By Jason Steger
September releases include new books from Ian McEwan, Jane Harper, Maggie O’Farrell, Sophie Cunningham and Nick Cave & Sean O’Hagan.
September brings spring and also – yes, it’s true – the start of the Christmas books season, when booksellers do a large and vital chunk of their annual business.
From now until December, there will be a steady flow of books of all sorts – children’s, cooking, fiction, histories, biographies, memoir – packing the shelves.
It’s books bonanza for a few months.
The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from books editor Jason Steger. Get it delivered every Friday.
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Lessons, Ian McEwan
Jonathan Cape, $32.99, September 15
Lessons has one of those classic Ian McEwan openings – perhaps not as dramatic as in Enduring Love or The Child in Time – with Roland, the teenage hero, whom we then follow over many decades, being seduced by an older woman, his piano teacher. As our impending review says, “it’s impossible not to admire a writer of McEwan’s reputation who is always risking a new adventure”.
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This Devastating Fever, Sophie Cunningham
Ultimo Press, $32.99, September 7
This ambitious third novel took environmentalist and former publisher Sophie Cunningham 16 years to complete and brings together such disparate subjects as colonialism, Leonard Woolf – husband of Virginia – and the Bloomsbury circle, and through the figure of a novelist writing about Woolf today, the various problems facing our world. It’s a deft, original novel that is clearly going to prompt many conversations.
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Faith, Hope and Carnage, Nick Cave and Sean O’Hagan
Text, $45, September 20
How much is there left to know about Nick Cave? Quite a lot if we go by the pre-publicity for this book produced from hours of conversation between the deep-thinking musician and his old friend, British journalist Sean O’Hagan. It focuses on Cave’s inner life in the six years since the death of his son Arthur and was sparked by lockdown and his ongoing dialogue with fans through his Red Hand Files.
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The Marriage Portrait, Maggie O’Farrell
Tinder Press, $32.99, August 30
How do you follow up a commercial and critical success like Hamnet? Maggie O’Farrell has turned to the Italian Renaissance with the story of Lucrezia de Medicia, who was only 13 when she was married off to Alfonso, Duke of Ferrara, who was twice her age. The historical record is not clear, but the suggestion is that he killed her. O’Farrell brings Lucrezia brilliantly back to life in 16th-century Florence.
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The Settlement, Jock Serong
Text, $32.99, August 30
This is the third of Jock Serong’s historical novels set around the Furneaux Islands. As our forthcoming review puts it, Preservation and The Burning Island were “quite historical novels, but dwarfed in ambition by this devastating work”. The settlement is Wybelenna on Flinders Island where George Augustus Robinson corralled Tasmanian Indigenous people, and Serong reimagines the misbegotten project in gripping fashion.
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Exiles, Jane Harper
Macmillan, $32.99, September 20
The bestselling author of The Dry brings her AFP detective Aaron Falk back for what she says is going to be his final appearance. Visiting friends in small-town South Australia, Falk is intrigued by the mysterious disappearance of a local woman and mother of a newborn, and an earlier fatal hit-and-run. As with her previous books, you’ll find yourself immediately hooked by the plot and characters.
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Charlie’s Good Tonight, Paul Sexton
HarperCollins, $34.99, September 21
When Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts died last year, the tributes were legion and heartfelt. He was such a contrast to the rest of the band and you wonder whether they would have survived as long without his steady, brilliant influence. Paul Sexton’s title comes from that line of Jagger’s – “Charlie’s good tonight, ineee?” – caught on Little Queenie on the 1969 live album Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out!
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Emperors in Lilliput, Jim Davidson
Miegunyah Press, $59.99, September 20
Meanjin and Overland remain beacons in the literary landscape. Historian, biographer and the second editor of Meanjin, Jim Davidson, looks at the two men who founded the magazines, Clem Christesen and Stephen Murray-Smith respectively, and how both steered the magazines for 34 years through the sometimes stormy waters of the times, while nurturing writers and thinkers alike.
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The Story of Art Without Men, Katy Hessel
Hutchinson Heinemann, $55, August 30
The title tells it all. Here are the female artists who have traditionally been ignored in the histories written by men. This comprehensive survey by art historian Katy Hessel restores and revives the reputation of the artists and makes them the focus. As our review puts it, “it’s a vast revisionist history of women’s art making, but it’s also a history of how women – against all the insurmountable odds – managed to make art”.
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Wildflowers, Peggy Frew
Allen & Unwin, $32.99, August 30
This is the story of three sisters – Meg, Nina and Amber – whom we meet as children and then in later, more stressful times after the youngest (the golden child long tipped for the brightest of lives) has slipped into the grip of addiction. In Miles Franklin shortlisted author Peggy Frew’s fourth novel, Meg and Nina prompt a sororal intervention. But can a spell in Queensland help the sisters save Amber and resolve their own issues?
The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from books editor Jason Steger. Get it delivered every Friday.
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