Dear Reader, October 2018
Haruki Murakami made headlines this September, choosing to withdraw himself from contention for the New Academy Prize for Literature, the Swedish award set up as the alternative to the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature while the old academy regroups following scandals revealed earlier in the year. Murakami is making good on that old acceptance speech adage that ‘it’s an honour just to be nominated’; he’s choosing to shy away from media attention to focus on his writing instead. There is something pretty cool about that. Meanwhile, fans across the English-speaking world have been waiting for the translation of his most recent novel, Kishidancho Goroshi, published in Japan in 2017. We will come to know it as Killing Commendatore, or perhaps as our reviewer puts it, ‘a great big joyous elephant of a book’. It arrives in store on 10 October, and is our Fiction Book of the Month.
Alongside this, we have some bona fide home-grown blockbusters sharing the shelves: Marcus Zusak’s Bridge of Clay and Liane Moriarty’s Nine Perfect Strangers. Rosalie Ham of The Dressmaker fame returns with The Year of the Farmer; Scribner launches its Australian imprint with Shell by Kristina Olsson; and new novels appear from Shirley Barrett, Ilka Tampke, and Holly Throsby. I particularly admired Alice Nelson’s The Children’s House, an excellent work of literary fiction, generous in its exploration of trauma and the different ways we make family.
In international fiction, we recommend new books from Miriam Toews, Sarah Perry, Javier Marías, Gary Shteyngart, Kate Atkinson, William Boyd, Ian Reid and Hwang Sok-yong. Japanese authors seem to have a thing for writing about the life lessons that cats can teach us, and we really do love to read about that (remember Takashi Hiraide’s The Guest Cat and Hiro Arikawa’s The Travelling Cat Chronicles?); this year look out for If Cats Disappeared from the World by Genki Kawamura. It has sold more than a million copies in Japan.
At a time when it seems that being outspoken about any issue also involves a decision about whether you can stand the takedowns and abuse that might follow, we are incredibly lucky to have a woman and a writer like Clementine Ford amongst us. 2016’s Fight Like a Girl was a publishing sensation, and, more importantly, an agenda-setting line in the sand. Ford returns without compromise: Boys Will Be Boys continues her urgent reassessment of toxic masculinity and the enduring tedium of the patriarchy. It’s our Nonfiction Book of the Month. In fact, Ford is in company with a sisterhood of inspirational Australian women, with standout books on the way from Clare Wright, Leigh Sales, Fiona Wright, Gillian Triggs, and Chloe Hooper (her brilliant The Arsonist is out on 10 October and I’ll be reviewing it in full next month).
And there’s much more besides, with books about memory, capitalism, physics, maths, geese, identity politics, bees, the Western Front, sheep, mothers, Donald Trump … really, something for everyone!
And finally, dear reader, to help celebrate the event that is the release of Killing Commendatore, we’ll be offering a 3 for 2 deal on Murakami’s backlist, both fiction and nonfiction. Time to complete your library! (Please note: This offer is available in-store only, not online.)