Discover the new nonfiction books our booksellers are recommending this month!
Murder In Paris ’68: A True Story of Death and Glamour
Edward Chisholm
In 1958, Yugoslavian hustler Stefan Marković crosses the border into France, eager for all the opportunity this new world will offer. Almost exactly 10 years later, he is found on the outskirts of Paris, dead in suspicious circumstances. His closest known associate is none other than film-star Alain Delon, the broodingly handsome golden boy of French cinema, for whom Marković worked in tenuous, tense employment. From that single connection spirals out a web of implication drawing together small-time criminals, Parisian socialites, crime bosses and perhaps even those at the top of France’s political order. Stranger still are the connections the case draws to Delon’s films, from the envy-driven doublings of Purple Noon to the titular contract killer of Le Samouraï. Life seems to have imitated art, but the question is: how closely?
In Murder in Paris ’68, Edward Chisholm breathes life into a case that has been lost to archives and long-forgotten police files, combining facts with imagined exchanges and careful speculation. There is a fascinating story to be told about the death of Stefan Marković, and Chisholm rises to the task of telling it, darting between broad overviews of 1960s French culture – its politics, its media and, most of all, its crime – and incisive examinations of his leading figures, whose complex psychology and fraught relationships leap off the page. While the question of who killed Stefan Marković remains unsolved to this day, Chisholm offers decidedly more interesting questions to the reader: who were Stefan Marković and Alain Delon? What brought them together, and more importantly, what drove them apart? Although Murder in Paris ’68 can’t offer any definitive answers – despite Chisholm’s exhaustive research, some things are truly lost to history – it does deliver a gripping journey filled with punchy prose, film-set glamour and film‑noir sleaze.
Reviewed by Joe Murray.
Light and Thread
Han Kang, translated by Maya West, e. yaewon & Paige Aniyah Morris
In her first book written since being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2024, Han Kang returns with her first work of nonfiction to be translated into English, jointly translated by Maya West, e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris. The book opens with her 2024 Nobel Lecture, where readers both familiar with and curious about her past works are treated to an inside look at Han’s writing process for each book, and the questions that she would ‘endure… [and] live inside’ while writing them. For The Vegetarian these included: ‘Can a person ever be completely innocent? To what depths can we reject violence?’, and for her latest novel, We Do Not Part: ‘To what degree must we love in order to remain human in the end?’
She then goes further, following the thread of questions back in time to a poem she wrote at eight years old, when she asked, ‘Where is love? What is love?’, and then, at age 12, upon finding photographs of the residents of her native Gwangju killed in the 1980 military crackdown on pro-democracy protests (which would later become the focus of Human Acts): ‘Is this the act of one human towards another?’
In order to reconcile the horrors of what we know about the world with what we love about it, Han’s way of moving forward is by believing that we are connected, and, through her writing, pursuing this connection ‘as if [she is] sending out an electric current’. Anyone who has read Han before will understand that her unique, visceral precision is the result of this pursuit.
In the midst of writing We Do Not Part, Han picks up gardening, tending to her house’s small courtyard, recording the incremental changes her plants go through over the years, and their subsequent effect on her own sense of self. There’s a beautiful humility and gentleness to this book, qualities I think readers will find much solace in, as they share in Han’s simultaneous wonder and terror at the state of our world.
Reviewed by Tracy Hwang.
Delicious: Stories of Cooking, Love and Friendship
Kate Legge
Are you hungry? If so, heed my warning: reading this record of good food and people who matter on an empty tummy is not helpful. Before you know it, the book will be placed down and you will be separating eggs, whisking, and making a good old-fashioned mess. You might even want to ring someone close and just check the ingredients of that dish you had when you were travelling together when the kids were little and oh, do you remember how you ate that pasta dish …
Kate Legge – novelist, journalist, mother and friend – has written a memoir of numerous shared meals she has eaten over the years. Each chapter celebrates a particular time, location, person, and a dish. These tales range from when she lived in a dodgy area in Washington to when she was with a friend’s friend on a Greek Island, and in another remembers a cake given to Legge at a time of crisis. The time and place do not matter, really, the point is these are tales that recognise and celebrate food made with love, food that made each situation better, and Delicious is a series of these moments. Of course, along the way, we learn more about the formidable Legge’s life and that’s as interesting and insightful as the recipes featured at the end of each chapter.
(In excellent news, I have now made the carrot cake and I can attest to the power of Legge’s words.) Delicious is going to make you hungry. It will also make you remember the importance of shared meals – and how those memories count for everything good in life.
Reviewed by Chris Gordon.
Also noteworthy are:
Born to Flourish: How New Science and Ancient Wisdom Reveal a Simple Path to Thriving
Richard J. Davidson & Cortland Dahl
The human species is experiencing a massive mental health crisis. Depression is now the leading cause of morbidity globally. Loneliness is more dangerous to our health than smoking 15 cigarettes per day. Suicide rates in some parts of the world are skyrocketing and cut across social class and income. Distractibility and impairments of concentration are at an all-time high, and teens are spending more time on social media than they do sleeping.
Now, based on decades of neuroscientific research, Dr Richard Davidson, a pioneering neuroscientist and New York Times bestselling author, and Dr Cortland Dahl, one of the world's foremost experts on the science and practice of meditation, share their groundbreaking scientific model – the Healthy Minds Framework – that highlights the four core skills of human flourishing to counteract such problems.
Each skill – awareness, insight, connection, and purpose – translates into practices that all of us can do in simple ways, every day, with enormous positive results. When we cultivate these skills, we can navigate life's ups and downs with far more resilience and calmness, on a path to a life that feels balanced, rich, and rewarding.
Look After Your Feet: Some Keen Observations on the Unexpected Advantages and Indignities of Getting Older
Rosalie Ham
Rosalie Ham, the international bestselling author, burst onto the literary scene in 2000 with her novel The Dressmaker. After years of entertaining us with weird and wonderful older women characters adored by her readers, Rosalie now turns her trademark wit and shrewd observations to life itself.
Peppered with practical advice about all manner of things (cheese and wine for dinner is welcome and acceptable), Look After Your Feet is a brilliantly funny, painfully honest and insightful celebration of the wisdom that seems to accelerate as body parts deteriorate, and life falls into place*.
* Often just a little bit too late.
The Ruin of Magic: Longing and Belonging in Strange Times
Kate Holden
In The Ruin of Magic, award-winning writer Kate Holden joins Katherine May, Maggie Nelson and Andre Aciman in crafting essays of intimate personal experience and sharply informed rumination on life in strange times.
In gorgeous prose Holden meditates on her instinctive yearning for long-ago Europe versus the natural belonging she feels to the Australian landscape, and asks, What is a home? The strongest shelter or the most lethal trap, a museum of ourselves or a showcase of fashions? What, then, does it mean to make ourselves at home in an Australia still finding its way amidst old and avoided truths? Is nostalgia a reasonable mourning of timeless lore lost or a dangerous fantasy? And what has happened to magic and beauty in the glare of modern life?
Reading Rainer Maria Rilke, Patti Smith, Walter Benjamin and D.H. Lawrence, dreamers and philosophers and poets, pagan history and new criticism, Holden writes with humour and sorrow of all the ways life today warps us under its glare – and how to find a haven in the subtle shadows.
London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City, and a Family’s Search for Truth
Patrick Radden Keefe
In 2019, a London teenager, Zac Brettler, mysteriously fell to his death from a luxury apartment building on the banks of the Thames. When his grieving parents began their desperate quest to understand how their son had died, they made a terrible discovery: Zac had been leading a fantasy life, posing as the son of a wealthy Russian oligarch.
In his inimitably gripping and forensic prose, Baillie Gifford Prize winner and New Yorker writer Patrick Radden Keefe follows Zac's parents on a dark journey to find out what brought Zac to the balcony that night – and how a teenager's world of make-believe drew him into the city's terrifying underworld.
London Falling is at once a devastating family tragedy, a riveting story of greed, power and deception, and an indictment of the culture that has transformed London into a haven for the malignant forces that have come to influence us all.
Available from 14 April. Copies with signed bookplates are available to pre-order, while stock lasts!
Why We Garden: On the Joy and Wonder of Growing Things, Even When We Don’t Have To
Hannah Maloney
In a world of well-stocked supermarkets and florists, why do we garden, even though we don’t have to?
This was the question that fascinated Hannah Moloney. So she went out and asked. She spoke to politicians, artists, community leaders, activists and thousands of ordinary gardeners. This book explores their answers – sometimes surprising, often philosophical, always insightful. Much more than a gardening book, Why We Garden is a joyful, life-affirming exploration of nature, humanity and community.
Featuring interviews with Tim Winton, Bruce Pascoe, Laura Tingle, Clare Bowditch, Bob Brown, Costa Georgiadis and many more.
Journey to the End of Time: Writing and Memoir, Artists and Friends
Alex Miller
Robust, textured and fascinating, this collection of short stories, memoir, journal entries, essays and poems, Journey to the End of Time, spans decades of Alex Miller's life. The collection opens with a moving depiction of Miller's father leaving for war and closes with the final words of a poem written in 2023: when, eventually, after long labours the voice of the story falls silent and the work is laid aside, then I am alone once again, returned to the timeless solitude, the simplicity of my beginning
Each story is written in response to a significant event in Miller's life. His discerning writing engages with the works of prominent authors and artists, many of them longstanding friends, including Janine Burke, Jacob Rosenberg, Jim Davidson, Rick Amor, Sidney Nolan, John Wolseley and Emily Kame Kngwarreye, each of whom have deepened the richness of Australian cultural life.
Miller explores the process of writing and the sources of his inspiration, saying, 'From early childhood I had been a storyteller, but as an adult it took me a long time to find my material as a story writer.' Journey to the End of Time forms a companion volume to The Simplest Words and A Kind of Confession, the three volumes together constructing an intimate narrative of Alex Miller's life, writing works of quiet power and beauty. His wisdom and experience shine in this rewarding anthology.
Big Sky: When the Emu Left the Earth
Bruce Pascoe & Professor Ray Norris
Big Sky: When the Emu Left the Earth is an exquisite conversation of sky knowledge between Aboriginal farmer and award-winning writer Bruce Pascoe and astrophysicist Professor Ray Norris.
This meeting of science and philosophy, tempered by holistic knowledge gained from deep observation over a millennia offers a philosophy of peace for our age. It reframes astronomy not only as a science but as ethics and Law in our heavens. This dialogue places First Nations beliefs as rigorous, enduring knowledge, offering ecological and astronomical insights which could help navigate current climate threats.
For more new and engaging nonfiction, see our collection here.
