Hooked
Asako Yuzuki
Translated by Polly Barton
RRP $16.99 | HarperCollins
Eriko’s life appears perfect – devoted parents, pristine apartment and a high-flying job in the seafood division of one of Japan’s largest trading companies. Her latest project, to reintroduce the controversial Nile perch fish into the Japanese market, is characteristically ambitious. But beneath her flawless surface she is racked by loneliness.
Eriko becomes fascinated with a popular blog written by a housewife, Shōko. Shōko’s posts about convenience-store food and her messy home are the opposite of the typical manicured housewife. When Eriko tracks Shōko down at her favourite restaurant, Shōko is at first charmed by her new companion. But soon Eriko’s obsession with Shōko begins to spiral out of control. How far will she go to hold on to the best friend she’s ever had?
Scared Angry Laughing
Margaret Merrilees
RRP $32.99 | Pink Shorts Press
A joyously unruly collection of essays about civil dissent, saving the planet and losing your hearing, Scared Angry Laughing is a book for imperfect protesters and eternal optimists, young and old.
Pearls
Tracy Crisp
RRP $32.99 | Pink Shorts Press
Grief, ambition and dropped stitches combine in Pearls by Tracy Crisp, a moving and memorable meditation on our many possible lives, for anyone who has ever thought maybe they were meant to be someone else.
My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein
Deborah Levy
RRP $42.99 | Penguin
Avant-garde poet, art collector, queer icon, friend to Picasso and Hemingway, self-declared genius, Gertrude Stein has baffled readers and critics for a century.
In Deborah Levy’s new novel, a narrator arrives in Paris to find out why she still matters.
There she meets Eva, an artist in a long-distance marriage, and Fanny, a sexually adventurous financier. Together they cook, walk, read and argue late into the night, and think about anxiety, desire, angry fathers, making new lives, art and language, and what it costs to become modern.
I Eat the Stars
Sarah Wilson
RRP $36.99 | Penguin
From New York Times bestselling author Sarah Wilson comes a guide to living with meaning and joy in a world that feels like it’s unravelling.
In I Eat the Stars, Wilson argues that what we’re experiencing isn’t simply a bad news cycle, it’s systemic collapse: the kind every complex civilisation before ours has faced. Drawing on more than 200 conversations with philosophers, poets, game theorists and spiritual leaders, she confronts the questions many of us are quietly asking: Should we be having kids? How do we make financial decisions when the future is uncertain? And how do we avoid being swallowed by despair?
Going On and On
Lucinda Holdforth
RRP $29.99 | Simon & Schuster
Australia’s aged care crisis is escalating, and according to the latest research, our ageing population poses as great a risk to the country’s future as climate change or geopolitical instability. Yet we’re refusing to talk about it.
