The start of a new month means that there's a new issue of Readings Monthly available online and in our shops. Below you can read Alison Huber's column from the latest issue – and keep an eye on the blog for more updates and recommended new releases throughout the month!
I would usually describe myself as a ‘reformed procrastinator’, but occasionally those dusty old undergraduate habits rear their dreadful heads, and the target for my unreconstructed behaviours most recently was: This Month’s Column. Last night, after tidying the kitchen, rearranging a sock drawer, and catching up on all my shows (of which there are far too many), I decided the only way forward was the old trick of taking myself to bed in order to get up early with a refreshed mind (though as any true procrastinator knows, you never sleep that well, such is the level of guilt). But in happy news, that decision led to me listening to the announcement of the International Booker Prize winner as I write this morning, and I can now write about this here (see, there was method there, or at least that’s the way I’m spinning it, dear Ed.).
By the time you read this, you’ll likely have heard that the winner is Heart Lamp, written in Kannada by Banu Mushtaq and translated into English by Deepa Bhasthi. You may also know that this prize awards both the writer and translator, so Mushtaq and Bhasthi share the £50,000 prize money equally, which recognises the collaborative practice required to bring works into a new language, and the important creative work of literary translators. Typically, the International Booker Prize winner turns out to be one of the books on the shortlist that I haven’t read (and I was tracking so well this year! It’s just about to be released locally in an edition by Scribe Publications), but the chair of judges, Max Porter, describes this book as, ‘a radical translation which ruffles language, to create new textures in a plurality of Englishes’. I’m looking forward to reading this!
Our dear Mark Rubbo is a longtime fan of Gail Jones and has written our review for Jones’s new book, The Name of the Sister, our Fiction Book of the Month. There’s nothing quite as satisfying as following an author across the length of their career, and Mark says that he has, ‘loved everything of hers that I’ve read: her books are intelligent, sophisticated, and cosmopolitan’ and that this book, ‘will delight her admirers but also garner the attention of those yet to discover her’. That pretty much covers all of us I think, so let’s get reading!
This month we also see new works from Jennifer Mills and Marija Peričić and several strong debuts, including a highly recommended short story collection by Lucy Nelson about characters who are not mothers called Wait Here, and first novels from Miranda Nation, Sinéad Stubbins, and Thomas Vowles. Speaking of the International Booker Prize, you might recall the novel The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree by Iranian-Australian author Shokoofeh Azar, which was shortlisted for that prize in 2020: Azar has a new novel out this month called The Gowkaran Tree in the Middle of Our Kitchen.
The rediscovery of Charmian Clift’s work continues this month, with the republication of Honour’s Mimic. Our resident graphic novel expert assesses a new work called The Brownout Murders which is set on the mean streets of Melbourne, circa 1942. Our Crime Book of the Month is Melaleuca, by First Nations debut author Angie Faye Martin, and our reviewer describes it as ‘masterful’. We also point you in the direction of lots of interesting international writers in our reviews section, including books from Susanna Kwan, Taylor Jenkins Reid, Fredrik Backman, Jennifer Trevelyan, V.E. Schwab, and Anthony Passeron, and there’s lots more to discover there too, like the new novels from Sarah Moss and Hiro Arikawa, as well as local editions of books that received a lot of acclaim in the ‘best of 2024’ lists overseas, Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte and Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino.
Our Nonfiction Book of the Month comes to us from Perth-based Upswell, the project of former UWA Publishing director and publisher Terri-ann White. Upswell produces a fascinating list of unusual and creative literary works, and I admire this imprint immensely. Our reviewer describes Anne-Marie Condé’s The prime minister’s potato and other essays as ‘storytelling of the highest order: insightful, discerning, and quietly magical’.
You’ll remember Dr Debra Dank’s multi-award-winning memoir, We Come with This Place, and the writer and academic’s new work Terraglossia is published this month. Food critic Besha Rodell’s Hunger Like a Thirst appears mid-June, and we have a sneak peek extract in this month's edition. It will be hard to miss the memoir from former New Zealand Prime Minister and trailblazing woman Jacinda Ardern; early buyers might be lucky enough to receive a copy with a signed bookplate. Also out this month is a new Quarterly Essay from Hugh White, Jacinta Parsons’s further writing on women and aging, A Wisdom of Age, new books from Andreas Malm, Keio Toshida, Linda Jaivin, Jenny Valentish, and Sheila Fitzpatrick, and it won’t be a surprise to hear that I’m looking forward to diving into Ottolenghi co-founder and chef Sami Tamimi’s first solo cookbook, which is called Boustany: A Celebration of Vegetables from My Palestine.
And finally, dear Reader, we do love our classics here at Readings, and we know you do too. We’ve had an annual promotion of Penguin’s extensive range for a number of years running now, with previous years focusing on their Black, Vintage, Modern, and Clothbound Classics, and this year I thought I’d put together a bunch of their lesser known series that you may not have seen en masse, including the splendid Vintage Quarterbound Classics hardbacks. Though I knew how lovely they all were, even I was excited to see them out on display together!
Meanwhile, my colleagues in the Children’s buying team have organised a similar deal for children’s hardback classics – see our News page for details. We have both promotions as 3-for-2 offers in-shop only, so come in soon and see how gorgeous they are.
