Welcome to ABC Arts' monthly book column, a curated shortlist of new releases read and recommended by Kate Evans from The Bookshelf, Claire Nichols from The Book Show, Nicola Heath from ABC Arts, and critics Declan Fry and Rosie Ofori Ward.
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04-01, 2025These five critics are voracious readers, and their sole criterion for recommending books is simple: they must be newly released and, in their opinion, exceptionally good. This month's selections include the latest work from Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah, a brilliant Irish author's homage to *Heart of Darkness*, and a gripping psychological mystery by Australian author Diana Reid. At just 29 years old, Diana Reid has already published her third novel and is being hailed as a literary superstar in the vein of Sally Rooney.
Diana Reid's *See What You Made Me Do* tells the story of Arnika, who senses an unseen presence in a chalet during a holiday in France. She hears an unfamiliar voice - is it her precocious younger sister Skye? Or Rupert, the roguish, lecherous crime novelist? Or perhaps Cas, their family friend, who later suffers inexplicable seizures? *See What You Made Me Do* blends elements of psychological mystery, filled with twists and red herrings. Absent parents, queer patriarchs, and a sense of drama and playfulness give the novel a country house murder feel, like a mashup of Italian *giallo* and an E.M. Forsterian comedy of manners. Reid has stated that she drew inspiration for the novel from certain tropes and clichés surrounding "trauma" narratives. Her book revels in the drama of characters attempting to understand each other while avoiding confrontation.
Colum McCann's *American Mother* focuses on the internet, the great "connector". McCann explores this amorphous, chaotic thing by examining the hardware, the cables themselves that span the earth and, especially, the seabed. He anchors the story with a mysterious sea captain and free diver, John A. Conway, and an admirer eager to tell his story, the nearly washed-up journalist Anthony Fennell. Structurally, he is also heavily echoing Joseph Conrad's *Heart of Darkness* – a narrator, telling the story of a charismatic and missing figure; a story about Africa and colonialism – and veering into *Apocalypse Now*. Conway works on trawlers that track down and repair breaks in the transmission cables, a practice that seems to be a mix of magic, divination, luck, and technical precision. Fennell, as a feature writer, finds himself joining this journey, along the coast of Africa, in a closed-ship community, looking for a big break. The story is told in a retrospective way, with lots of side roads about stories, speculation, history, and even bullshit, as something dramatic has happened to Conway, something that might be revealed or resolved in the telling. It's a story about breakage and repair, big men and mysteries, grand ideas, and a narrator captivated by the ideas of the person he is observing—and we, in turn, can be captivated by the writing itself.
Luke Horton's *The Loneliness of the Time Traveller* is an astute observation of character. Set on another holiday, Horton's latest novel, *The Loneliness of the Time Traveller*, is a deft exploration of midlife crisis – parenting, navigating relationships, losing parents, and reconciling the person you were with the person you are. Phil has holed himself up in his parents' beach house, overlooking a eucalyptus-covered headland that stretches into the nearby bay. In mourning for his mother, who died six months earlier, and self-medicating with her leftover morphine, he invites some old friends to visit, hoping they can pull him out of his depression. They all live in the city, but their busy lives mean they never see each other, and it takes Phil's blanket invitation to bring them together. Bella and Tim, along with their two children – the sullen 12-year-old Millie and the sunny 9-year-old Paul – are the first to arrive. As their car pulls up, breaking his solitude, Phil wonders if he's made a terrible mistake. The others arrive the next day: Joe, Lucas, three-year-old Maisie, and the single Anne. The narrative shifts fluidly between these four characters – Phil, Bella, Tim, and Anne – we see what they see, and, importantly, what they miss. Each character is weighing up who they were with who they are now, and Horton captures both the joys and regrets that come with their choices, such as Bella's ambivalence towards motherhood.
Charlotte McConaghy's *Once There Were Wolves* is set on a fictional island, Hillwater, that closely resembles the real Macquarie Island. Dom and his three children have been the island's caretakers for the past eight years, but they've been told their time is up. Hillwater is no longer safe due to rising sea levels. The family has one important job to complete before they leave – packing and shipping seeds from a massive vault designed to protect the world's plants in the event of environmental catastrophe. The arrival of a mysterious woman, Rowan, throws everything into disarray. She feigns ignorance, but it's clear she knows more about Hillwater than she lets on. Her suspicions about the family are also high: no one can explain why the island's communications are down or who owns the graves on the hill. This is a suspenseful novel, a compelling thriller, an ode to the natural world, and a celebration of family – all wrapped up in one delicious package.
Natasha Radojčić's *The Mother Fault* tells the story of two timelines. Readers follow Indu and Vijesh as they leave India in 1990 in search of a better life for their children, and Archana in 2022, their eldest daughter, at her farmhouse in the Blue Mountains, where she's trying to escape her friends, her family, and, often, her emotions. Archana is a queer Indian woman who desperately wants to be neither, and she is full of internalized homophobia and racism. She instinctively pushes people away, afraid of what they might see in her. However, when she receives a call from a concerned neighbor, she realizes she might have to let her father back into her life. Radojčić makes clear, sometimes with an overly didactic tone, how the effects of racism can reverberate differently within families. In Archana's father, Vijesh, it manifests as a need for power. When he loses control over his environment and is diminished by those who refuse to see his worth, he tries to reclaim his power through his relationships with his children. Although Archana is justifiably angry and hurt, Indu and Vijesh are portrayed as compassionate and generous people. By understanding their different perspectives, readers can see how individual pain and misunderstanding can lead to resentment within families.
In Abdulrazak Gurnah's *Afterlives*, what exactly has been stolen? Everything has been stolen, from the future to the nation, from names to groceries, from money to reputation, from happiness to hope and love. And what hasn't been stolen? The same list, because the accusation of theft is not the same as the truth of theft, and hopeful postcolonial futures resist all these stolen histories. Gurnah, a British writer, left Tanzania at the age of 18, after the Zanzibar Revolution in 1964. Since then, he has written essays, short stories, and novels, and is a scholar of literary studies. He won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature for his compassionate imagination of the lives of refugees. That compassion shines through in *Afterlives*, in the intimate and careful way he shapes his characters – with sympathy, but without sentimentality. The novel focuses on the 90s but looks back to the 60s and the period of great change in Tanzania, when the Sultanate of Zanzibar and the state of Tanganyika were overthrown, dissolved, and rebuilt. It does this through the lives of three young people – Karim, Fauzia, and Badal – and their families. Karim is middle class, fortunate, outgoing. Fauzia is clever, bookish, defined in part by the epilepsy she suffered as a child. Badal is poor, oppressed, sold into a kind of indentured servitude, but also clever, alert, warm. These characters are so well drawn, so compellingly complex, that you ache for them. The lives of these three intertwine, but Badal – initially bewildered by the world and the decisions being made for him – becomes the mainstay of the story. He leads us through family secrets and hidden histories, through kitchens and gardens, through hotels and relationships, with a mix of sweetness and sorrow that is both emotionally and intellectually satisfying.
Laura McHugh sets her debut novel, *The Wolf Den*, in one of the most remote places in the world: a small island called Eileen Dearie, a scrap of land surrounded by the frigid North Atlantic, located in Scotland's Outer Hebrides. As an armchair tour, the novel is a great success. McHugh evokes the desolate, windswept landscape with great skill; the icy weather is so biting that frost practically covers the pages. The story begins with Detective Inspector Georgina Lennox and Richard Stewart aboard a police launch on choppy seas, heading to the island to investigate the death of 18-year-old Alan Ferguson, a local boy who fell to his death from the island's lighthouse. It is unclear whether the death was the result of a crime. The investigation is more of a formality, a way to engage with an isolated community, than a high-speed pursuit. The brusque Lennox – or Georgie, as she is known – is also dealing with debilitating chronic pain caused by a traumatic event, the details of which are slowly revealed throughout the book. It is clear that Georgie's superiors see the Ferguson case as a good way to get her back into active duty – and to test whether she is still up to the job. The residents of Eileen Dearie – 206 in total – are wary of visitors. As one islander says: "We have long been ignored by the mainland when we have called for help, so we have learned to rely on each other." They are also a devout bunch. Father Ross presides over the island's only Roman Catholic church, and his influence becomes apparent when he turns up uninvited to many of the police interviews. But the story takes a supernatural turn when a masked figure appears at the window of the Nicholson farmhouse, where Georgie and Richie are staying. Locals talk of fairies and other mythical creatures in the woods, and, quite implausibly, Georgie hears wolves howling at night. In this closed environment, secrets thrive, fueled by a toxic mix of extreme isolation, religion, and centuries of superstition. What all this has to do with the premature death of Alan Ferguson will keep you turning the pages until the dramatic conclusion.
Laila Lalami's *Conditional Citizens* poses a thought-provoking question: what if your dreams could imprison you? That's the situation our protagonist, Sara, finds herself in in Laila Lalami's frighteningly plausible novel. Sara lives in a near-future America where people are detained for crimes they haven't yet committed, much like in the film *Minority Report*. In a world ruled by Big Tech, an algorithm determines who poses a risk to society. The code analyzes people's habits, financial records, social media interactions, and (for those who have downloaded a new type of sleep-aid app) even their dreams. Sara, a museum archivist and mother of two young children, sees her life begin to unravel after she is arrested at airport security: her risk score is deemed too high. She ends up in a "detention" center – in other words, a prison – initially told she will be there for 21 days. When we meet her, she has been incarcerated for nearly a year. While the setting is science fiction, the realities of prison life feel all too real. Sara and her fellow inmates suffer countless indignities, and the system – which profits from the women's labor – is designed to keep them in, not let them out. If you're anything like me, you'll find yourself clenching your fists in anger.
Madeleine Watts' *The Inland Sea* tells the story of Eloise and Lewis Levine, a white couple living in New York, on a road trip through the American Southwest, in Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and California. They see a country where water resources are depleted, the ocean is polluted by agricultural runoff, and wildfires are raging everywhere. Lewis, referred to throughout the book as "you," is mourning the death of his mother, Linda, from cancer. He is creating a conceptual art piece in the Arizona desert while grappling with a grief that Eloise, who is writing a dissertation on the Colorado River, cannot fully alleviate. They sometimes watch films by Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni together. Like an Antonioni character, Eloise, an expatriate from Sydney, often feels alone. Lewis's family is one she sometimes struggles to connect with. In a plot twist that also feels like it could be from an Italian director's film, Lewis eventually disappears and never returns. Watts' prose is patient, gradually revealing the layers of Lewis and Eloise's relationship. The elegy in the title alludes to many disappearances: Lewis's mother; Eloise's relationship with Lewis; the scorched, barren landscapes they travel through; a miscarriage. As the edges of Lewis and Eloise's love and their life together fade, they become more tangible – objects caught for a moment in the rearview mirror before vanishing. Accompanying press materials suggest Fleetwood Mac's *Rumours* as a point of reference for this novel, but I found myself recalling another mournful song about endings: Phoebe Bridgers' *I Know the End*, which tells a painful yet yearning road trip story, like a cry in a desolate landscape. This is a deeply lonely novel. Moving between intimate conversations in the past and present, it gradually builds to a devastating, profoundly poignant conclusion.
