Our books of the month, August 2023
Explore our books of the month for August; each of the below titles has been read and recommended by our booksellers before being selected as our book of the month for its category.
FICTION BOOK OF THE MONTH
Firelight: Stories by John Morrissey
Reviewed by Ellie Dean, Readings Carlton
'Indeed, I would be happy to recommend this collection to any curious reader – regardless of their usual position as a speculative fiction lover or hater.'
John Morrissey’s debut collection of short stories is a beguiling, evocative delight. In it, he presents a series of visions that meld the absurd and mundane: a mysterious commonwealth celebrating their colonisation of the moon, the fraught efforts of a veterinary team trying to reconstruct a thylacine, and the gothic tale of a First Nations warrior seeking revenge on the white colonial explorer who murdered him.
Many of the tales seem to exist in a world both rigorously contained by and freely abstracted from realist conceptions of time and nature. Images of ancient spirituality and figures like the green man are untraditionally positioned right next to contexts of space travel and genetic modification, with startlingly effective results. Morrissey, who is of Kalkadoon descent, may be familiar to some readers, having been previously published in the Australian First Nations speculative fiction anthology This All Come Back Now early last year. While not all the stories in this new collection can be clearly classified as sci-fi, he has clear control over the genre’s motifs, and the imaginative and destabilising qualities of his individual take on them are shaping up to become a formidable trademark of his style.
Indeed, I would be happy to recommend this collection to any curious reader – regardless of their usual position as a speculative fiction lover or hater. There’s something about his confident, conversational writing style that allows Morrissey to encase very abnormal events in everyday settings in a way that feels completely believable – and to tackle some themes that might not be as far from reality as you think.
CRIME BOOK OF THE MONTH
Dark Corners by Megan Goldin
Reviewed by Kate McIntosh, manager of Readings Emporium
' Short, sharp chapters, every other one ending on a cliffhanger, were the real hook.'
Aspiring crime writers, read this book. If anyone can show you how to grab ahold of a reader and not let go, it’s Megan Goldin. It only took me eight pages to realise I wasn’t going to get anything else done until I finished this novel. Short, sharp chapters, every other one ending on a cliffhanger, were the real hook. Then add an intelligent, strong-willed and likeable main character, and a truly despicable bad guy, and you’ve got a cracker of a read.
Rachel Krall is a successful true crime podcaster. She has solved cold cases in the past and made quite the name for herself, to the point where she is curious, but not overly surprised, when the FBI ask her to fly to Daytona Beach, Florida, to visit a man in prison. She was mentioned in a conversation the prisoner, Terence Bailey, had with a visitor who has since disappeared. As Bailey is a suspect in several murders and due for imminent release, the Feds are desperate to find out more about his connection to the missing woman, a hugely popular social media influencer. Although Rachel doesn’t appear to achieve anything at the prison except a threat to her own life, and the FBI is keen for her to head home straightaway, she decides she is due for a holiday and stays on to do her own investigating. An ex-journalist would never walk away from a story like this.
As Rachel explores the shallow but extremely competitive world of content creators, Federal Agent Joe Martinez does his best to solve the case while keeping an eye on the renegade podcaster. Between the two of them, the killer is bound to be discovered eventually, and this is the only flaw in the story: there are no real surprises for the reader. I still loved it, and although I didn’t quite get through the whole book in one sitting, it was close.
NONFICTION BOOK OF THE MONTH
Art Monsters by Lauren Elkin
Reviewed by Joanna Di Mattia, Readings Carlton
'Art Monsters is a major work, thoroughly researched, beautifully executed, and frequently surprising.'
When I was an undergraduate in the early 1990s, I took a course in women’s art history that ran over multiple semesters and offered a historical survey. I encountered art made by Artemisia Gentileschi, Leonora Carrington, Alice Neel, Louise Bourgeois, and Carolee Schneemann, and writing from Linda Nochlin, bell hooks, Susan Sontag, and Laura Mulvey, all for the first time. My eyes were opened wide to the gaps in the history of art – and the world – that I had absorbed to this point. It’s not hyperbole to say this course reshaped my mind.
It was a pleasure, then, to revisit with older eyes some of this terrain in Lauren Elkin’s exploration of feminist art and the unruly women who have made it. Art Monsters – a phrase from Jenny Offill’s novel Dept. of Speculation – refers to women, defined by Elkin in the broadest sense of the word, who bust the boundaries of what are considered acceptable ways to behave and look. Art monsters reach for the truth of their own bodies, outside the patriarchal language that has traditionally defined, idealised and desired them.
Art Monsters is a major work, thoroughly researched, beautifully executed, and frequently surprising. Like so much of the boundary-busting art Elkin references, it is uncontainable and uncategorisable – part art history, part memoir, often conversing with the mechanics of its own creation, serious and searching. Written in fragments, it is concerned with aesthetics and affect, in opening up engagement and meaning, not closing it down in absolutes.
Conversations about feminist art, Elkin decides, have outgrown the declaration that the personal is political. This is now such a truism as to be almost meaningless. What Elkin prefers is art that surprises, providing an experience that is rooted in sensation, like life itself. Art is feminist not because of what it is but because of what it does – the political position it produces in the body of the viewer. A radical reminder of a radical way to engage with and think about women’s art, bodies and stories.
KIDS BOOK OF THE MONTH
Ghost Book by Remy Lai
Reviewed by Kim Gruschow, co-manager of Readings St Kilda
'There are great characters, a fantastic story and lots of humour, too'
The newest graphic novel by Remy Lai is about a girl named July, who can see ghosts. July keeps this to herself until hungry ghost month, when she begrudgingly befriends a little boy ghost after saving him from being eaten. July learns the boy isn’t exactly a ghost, but rather a wandering soul, and vows to help him. They join forces, and during a dumpling-studded adventure that leads them to the underworld, they learn that their lives, and perhaps deaths, are already intertwined.
I always enjoy Remy Lai’s books and while they are all hearty and unique, I think this one is her best and most accomplished yet. There are great characters, a fantastic story and lots of humour, too. The artwork is excellent, the book is full colour throughout, and it’s just the right amount of spooky for middle grade readers aged 9+. Highly recommended.
YOUNG ADULT BOOK OF THE MONTH
One Song by A.J. Betts
Reviewed by Angela Crocombe, senior buyer
'...this is a funny and insightful story about rock-god ambitions, misdirected romantic inclinations, and genuine teenage angst.'
Eva Sidebottom, a 17-year-old musician, wants more than anything to win the Triple J Unearthed High competition before she finishes high school. She’s entered plenty of times before, but this weekend is her very last chance. She assembles a motley band: along with her friend Cooper, who she has kissed a few times and still has a crush on, there’s a snarly girl who doesn’t seem to like her very much, and a drummer who’s in two other bands. They are meeting in Cooper’s granny flat at the back of his house to record and lay down their potentially award-winning song, which will rocket them to stardom – or so they hope. Fly-on-the-wall documentarian Mim films the recording and interviews each of the band members, capturing their chaotic process on video. When the snarly guitarist, Ruby, declares the song is ‘shit’ early on in the evening, the wheels start to fall off from there.
Set over one chaotic weekend, this is a funny and insightful story about rock-god ambitions, misdirected romantic inclinations, and genuine teenage angst. It captures the desperate need to achieve something before you finish high school, along with some truly memorable moments, including a laugh-out-loud episode with a dog stealing a used menstrual pad and racing around the garden with it.
Completely different from the author’s two previous dystopian novels, Hive and Rogue, this is a fresh, funny, and contemporary novel that will be adored by readers aged 14+.
YOUNG ADULT CLASSIC OF THE MONTH
The Life and Times of Gracie Faltrain by Cath Crowley
Reviewed by Lucie Dess, marketing and events coordinator
'Revisiting The Life and Times of Gracie Faltrain has cemented my view that Crowley is truly the queen of contemporary Australian fiction.'
Gracie is a soccer superstar, and she knows it. She never misses a goal and she’s on her way to get everything she’s ever wanted. The team is going to the national championships, her dream guy has started noticing her, and surely her dad will come home any day now. But for Gracie, winning is everything, even if it means never passing the ball and pissing off everyone around her. But she’s about to learn that winning isn’t everything, and it certainly won’t fix all her problems.
I first read this book in early high school and adored it. And rereading it, I easily fell back into Gracie’s world. The full-body cringing I first felt when reading Gracie’s first date came flooding back and I had to put the book down for a moment. Gracie is often an unlikeable character and very questionable in her behaviour. But she is also incredibly sweet, and I just wanted everything to work out for her.
In true Cath Crowley fashion, the book is written from multiple points of view, switching among characters, giving depth to the story. This is so much more than a book about a girl who loves soccer. It’s about relationships, of all kinds.
Revisiting The Life and Times of Gracie Faltrain has cemented my view that Crowley is truly the queen of contemporary Australian fiction. I highly recommend this book or anything else written by her.
CLASSICAL ALBUM OF THE MONTH
Music for a New Century by New Century Chamber Orchestra and Daniel Hope
Reviewed by Kate Rockstrom, friend of Readings
'I love an album where you hear the weight of the past 400 years of music in each work.'
I love an album where you hear the weight of the past 400 years of music in each work. This album has everything you’d expect from modern music: neoclassicism, minimalism, cinematic, atonality and more, to blend, contrast and plain show off some of the best composers working right now. Daniel Hope is the artistic director of the New Century Chamber Orchestra, who aggressively commission new repertoire from composers around the world. This album is an eclectic smorgasbord of those pieces with three world-premiere recordings celebrating the orchestra and its creative engagement with new music.
It starts with Philip Glass and his Piano Concerto No 3, which was composed in 2017 with Alexey Botvinov at the piano. The three movements are rooted in Glass’s minimalist style, with lashings of Arvo Pärt, and it is contemplative, without losing forward momentum. Which makes the transition into Tan Dun’s Double Concerto for violin, piano, strings and percussion even more jarring, but strangely invigorating. The angular first movement gives way to a sublime Misterioso, and throughout all the movements you can feel the influences of Dun’s Chinese musical heritage, along with his cinematic experience, through the use of percussion.
Meanwhile, Mark-Anthony Turnage is a British composer, working extensively throughout Europe as an opera, ballet and orchestral composer. His Lament for Solo Violin and Orchestra is an utterly modern work. Turnage wrote it for Daniel Hope, and says, ‘He is a player with a lot of heart and that’s what I tried to capture in the piece as a whole.’ There are moments of discordance, and others of beauty; Hope brings it all together with his singing sound. My favourite work on the album was the sweet Overture at the end by Jake Heggie. The strong opening chords are obviously rooted in the Copland tradition, and its joyful five minutes are a perfect way to end this album.