November's best new books, from Rosalie Ham's latest novel to a stranger-than-fiction memoir from Lech Blaine

As summer holidays steadily approach, the pile of bedside books you'll need to see you through isn't going to grow itself. 

Take note of these new releases our group of critics — The Bookshelf's Kate Evans, The Book Show's Sarah L'Estrange, ABC Arts' Katherine Smyrk and writer Declan Fry — have tucked into this month.

Including new Rosalie Ham fiction, stranger-than-fiction memoir from Lech Blaine, literary biography (who can get enough Didion?) from Lili Anolik and a deep dive into the boundary-pushing work of David Cronenberg by Violet Lucca, there's something here for everyone.

• The Position of Spoons and Other Intimacies by Deborah Levy
• Australian Gospel by Lech Blaine
• Time of the Child by Niall Williams
• The City and its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami
• The Thinning by Inga Simpson
• Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik 
• Molly by Rosalie Ham
• David Cronenberg: Clinical Trials by Violet Lucca 

Deborah Levy, The Position of Spoons and Other Intimacies

Hamish Hamilton

It's tempting to use up all 300 words allowed for this review by simply quoting first lines from each small, incisive chapter. 

What would you then have? An elegant prose poem with glimpses out to the stuff of everyday: 

"I fell in love with her before I read any of her books"/ "The purpose of language for Duras is to nail a catastrophe to the page"/ "I began to wonder why a particular middle-aged woman of my acquaintance had eyes that seemed to want to disappear into her head"/ "To stand in the centre of Russell Square Gardens, London, WC1, in the November rain is to summon all your losses in life".

You see?

English writer Deborah Levy creates both fiction — seven novels, including Swimming Home and Hot Milk — and non-fiction, especially her "living autobiography" series, Things I Don't Want to Know, The Cost of Living and Real Estate.

This new book is a series of essays on writing, art, observation, cities, daily life: an opening up of her mind and influences and observations. It's so beautifully done it's uplifting even when the subject is harsh, shocking or tenderly sad.

There is no introduction to this collection, no statement of intent or "way in". Instead, it's like being thrown back into a conversation with an especially clever, slightly intimidating friend you admire and really must keep up with.

And you do keep up, because you're invited in without being patronised or sneered at. Here, a reflection on the French writer Collette; there, a story about Levy's daughter's school bullying attacked sidewise, through a telegram sent to an electricity pylon.

This is writing to revel in, ideas to savour, insights to share — and all those first lines, to read aloud.

— Kate Evans

Lech Blaine, Australian Gospel

Black Inc Books

Australian Gospel opens with two pony-tailed men driving a gold Holden Commodore down the Bruce Highway on a "sunlit Monday afternoon".

Matched with its title, this almost cliched scene could have you thinking this is going to be a true-blue, everyday Aussie tale. But while it's true, it's also truly bizarre. The two men are on their way to kidnap a three-year-old boy.

Author Lech Blaine is the youngest child of Tom and Lenore Blaine, from regional Queensland. He is their biological child, but his five sisters and brothers are all permanent foster care placements, most of them coming to the Blaines at a very young age.

Three of them are the children of one of the kidnappers, a religious zealot named Michael Shelley who believes sport, alcohol, overeating, outspoken women and uneducated people are ruining the country. 

After his malnourished and love-starved children are removed from him, he becomes increasingly convinced "the system" is full of corrupt child abusers who are persecuting him for religious reasons, and becomes obsessed with seeking justice.

At times, particularly in the beginning, there is almost too much information. The plot moves on at a dizzying clip, but once you've wrapped your head around the origins of Tom, Lenore, Michael and his long-suffering, mentally ill wife Mary (born Carole), you are deeply invested in this strange tale.

Blaine wasn't born when a majority of the action occurred, but he understands the impacts it had on his family, and also conducted extensive interviews with community members, social workers and even beloved actor Jacki Weaver (you'll find out why).

And although he has an obvious bias towards the people he grew up with, these characters are fully drawn, often quite flawed people who you find yourself loving for their mistakes. Even the people who tormented the entire Blaine family, Michael and Mary Shelley, are rendered generously. Their early traumas and trials are sensitively told — not justifying their actions, but acknowledging the nuance of it all.

This story covers so many things: toxic masculinity, birth trauma, marginalisation, the broken foster care system, alcohol and drug abuse, mental health, disability, and the ways that poverty and isolation can force people into impossible circumstances. 

In parts, it's an indictment of the Australian gospel, and how good people are left behind in its wake.

But, ultimately, this is a surprisingly heartwarming story about love: how a lack of it can irreversibly derail someone's life but how, in turn, a life can be saved by it.

— Katherine Smyrk

Niall Williams, Time of the Child

Bloomsbury Publishing

Irish writer Niall Williams has created a town called Faha, and he keeps returning to it: in History of the Rain, in This is Happiness, and now in Time of the Child. This isn't to say he's created a trilogy or keeps leaving us with cliff hangers. Each novel stands alone — and besides, we're told at the beginning of this latest novel that the thing about Faha is that "nothing happened there".

But of course, everything happened there.

By Christmas, 1962, Faha was the sort of place with only a few TV sets and exactly 19 telephones. The book includes delicious detail and rich descriptions of characters that take you through the town's streets, pubs and back lanes, and in and out of remote farms and crofts.

There's enough acid to ensure that this is not fiddle-dee-dee mythologising of Auld Ireland. Because there's also despair and lost opportunities, poverty and drunken neglect, sickness and miscommunication, and a man — Doctor Jack Troy — who has lost his love for the world. His eldest daughter, Ronnie, is by his side: stoic, observant, settled.

Every action and person has its own back story and defining moments, and this could be enough.

But something happens. A baby is found, abandoned in a churchyard (of course), rescued and handed to the doctor and his daughter. 'We'll keep this a secret,' they decide. But it's 1962 in Ireland, so your stomach clenches in anticipation of what might happen next.

— Kate Evans

Haruki Murakami, The City and its Uncertain Walls

Penguin

What is up with Murakami? We know his tropes: jazz records, the endless pasta variations, the T-shirt collection (enviably large, one for almost every day of the year). And always lots of cats.

Yet who can explain the strange magic of his prose, languorously compelling, meditative without being sententious?

In the first part of his new novel, an unnamed narrator recalls his first love, a girl he met when he was 17 and she was 16. The girl tells him of a town where, "The real me lives"; she even informs our narrator that he can find her there, although she will neither recognise nor remember him.

Surrounded by a wall, the town is a kind of Hotel California: hard to get in, harder to leave. There is a role reserved for him there as a "Dream Reader". These dreams, we learn, are vaguely egg-shaped, an apparent call-back to Murakami's acceptance speech for the Jerusalem Prize in 2009. ("Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it," he said, addressing an audience in Israel, "I will always stand on the side of the egg.")

The narrator never again finds a successful relationship after his formative teenage one, and when he reaches the town, he is much older, while the girl he knew is still 16.

In the second part of the novel, the middle-aged narrator, unable to return to the walled town, quits his job at a book-distribution company to take up a position at a library in Fukushima run by an unusual man, Koyasu, and a cast of other strange characters.

The attempt to sound out things that are difficult to name colours the narrator's meditations. As in much of Murakami's writing, loneliness, the walls between people and wistfulness form a constant refrain, giving the text a melancholy undertow.

There is a meta aspect to the narrative, too: just as the narrator reflects on memories of his younger self, this novel, for Murakami, is an act of revisiting and working over the past. As he recounts in the book's afterword, its origins lie in a 1980 novella that "was never published as a book, either in Japan or in other countries". He continued to engage with the material, producing his fourth novel, 1985's Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World – and now, almost four decades later, this.

Reading Murakami in English remains an uncanny valley experience: the original Japanese heavily influenced by English phrasing and syntax. To date, all of Murakami's English translators have been from the US and have tended to render things in decidedly all-American English — and tailored to what foreign readers are presumed to prefer: the English translation of The City and its Uncertain Walls is shorter than the Japanese original, just like the English versions of both Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, each subject to an arbitrary word limit enforced by the books' English-language publishers.

This is not, it must be said, Murakami's strongest work, although it offers reminders of what makes his writing both charming and ineffable. Readers new to the author may be better off starting with books like Norwegian Wood or his brilliant, deeply moving account of the Aum Shinrikyo cult's Tokyo subway gas attacks, Underground.

— Declan Fry

Inga Simpson, The Thinning

Hachette

Inga Simpson is a noted Australian nature writer and novelist, whose books include Mr Wigg, Nest and Understory. Her novel Willowman took a lateral approach, focusing as it did on that summer sound of leather on willow, and the making of cricket bats (among other things).

In The Thinning, Simpson has expanded the idea of nature writing away from leaves and soil, and out into the universe. She, and her characters, look to the stars.

The story is set in a familiar but twisted future Australia, with an authoritarian state that tracks and controls its citizens, paying particular attention to fertility and women's bodies (a hugely dystopian scenario). Mining and other interests have looked to the moon and elsewhere, and the scientific work of places like Siding Springs Observatory in NSW's Warrumbungles is both crucial and highly political.

Fin, our young hero, grew up in a family of scientists — and now they're all in hiding. Her mother was a specialist photographer, able to read the shape of the darkness as well as the light, and she's taught Fin how to visualise the world and its threats. They, and others like them, are non-citizens now, living outside society.

Back in mainstream society, there's also a new form of humanity to contend with — the Incompletes — who are viewed with suspicion and fear. One of these new people, also young, also out of place, stumbles upon Fin and her people.

There's a quest, a sort of odd-couple alliance, heart-thumping action and — again and again — beautiful descriptions of the land on which we live, and the skies that surround us.

— Kate Evans

Lili Anolik, Didion & Babitz

Allen & Unwin

In Los Angeles, singer St Vincent informs us, mothers milk their young while sages burn the pages of unwritten memoirs.

This sentiment certainly applies to Lili Anolik's look at Eve Babitz and Joan Didion, two lodestars of the Los Angeles literary scene. Didion & Babitz is urgent, colourful, intelligent, passionate, amused.

Building on her previous study of Babitz — Hollywood's Eve, a book that helped rekindle interest in the author — Anolik describes hoping to perform "a kind of auto-exorcism" on her obsession. That doesn't happen; instead, an unsent letter from Babitz to Joan Didion — part j'accuse, all (very) backhanded flattery — leads Anolik to examine the dynamics driving each author.

Her account of Babitz's career isn't an escape-from-Kansas, Chappell-Roan-dancing-in-West-Hollywood saga, although it has elements of romantic ascent, beginning with a famous Marcel Duchamp photograph. With panache, humour and theatrical flourish, Anolik convincingly evokes Babitz's fascination — smart, slobby, slutty, shambolic, a scenester and a striver. She is the Charli XCX to Didion's cigarette-out-the-window-of-a-Corvette-Stingray "cool customer" (Coca-Cola presumably stashed somewhere in the glove compartment).

Didion & Babitz is often ridiculously entertaining: like high-grade gossip with a garrulous friend — not least of all when Bret Easton Ellis suggests Didion's husband of nearly 40 years, John Gregory Dunne, may have been gay. The evidence for this claim isn't much, to be sure — but sometimes the dangling of the possibility is all you really need.

Anolik's evaluation of Didion can be arrestingly dismissive; the author's 1968 breakthrough, Slouching Toward Bethlehem, is characterised as "old-fashioned Gothic tricked out in New Journalism clothing". The good people of Goodreads haven't taken kindly to this perspective, but, as Anolik acknowledges, a writer's artistry does not need to be garlanded with arse kissing and critical platitudes in order to be admired, or even beguiled by.

Arguably it's all part of the book's titillating approach, repeated in such scenes as a droll account of Harrison Ford told by a member of the Mamas and Papas, who, unaware Ford is an actor, sees him on screen during Star Wars and shouts: "That's my pot dealer!"

There's no success like failure, Bob Dylan sang, and both subjects inform Anolik's examination of the authors. Indeed, Didion became so inordinately famous during her final years that Céline came calling with modelling gigs, and celebrities — Reese Witherspoon, Harry Styles, Johnny Marr and more — were in attendance at her funeral.

And yet, like all great biographical subjects, both women retain their mysteries, their inexhaustibility: we will never reach the end of them.

— Declan Fry

Rosalie Ham, Molly

Pan Macmillan

Fans of The Dressmaker by Australian author Rosalie Ham rejoice! There's another instalment in the lives of the eccentric and outspoken Dunnage family. While the 2017 sequel, The Dressmaker's Secret, was a continuation of fashion designer Tilly Dunnage's story, Molly provides the backstory of Tilly's cantankerous mother.

The novel begins with the memorable line: "Molly Dunnage started 1914 with a stint in the city watch house." She landed there after attending an unruly women's suffrage protest in Melbourne, which was broken up by police who regard the suffragettes as "pests".

At this point in her life, Molly is 24 years old, with grand dreams of becoming a renowned seamstress and establishing her name in Paris. She won't sacrifice her belief in justice for these dreams however, and her opinionated nature often lands her in trouble with her neighbour (the fabulously named Mrs Sidebottom), her workplace (in a corset factory, aka sweatshop) and with the law.

Molly is a talented corset designer, dedicated to liberating women from the confines of restrictive underwear, but her career breakthrough continues to be thwarted by others' self-interest and greed. She has an indefatigable energy that is eventually worn down by prejudice, poverty and the looming First World War.

The period detail is beautifully brought to life, particularly the animosity between the suffragists aligned with the Women's Political Association, and the conservative Australian Women's National League, who advocated against women's political and economic advancement.

Ham is an astute observer of social class in Australia and the novel is spiked with humorous observations and creatively named characters — such as love-interest Hurtle Rosencrantz, and villains Norbert Poke and Clive Woodgrip.

Read this book to understand how our conscientious and energetic Molly became stuck in the fictional town of Dungatar, where she transformed into the "mad Molly" we met in The Dressmaker. Ham says it will be the last time she revisits the Dunnage family in fiction, but these distinctive characters will live on in your imagination.

— Sarah L'Estrange

Violet Lucca, David Cronenberg: Clinical Trials

Abrams

Back in the days when films were a cultural event — touchstones whose incidental dialogue could become part of household conversation — I remember hearing a phrase: "Be afraid, be very afraid!". Although I did not know it at the time, it is actually the tagline from one of director David Cronenberg's most famous films, 1986's The Fly.

Despite a long and successful career, there are relatively few books devoted to Cronenberg's work. What makes this more unusual is how literary much of Cronenberg's output is: adaptations and reimaginings of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, William S. Burroughs, Don DeLillo, JG Ballard, and Stephen King, among others. (An aspiring writer since he was young, Cronenberg has also published a novel.)

Lucca's approach is illuminating: put Cronenberg on the psychoanalyst's couch to analyse his films with Jung, the psychiatrist renowned for his ideas about archetypes and the collective unconscious.

She sees in Cronenberg's filmography a riposte to the fascism of the present, especially in how it offers a critique of our neglect toward the vulnerable and our fascination with waste and spectacle.

The psychological nuances of Cronenberg's body of work inform the book's structure. The first part, Individuation, examines how Cronenberg formed his directorial persona, while the second half, Psychotherapy, conceptually links the films to the different stages a patient progresses through in Jungian therapy.

We are reminded that Cronenberg began working during a period when video cassettes and pop music were seen as harbouring satanic powers, video nasty hysteria consigning anything but the blandest, John-Hughes-approved sentimentalism to the status of guilty until proven innocent.

This is an inventive, insightful study. Like so much good criticism, it makes you want to go back and visit the original work. Whether it's Viggo Mortensen's performances in films like A History of Violence and Eastern Promises; Jeremy Irons co-starring with himself in Dead Ringers; or the cult classic Videodrome's prescient examination of media and technology, Cronenberg has finally received the therapeutic treatment his remarkable filmography deserves.

Be afraid, be very afraid — Lucca's book is fearfully good.

— Declan Fry

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