Books
PREPARE TO BE ASTONISHED WITH SOME GROUNDBREAKING READS.
WOMEN LIKE US
Mandy Nolan and Ellen Briggs, Finch, $27.99
A tell-all ‘we girls together’ collection of revelations from two Mullimbimby stand-up comics. Mandy has five children and covers the full horror of being responsible for their destinies. Ellen is more cosmopolitan. Don’t expect constant hilarity. The anorexic daughter’s tale is profoundly sad.
TRAJECTORY
Richard Russo, Allen and Unwin, $32.99
A happily married real estate agent shakes hands with the wife of a terrible Texan and experiences a magical vroom vroom — not that it’s going anywhere, but she does persuade her husband to buy a house he’s dismissed as ‘crap’. A Canadian academic, whose holiday in Italy is sabotaged by an oversmart phone, finds a coffee in Venice costs $20. Russo, maestro of the tiny life moments that change everything, gives us four short stories. No lessons for would-be writers here. Russo is a one-off.
THE PRISONER
Kerry Tucker with Craig Henderson, William Heinemann, $34.99
Tucker was convicted of fraud in 2003. Her two daughters were four and six at the time. She spent four and a half years in the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre, a maximum-security prison at Deer Park, Victoria. Tucker is a non-user but once inside she was surrounded by women for whom drugs were an obsession. Her way with words led to a job within the system; she became a peer educator — a prisoner trusted by fellow inmates yet able to negotiate with staff. The most intriguing chapters cover what happened once Tucker was discharged. She wanted to go back to prison, missed the emotional support, feared for her safety. Moreover, the longed-for company of her daughters was often too taxing to endure. Her narrative veers from startling to, occasionally, reassuring.
THE BOAT PEOPLE
Sharon Bala, Doubleday, $29.99
The Canadian immigration authorities are waiting anxiously for the arrival of a boat thought to be carrying 300 people. But it’s not one boat, it’s two, and there are more than 500 refugees aboard who believe they’ll be welcomed and looked after. The team assigned to processing the newcomers is overwhelmed and, to complicate matters, the government now fears that among the innocent passengers are terrorists posing as refugees. Widower Mahindan is aboard with his six-year-old son. Priya is the lawyer who will attempt to release Mahindan from detention and Grace, a third-generation Japanese-canadian, is the adjudicator whose performance is seriously threatened by exhaustion and a big distraction in her personal life. An evocative novel that resonates with our own immigration dilemma.
SOMEONE LIKE YOU
Karly Lane, Allen and Unwin, $29.99
It would have been OK if Hayley Stevens had simply quit city life, hunkered down in her solid little cottage two and half hours from Sydney, written her novel and dismissed a failed marriage as the fault of pressing publisher’s deadlines and PR tours. Acquiring a donkey was frivolous and the barnyard menagerie that followed sheer folly. However, owning stock is a way to make friends with farmers and so the inevitable happens. Then Hayley’s novel starts writing itself and a past-lives specialist has to be called in to investigate. Lovely work from a practised wordspinner. Extra chuckles for any reader who has their own novel in the works.
THE WASP AND THE ORCHID
Danielle Clode, Picador, $39.99
Edith Coleman’s research is world renowned among botanists but she’s not well known in Australia, where she spent most of her life. Clode rambles delightfully. She breaks all the rules set down by professional historians and speculates way beyond the facts when it comes to Coleman’s private life. Yet this is a valuable biography to be read and enjoyed. Her major contribution was proof of pseudocopulation; Coleman’s vigilant observations revealed that Lissopimpla semipunctata (a wasp) mistakes Cryptostylis leptochila (an orchid) for a mate and thus the flower is pollinated.