherman working the Venice lagoon in 1945. The war is over, but in La Serenissima, the Nazis are still – just – in charge. Sweeping his nets one night, Cenzo snares not fish but the still alive body of a beautiful young woman, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish family fleeing the Wehrmacht. The two are so opposite and argumentative, they’re clearly made for each other, but not before a string of adventures gets them entangled with rival groups making their last grasp at power – the Germans and those who thrived under them, and the equally dangerous partisans. What lifts this novel above the love-in-war pack is the knowing examination of what people are prepared do when things fall apart – except for the fisher community, which carries on with business.