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!
October is here, and with it so many novels you’ve been waiting for: Trent Dalton, Bri Lee, Sofie Laguna, Jane Harper, Garry Disher, Chris Hammer, Lily King, Kiran Desai, Patricia Lockwood, Richard Osman, Bora Chung … I mean, even Thomas Pynchon is publishing a new book!
Our Fiction Book of the Month for October is Heather Rose’s A Great Act of Love. Rose never writes the same book twice and this historical novel is sure to capture many imaginations with its tale of personal reinvention and champagne in the fraught early days of colonial Australia. Lainie Anderson follows up her hit debut The Death of Dora Black with Murder on North Terrace, our Crime Book of the Month, with the historical figure police officer Kate Cocks again at the helm, returning us to the streets of early 20th-century Adelaide.
One of Melbourne’s stalwart independent publishers, Scribe, brings us the incredible Chris Kraus’s new novel this month, The Four Spent the Day Together. Don’t miss this book! Those of us on staff who have read it can’t stop talking about it. Also for the radar – and a book for every Melbourne literature-loving home – is Tony Birch’s career retrospective story collection, Pictures of You. Tony has kindly signed all our stock, so whether you’ve never read Tony’s stories or have read them all, this is a gorgeous thing to have: as our reviewer puts it, ‘the best stories from across the career of one of Australia’s best working writers … a treasure trove’.
I was slightly freaked out to learn that it is 10 years since the publication of Max Porter’s brilliant debut, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers. Ten whole years, where did they go?! But also, it feels like a book I’ve always known, so it’s unsurprising in another way, and there’s a beautiful new anniversary edition being published to mark the occasion.
I loved Lily King’s Heart the Lover, and found myself unexpectedly weeping on the tram as I read the last chapter … but in a good way! Georgian author Nino Haratischwili, author of the blockbusting The Eighth Life (for Brilka), has a new novel this month, The Lack of Light. Megha Majumdar wrote a wonderful debut, A Burning, and her book A Guardian and a Thief is a similarly tense and tightly written multi-perspectival work set in a near future of famine and climate emergency … a future that doesn’t feel at all futuristic at this stage of proceedings.
Our Nonfiction Book of the Month is Drusilla Modjeska’s A Woman’s Eye, Her Art, with a special guest review by the writer Andrea Goldsmith, who happens to be in conversation with Modjeska at an event at the Church of All Nations on Friday 3 October. It has taken a long time, but there is at last a lot of energy in art criticism and book publishing at this moment around the lives of women artists, previously overlooked or dismissed or written out of Art History (capitals intended). This book is another important contribution to the endeavour, which Goldsmith calls a ‘wonderful experience’ and ‘a pleasure to read’.
Readings loves books about its fair city, and Robyn Annear’s Shutter City is the next to illuminate Melbourne’s forgotten past, complete with Annear’s trademark style that brings the stories to life. We love our city’s food heroes, too, and this month you can read about the unique life of Lune’s visionary founder, Kate Reid, in her memoir, Destination Moon. Bob Brown has led a very different kind of influential life, and his memoir also appears this month, Defiance: Stories from Nature and Its Defenders (and for the month of October Readings will match publisher Black Inc.’s commitment to donate $2.50 from each sale of Defiance to the Bob Brown Foundation).
Iron Maiden is releasing a visual celebration of the band to mark its 50th year, and we have an amazing competition running, with prizes including a turntable, vinyl, and a card signed by all the members of the band. Excellent! Evan Dando has written the book no one thought he would, Rumours of My Demise.
Cookbooks start causing logistical problems in our shops this month as they arrive in big deliveries: Helen Goh and Baking and the Meaning of Life, I’m looking at you. And there are new books by Yanis Varoufakis, Serhii Plokhy, Ilan Pappe, Tim Curry, Mariana Enriquez, and so, so many more.
And finally, dear Reader, the winner of the Booker Prize is announced on Monday 10 November. This is always a highlight of the literary year, so to lean into the build-up I thought it might be interesting to see if we could display all the winning books together. As always, these great ideas turn into practical stock-related investigations, and one finds that even winning the Booker Prize doesn’t guarantee that a book remains readily available to us always and for all time. There are some gaps in availability, some stock in transit, some stock only available to import: it was an interesting exercise, to see what has fallen out of buying favour or view. But I’ve put together the full list which you can access on our website if you’re interested in seeing the current editions, and our shops at Carlton, Emporium, Hawthorn, and Malvern will be displaying a selection of the titles (as well as the last 10 years of winners of the International Booker Prize, and if you buy two or more from the in-shop display you will receive 20% off the books).
