The selected books for February offer a rich and captivating variety. They range from a queer love story filled with keen observations of life to a work blending fiction and memoir that explores love and pain, and even a story about a protagonist convinced they are being hunted by a sniper. Among these works are masterpieces by Nobel laureates and debut attempts by new writers.
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03-03, 2025One writer discovers her father may have been a secret agent, while another explores the end of grief. ABC Arts reviewers bring you these wonderfully diverse works in this month's reading recommendations.
Black Woods Blue Sky by Eowyn Ivey
Eowyn Ivey says that the young character Emmaline in the novel is her most autobiographical character. Take a close look at the cover of Alaskan author Eowyn Ivey's latest novel, and you'll find magic hidden within. The illustration depicts a dense, dark forest, with a bear standing beneath the trees—a bear with a human shadow.
This bear-man is named Arthur, and he is quiet, reclusive, and periodically transforms into a bear, roaming the Alaskan forests. Bertie, a single mother and waitress, falls in love with Arthur, unaware of his secret. It sounds absurd, but in Ivey's skillful hands, this strange premise works. The author (whose previous novel, The Snow Child, also introduced similar fantastical concepts) grounds the story in reality: Bertie is a flawed young mother who drinks and longs for a simpler life closer to nature. In Arthur, she finds genuine connection and a chance for change.
Bertie's six-year-old daughter, Emmaline, is vividly portrayed—it is Emmaline who discovers Arthur's secret and realizes the real danger facing her mother and her. This sense of danger permeates the novel from the first page. Whether it's to appreciate the magnificent Alaskan scenery, or for the touching mother-daughter story, or to experience the magic within, be sure to read this book. – Claire Nichols
Memorial Days: A memoir by Geraldine Brooks
Geraldine Brooks is the 2006 Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction, author of six novels and three non-fiction works. In May 2019, Geraldine Brooks received a devastating phone call. Her husband, fellow writer Tony Horwitz, had died in the street—far from home, unexpectedly passing away while on a book tour. Brooks was struck by grief and shock, and of course, by the cold manner in which she was informed of his death. The doctor who called her was detached and tired, without pausing, and the system that handled his remains lacked compassion.
In the days that followed, she had to take action, notify their children, tell people, rush onto a ferry to leave the island where they lived, and then board a plane into a world of bureaucracy, organization, and information. All of it was brutal, all of it was difficult, but she persevered and completed it all.
She was also finishing her sixth novel, Horse, and then traveled the world promoting it, and she did it all with grace and reflection. But one thing she couldn't do on the tour was talk about her husband. It was a private, painful grief. Three years after his death, she realized she needed to return to that terrible day and try to understand what had happened, both to him and to her. To do this, she took herself to an island off the coast of Tasmania, a place filled with colonial heartbreak and pain, seeking solitude and space for memory—to tell a love story, to paint a portrait, not only of the man she married but of what they were like together: an Australian and an American, navigating the world and their own cultural differences; two foreign correspondents interested in world events; two writers who read each other's work and supported each other's ideas.
This book is the result: it is more than just an elegy, it is something else. An exploration and reflection on grief; a portrait of love; a steadfast facing of the most difficult week. It speaks of mourning and memory, but it is not mournful. There is joy in it, as well as sorrow. – Kate Evans
Disappoint Me by Nicola Dinan
Disappoint Me is Dinan's second work, her debut novel Bellies was published in 2023. Disappoint Me is filled with beautifully crafted, flawed, yet very real characters. The story tells of the love between Max, a poet and lawyer, and Vincent, a British-Chinese corporate lawyer. Max pretends to be an AI legal assistant robot for a tech company by day, while Vincent finds joy in baking and playing the clarinet.
Max is an unusual love object because she doesn't seem very interested in love. As she says in a detached and dry tone, "I've lost a lot of friends in the last few years to succumbing to heteronormativity. Even queer friends." Max believes that Vincent's life, friends, and even their relationship, are almost all alienated manifestations of heteronormative norms. As a transgender woman, she feels like an outsider, and Vincent is her only ticket in. Nevertheless, Max and Vincent easily fall into a state of harmony and intimacy, seeking solace in the certainty of love rather than pursuing the thrill of passion.
The story employs a dual timeline, one being their burgeoning romance in the present, and the other being Vincent's gap year in Thailand in 2012. A painful story about toxic masculinity unfolds there, one that Vincent wants to hide from Max at all costs. Dinan's writing is unadorned and delicate, interspersed with astute commentary on race, privilege, money, femininity, and transgender identity, amidst a profound understanding of love and regret. Disappoint Me is a compelling and sharp queer love story that is more important now than ever. – Rosie O'Fori-Ward
Small Rain by Garth Greenwell
Greenwell also writes reviews for The New Yorker and The Atlantic. If America ever has free—or even affordable—healthcare, many writers will lose plots. Literally: the plot of the script, where characters hustle, rob, or cheat to pay bills, will disappear; the plot of the novel, where someone puts off going to the emergency room because their "insurance" might not cover treatment, will also cease to exist. It will all vanish.
Instead, in Garth Greenwell's latest novel, Small Rain, an unnamed narrator in his forties (a poet) is struck down by sudden, inexplicable pain. It's a pain that doesn't follow any conventional standards, and he refuses to go to the hospital for five days. His Spanish partner, a man known as L (also a poet), is bewildered by this. The narrator turns his face away, looks inward, gasps, and tries to understand it through words, memories, and stories.
Eventually, he does go to the hospital and discovers that he may indeed have died. He is too young, too loved, too talented to die this way. He observes the people and systems and hierarchies around him with beautiful acuity—those small acts of kindness, and the callous cruelty; the fear that is deeply rooted not only in the hospital but also in a world suddenly facing the coronavirus; and the frustration and fear brought on by a newly unknown and unreliable body. This is a book that begins with physical pain but travels through personal history and sex, family stories and brutality, art and poetry, romance and home renovation.
It is also a book that plays with memoir and autofiction: it reads like "real life" but is labeled as fiction. It shares details with Greenwell's own life and the lives he created in earlier books (Cleanness, What Belongs to You). Surprisingly, it also shares a revealing moment about body shame and reflection with an Australian poet—wait, isn't that X?—whose name isn't mentioned until you read the acknowledgments. So keep reading, read it all. – Kate Evans
We Do Not Part by Han Kang, translated by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris
Han Kang's most famous novels include The Vegetarian (2015) and Greek Lessons (2023). Han Kang is the first Asian woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature—and one of the youngest winners. Her latest novel explores the direct impact of state-sanctioned violence on her parents' generation of Koreans.
Kyongha can barely sleep or eat. Her pain isolates her from the world. The line between nightmares and reality begins to blur. She feels anxious. Everywhere she looks, bodies are fragile, filled with the breath of death. She doesn't tell anyone about the hallucinations she's experiencing. She's afraid they won't believe her. Even the autumn trees, with their bare bark, look like "flayed, grayish-white flesh." She spends most of her time writing "a farewell letter to everyone." Walking to the writing room, she imagines a sniper on the roof, gun at the ready.
Gradually, we learn that the manuscript she is working on is related to a real historical event. Beginning in late 1948, the South Korean government suppressed a leftist rebellion on Jeju Island, a volcanic island off the southern coast of Korea. Homes and lives were destroyed. Official estimates vary, but American allies were told that the military and police killed about one-fifth of the island's population, or about 60,000 people. An unexpected message from a former colleague, Insun, pulls Kyongha out of her isolation. Insun's parents were both survivors of the rebellion. After returning to the village to rebuild their home, her parents kept the violence a secret for the rest of their lives. When Insun has a logging accident, she asks Kyongha to come to her house to care for the two parakeets left there. Kyongha's visit uncovers secrets—and helps her begin to understand the pain she has been experiencing.
Imagine a painting with stark outlines, gradually filled in with color. This is how Han Kang writes. Like the snow beautifully described in the book, this is a simple and unforgettable novel. We Do Not Part tells the story of how we must wait for years, even a lifetime, to hear the stories of those who have waited a lifetime to find the words to express themselves. – Declan Fry
Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis
Younis is an expert on Iraqi issues with a doctorate in international affairs. You might think that a novel about de-radicalizing ISIS brides would be serious or somber. However, Nussaibah Younis's debut novel, Fundamentally, is silly, funny, and extremely irreverent, turning a difficult topic into a light read.
The protagonist, Nadia, is having a breakdown in London. Her girlfriend has left her, her mother tells her she's going to hell at the end of every conversation, and her relationship with religion has fractured. Nadia makes the somewhat rash decision to move to Baghdad to run a controversial (and not particularly evidence-based) UN de-radicalization organization—aptly named UNDO. As an expert in the field, Younis is perfectly positioned to satirize the absurdities of humanitarian work and UN bureaucracy. We meet Pierre, a son of a French Tom who is the head of security, a quintessential jock; and "Sheikh Jason," who prefers to "draw energy from crystals" rather than Islamic doctrine.
Nadia is overwhelmed. When she meets Sara, one of the women she's responsible for transforming, she's smitten. Sara, an outspoken and brash East Londoner, reminds Nadia of herself, forcing her to question her intentions at UNDO and whether she is simply, as Sara puts it, "a saviour complex having slag." With a funny and conversational writing style, Younis honestly depicts how difficult it is to find the moral "right" in the gray areas of conflict. – Rosie O'Fori-Ward
Bill's Secrets: Class, War and Ambition by Belinda Probert
In her family memoir, Probert attempts to understand how Roy from Wales became Bill from Kent. When Belinda Probert was growing up, her father never shared stories about his childhood. He had attended King's College London and served in World War II—but Probert knew little about it. Her father lived in the present, traveling the world as an executive for a multinational corporation and pursuing his passion for luxury cars and fly fishing in his spare time. He would sometimes erupt in anger when drunk, but at other times, he was a loving husband and father.
For Probert—a social scientist born in England but who moved to Australia in 1976—it never struck her as strange that her father didn't talk about his past. "We probably thought his silence meant Bill didn't have any particularly interesting stories to tell," she writes in her latest book. It wasn't until a letter arrived four months after Bill's death in 1994, revealing that he was born into a large mining family in Wales and went missing at the end of World War II, that she learned how wrong that assumption was. This was a shocking revelation for Bill's heartbroken widow, Janet, and his three children, who knew nothing about his Welsh heritage, especially considering his fluent English accent.
Nearly 30 years later, Probert embarked on a mission to uncover the truth about her father. As she painstakingly pieced together his secret past, she saw Bill in a new light: as the son of Welsh coal miners, a star student who became a brilliant linguist, a war hero, and perhaps even a spy. In the search for answers, Probert takes the reader on a journey, documenting her amateur detective work and the obstacles she encountered. Because this is real life, there is no neat ending. Most of the main characters in the story have already passed away, meaning they can never answer questions about the past. Bill's family will also never be able to ask him why he kept his identity hidden for so long. After investigating her father's fascinating life, Probert is left with more questions than answers—perhaps the most important question being, how well can we really know our parents? – Nicola Heath
The Use of Photography by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie, translated by Alison L. Strayer
Ernaux's love story during cancer treatment was serialized in The New Yorker. French writer Annie Ernaux is another Nobel Prize winner, known for her exhilarating examinations of sex and relationships, much of which is semi-autobiographical. Her latest work is a bit different: it's a memoir in collaboration with photojournalist Marc Marie, with whom she had an intense relationship in 2003. The book intersperses 14 photographs taken during their relationship, presented with meditations from each lover, detailing the emotional arc of their brief but powerful love.
Ernaux poses a question that may lie at the heart of all past relationships: What did it all mean? During the affair, Ernaux was undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer. The body becomes undeniable. She describes the photographs in ways that make them tactile, organic. She says they are like "bloodstains, sperm and urine on sheets, or old mattresses discarded on the sidewalk [...] wine or food stains embedded in the wood of a sideboard, coffee or greasy finger stains on old letters—the most material and organic stains."
Ernaux sees the apparent stillness and solidity of each photograph as an invitation to reflect on the hidden movements and life changes they secretly depict: a pair of boots far apart on the floor reflecting "the force with which they were thrown off" before making love; a pile of manuscript notes scattered along a desk line reminding her that passion made her temporarily forget her cancer. The Use of Photography poses a challenge: if we cannot understand love and death, how at least should we think about them? Few acts, especially brief ones, bring the present into focus like falling in love. – Declan Fry
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