Dear Reader, September 2019
Deborah Levy is a favourite author of many of our staff. Her last two books (the novel, Hot Milk (2016) and the memoir, The Cost of Living (2018)) both featured on Readings’ ‘best of the year’ lists, which are compiled from staff votes. It might be presumptuous to suggest so at this early stage, but I foresee The Man Who Saw Everything (Levy’s new novel and our Fiction Book of the Month) making it onto 2019’s list with ease. Just read our brilliant review and believe the hype. This month we also recommend many fine books,including from Lucy Treloar, Claire G. Coleman, Salman Rushdie, Nicole Dennis-Benn, Amanda Niehaus, Joey Bui, Marcy Dermansky, and Josephine Rowe. I’m pleased to see that one of Sigrid Nunez’s earlier novels, The Last of Her Kind, is being reissued; we all loved The Friend so much.
It was sad to learn of the death of Andrew McGahan in February this year. His writing inspired a genre (1992’s Praise is perhaps the defining ‘grunge-lit’ novel), won numerous literary prizes, including the Miles Franklin in 2005 (for 2004’s The White Earth), and has been part of the Australian cultural landscape for going on thirty years. McGahan’s final novel, The Rich Man’s House, is published this month.
September also brings us the international event that is the publication of Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, which takes up Offred’s story twenty years after the end of The Handmaid’s Tale. Even we at Readings have to wait until the worldwide embargo is lifted to read this new work from one of the most important writers of our (or any) age. Be sure to preorder your copy!
Our Nonfiction Book of the Month, Sand Talk, has a compelling and urgent subtitle: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World. This book is challenging and exhilarating in its scope; hearing the author, Tyson Yunkaporta, speak was a highlight of this year’s Australian Booksellers Association Conference in June, and I think his book couldn’t come at a better time. Also out this month are anticipated books from Ruby Hamad, Jane Gilmore, Chloe Higgins, Sally Rugg, and Annabel Crabb’s new Quarterly Essay, plus a major intellectual biography of Susan Sontag which appears mid-month. Neal Drinnan’s The Devil’s Grip promises to be, in the words of our reviewer, ‘unlike any other true-crime book [you’ve] read’. I can’t wait to get myself a copy of Meera Sodha’s new cookbook, East. It has been twenty years since the publication of Naomi Klein’s No Logo, a book whose message was both timely and prophetic in ways we couldn’t see clearly at the time; her new work is On Fire.
And finally, dear reader, I’m delighted to congratulate our talented ‘Dead Write’ columnist, beloved Carlton staffer, and 2016 Text Prize shortlistee, Fiona Hardy, on the publication of her debut novel, How to Make a Movie in 12 Days. This book is just like Fiona: funny, smart, warm, and hugely imaginative. Joyous in its portrayal of friendship and family, and an unabashed championing of popular culture’s role in giving our lives shape, this book marks the start of a brilliant new career.
