Extract from ABC News
Wondering what to read next? Choose a book from this list of nine new titles our critics loved. (ABC Arts: Nicola Heath)
Welcome to ABC Arts' wrap of the best new releases out in March.
Our critics' picks this month include a gothic crime novel set in the Scottish Highlands, a "Campari-spritzed" romance set in a Sicilian villa and the latest from a Japanese novelist with a cult following.
Also on the list are a metaphysical thriller by an exciting young Swedish author and a novel set during the Blitz in London in World War II that artfully blends historical fiction with fantasy.
Happy reading!
- When I Am Sixty-Four by Debra Adelaide
- Slip by Abbey Lay
- Hooked by Asako Yuzuki
- The Minstrels by Eva Hornung
- The Cursed Road by Laura McCluskey
- The Department of the Vanishing by Johanna Bell
- Strange Girls by Sarvat Hasin
- Body Double by Hanna Johansson
- Nonesuch by Francis Spufford
When I Am Sixty-Four by Debra Adelaide
UQP
Debra Adelaide, author of The Household Guide to Dying, and Gabrielle Carey bonded over books as 12-year-olds at Gymea High School. (Supplied: UQP)
When Australian author Gabrielle Carey (Puberty Blues, Just Us) died by suicide in 2023 at the age of 64, her lifelong friend Debra Adelaide was among those left trying to make sense of the writer's life and death.
When I Am Sixty-Four is being marketed as a novel but can be read as a memoir, as the narrator (a stand-in for Adelaide) supports and cajoles her dear friend through the final days of her life.
Carey, who is never named, is painted as a woman of great intellect and spiky humour. As Carey and Adelaide take their regular walks, they talk about books and reading, literary success and failures, love and sex. But Carey's depression is deep, and she constantly complains about her financial future — will she be able to stay in her beloved home?
We learn that Carey's obsession with financial security is a direct echo of her father's money worries in the years before his own death. The revelation that Carey's father took his life at the same age — 64 — is sobering for the reader, and for Adelaide, who asks why she didn't do more to help her friend, who clearly hadn't come to terms with her father's death.
This is a book about regret and grief, and Adelaide is clear-eyed throughout. She resists the urge to paint Carey — or herself — as a saint. Instead, we meet two women in all their complexity and imperfection in the darkest of days.
When I Am Sixty-Four is a startlingly bare and beautiful work. You can't help feeling that Carey, who never shied away from revealing herself in her books, would like it.
— Claire Nichols
Slip by Abbey Lay
Penguin
Slip is the second novel by Abbey Lay, whose debut novel, Lead Us Not, was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier's Award for an Unpublished Manuscript. (Supplied: Penguin)
Fussy, uptight, and, arguably, a little self-absorbed, Grace is a woman who has found success rigorously organising and regimenting her life. She has also begun to sense some of the limitations of this approach.
Travelling to Sicily for her linguistics research, Grace is dismissive of the locals who try talking to her. She prefers structure and order, favouring the electronic research databases she can access via Sicily's (often unreliable) internet.
Grace is asking questions about herself and her long-term partner, Jack. A country boy who has successfully carved out a career as a lawyer, Jack and Grace don't always see eye to eye. Disciplined as ever, Grace convinces herself they can weather any storm.
Nico, her Sicilian host, flirts and flatters and cajoles her as she whips up platters of food, one of her passions. He asks if she has a boyfriend. She does, she says. She asks if he has a girlfriend. Sometimes, he says. (The cad!)
Nico is just a housemate, Grace tells herself — but could he be something more?
Campy and Campari-spritzed, Slip is both a romance and an anguished arrow through the heart of romance tropes. By the end, it takes on the solemn melancholy of an Italian neo-realist film. Transcribing Nico's anecdotes for her research, Grace discovers a "strange and shameful possessiveness" overtaking her: "He didn't sound like himself, and she couldn't bring herself to transcribe his words without editing them to make him sound more like the person she knew."
Playing on the double meaning of what can be "in the end, quite easily fixed", Slip is a novel about discipline, acceptance and desire; about making sense of the choices one faces and the possibility of new ones. Investing in fantasies only to find the fantasy disappoints — and, worse, that there is no one to share the disappointment with — Grace senses the contours of a loneliness in her life she was not aware of as a younger woman. It is only by recording and listening to others (and, yes, fantasising) that Grace can allow herself to realise what she truly desires.
Hooked by Asako Yuzuki, translated by Polly Barton
Fourth Estate
Asako Yuzuki, author of Hooked and Butter, has published more than 20 novels in Japanese. (Supplied: HarperCollins Australia)
It's telling that the two English-translated novels by prolific Japanese author Asako Yuzuki share a preoccupation with women, female friendship and the suffocating weight of societal expectations. In both, misogyny, body image and the female psyche feel at once distinctly Japanese and entirely universal — ripe for dissecting across cultures.
Like her 2024 novel Butter, Hooked, also translated by Polly Barton, is built around a tete-a-tete between two women in their 30s. Shōko is a popular housewife blogger whose brand is built on a studied laziness — the antithesis of the perfect wife. Eriko is her apparent opposite: immaculate, high-achieving, single and a corporate operator whose current project involves importing the Nile perch into Japan — an invasive freshwater fish species known for decimating native fish populations where it is introduced. Eriko, we're told, is "irresistibly drawn to it". In a novel preoccupied with dangerous obsession and loneliness, it's a revealing detail. At one point, Eriko thinks she sees "the shadow of an enormous fish. It took her a moment to realise it was the silhouette of her own torso". It's an analogy that threads through the novel.
Fascinated by Shōko, Eriko engineers a friendship with her by tracking her down via her blog, and the two quickly grow close. Both are desperate for female companionship and in genuine admiration of one another. But it's precisely at this intersection that the novel's tension catches. Their dynamic curdles fast. Eriko's controlling nature surfaces in ways that feel alarming, and Shōko retreats — echoing a similar situation from Eriko's past. Beneath their apparent differences, both women are lonely, flawed and vulnerable, struggling in a society designed to make women compete rather than connect.
Written in 2015, Hooked actually predates Butter. Where Butter interrogates the external — fatphobia, appetite, ambition — Hooked turns inward, tracing the interior battles women wage against themselves and each other. Alternating chapter perspectives keep the pacing taut. The ending deflates slightly, but there's something honest in its open-endedness — a refusal to resolve neatly.
Yuzuki is a novelist of female interiority, drawn to imperfect characters who push against the status quo. Hooked confirms she's a vital voice in contemporary fiction.
— Ying-Di Yin
The Minstrels by Eva Hornung
Text Publishing
The Minstrels author Eva Hornung won the 2010 Prime Minister's Literary Award for fiction for her novel Dog Boy. (Supplied: Text Publishing)
My profound sympathy to whoever had to write the blurb for Australian writer Eva Hornung's latest novel, The Minstrels. What to focus on? The conjuring of a past small-town Australia, with hemmed-in parents and simmering violence? Or a story of landscape, defined by dispossession and drought? A family drama, of siblings and tragedy, accidents and love? Or a dystopian future survival story, with new societal forms?
This book is all of those things, but what holds it together is gorgeous poetic writing and a fiercely sympathetic protagonist named Gem. As a child, she was snotty and grotty and wild, hissing like a feral cat, stealing lollies for her brother Will and earning his adoration by holding funerals for birds. Together the siblings — clever Gem and "feckless" Will — created their own world, forming a lifelong bond. However, as time passes and the world intervenes, it's a bond that proves dangerous.
These characters move away and then back to the small town that shaped them, lured by the place itself. Near the town is an ancient ravine known as The Minstrels, a beautiful slash in the landscape that held deep meaning for the original owners of the land. Generations of local teenagers have created their own mythologies about the place, attached with a set of rituals so reckless and thrilling you can only read about them with anticipatory dread.
From its beginnings in Gem's childhood and her attachment to The Minstrels, the story continues for years longer than you might expect, and in directions that confront narrative expectations. Is this a portrait of our local history, an observation of the 1970s and 1980s, or a piece of speculative fiction that arrows into the future? It's all of these things. What ties it together are truly astonishing sentences.
— Kate Evans
The Cursed Road by Laura McCluskey
HarperCollins
McCluskey is also a screenwriter and theatre maker, and a co-founder of Three Fates Theatre Company. (Supplied: HarperCollins Australia)
As The Cursed Road opens, a panicked young woman is running through a forest. It's cold and she's ill-prepared for the chill, wearing a stolen jacket and boots but no socks. We know little about her, except that she has been held against her will. She's now being hunted, and, like a deer, is felled by a bullet as she flees.
The case of the unidentified dead woman, dubbed Bambi by the press, lands on the desk of Detective Inspector Georgina Lennox. George has been in therapy since her last case — the investigation into a young man's death on the island of Eadar, the subject of Laura McCluskey's debut novel, The Wolf Tree — went awry. Relations between George and her former partner, Detective Inspector Richie Stewart, have been strained since Eadar, when George's addiction to prescription drugs came to painful light. As they reunite on the new case, Richie's uncharacteristic prickly behaviour shifts their dynamic; now — thanks to George's sessions with her psychologist Dr Kassab — she's the peacemaker of the pair.
Like The Wolf Tree, The Cursed Road is set in a spectacular landscape: the Scottish Highlands, both awe-inspiring and foreboding in equal measure. The investigation takes George and Richie to the remote village of Kirkcree and a nearby luxury hunting lodge, where wealthy clients come to stalk deer. Across the way, they stumble upon a crumbling castle, complete with a gothic crypt, inhabited by a reclusive family hoping to restore the mansion to its former glory.
George and Richie uncover rivalries and resentments old and new — including a centuries-old blood feud between two local clans — as they try to solve the mystery behind Bambi's death and how it relates to the disappearance of another young woman 10 years earlier. McCluskey throws in several satisfying twists as the novel tears towards a suitably action-packed and atmospheric finale.
— Nicola Heath
The Department of the Vanishing by Johanna Bell
Transit Lounge
Johanna Bell also publishes children's books and produced the award-winning podcast Birds Eye View, made by women in the Darwin Correctional Centre. (Supplied: Transit Lounge)
Did you know that some birds can pick locks while others make lures to entice fish into shallows? Or that ornithologists use the term "sexy syllable" to describe "when a canary sings in two voices at the same time"?
These are some of the quirky facts scattered through The Department of the Vanishing, in among stretches of verse, collages of newspaper headlines, quotes on scraps of paper, lists and webcam screen captures. Author Johanna Bell's magpie approach is a bold formal gambit to meet an unprecedented environmental calamity, the fractured pieces coalescing into a powerful portrait of the all-consuming power of loss.
Set in the near future, the narrative begins with police questioning Ava Wilde about an alleged breach of federal law at her workplace, the titular department. This fictional (but highly recognisable) government body creates labyrinthine catalogues of species as they become extinct. For Ava, the work becomes soul-destroying, with the department's bloodless, bureaucratic approach clashing with her impotent rage as she watches vast and beautiful natural worlds disappear.
Haunted by her father's unresolved disappearance when she was a child, Ava remains self-contained: "I shrink at parties / when people ask / what is it you do / exactly". Ava's mother, now living in a hospice with dementia, seems to have something important to say about her father's fate, though the painkillers she takes have rendered her communications cryptic.
Meanwhile, Ava trawls dating apps for hook-ups, using old photos and keeping her partners at arm's length. Then she meets Luke, a barman passionate about creating electronic music who takes an interest in her work. Their relationship is volatile and obsessive, reinvigorating Ava even as it threatens to disrupt her carefully compartmentalised life.
While very much experimental fiction, there is nothing inaccessible or chin-stroking about The Department of the Vanishing. It's a hot-blooded howl of a tale that rages and rumbles towards a shocking denouement.
— Daniel Herborn
Strange Girls by Sarvat Hasin
Dialogue Books
Cover image of Strange Girls (2026) by Sarvat Hasin. (Supplied: Hachette Australia)
Strange Girls is the love story of two friends. Told from both their viewpoints, we see the rich and intoxicating joy of young love and the contrasting emptiness when it is no longer there.
Unfolding in dual timelines, Aliya recounts the heights of the friends' obsession with each other in university while Ava narrates a humid and claustrophobic weekend in their adulthood when their relationship has soured.
When Ava and Aliya meet they quickly become each other's world, Aliya reflecting how "their days twined up like trees growing around each other". When they are together, it's at the exclusion of everyone else. When they are apart, it's unbearable. One summer, as Ava and Aliya spend hours FaceTiming between Scotland and Pakistan, they compare each other to Wuthering Heights' lovers Cathy and Heathcliff, Ava laughing that "the pining will make us stronger".
Their dialogue is sharp, bright and self-deprecating, filled to the brim with references to art and artists they admire. They share a longing for the Paris of Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West and Edith Wharton. They know they are cliches and they embrace it, willingly playing the "strange girl" — one who doesn't care for such silly things as boys or normality.
While as young women it was always the sheltered Aliya following Ava, seemingly the more talented and worldly of the two, in the present day Ava is still at sea while Aliya has all the markers of success: a husband, a house and — the greatest source of jealousy — a book deal. No longer on the same path, the women are forced to reckon with the question of whether a friendship like theirs can exist past adolescence or if the shadow of adulthood and the scars of the past are too much to ignore.
Sarvat Hasin has beautifully captured the romance and intimacy of female friendship. I wanted to stay longer in the smoky beer gardens and musty share house parties of Strange Girls and, like Ava and Aliya, hold on a little longer to their friendship before it burned itself out.
— Rosie Ofori Ward
Body Double by Hanna Johansson, translated by Kira Josefsson
Scribe
Body Double is Hanna Johansson's second novel. Her first, Antiquity, won the Katapultpriset Prize in 2021 for the best Swedish fiction debut of the year. (Supplied: Scribe Publications)
One day, Naomi discovers she has mistakenly taken someone else's coat from a department store cafe. Returning to retrieve the correct one, she sees another woman wearing it. The woman, Laura, troubles her — and Laura, in turn, seems suspicious of Naomi.
Naomi later finds herself unexpectedly bumping into Laura, not once but repeatedly. The things she says to friends begin to sound like Laura. Her friends sometimes mistake the two of them. When Laura moves into Naomi's home, a strange, consuming relationship develops.
Intertwined with this narrative is the story of a woman transcribing tapes for a ghostwriter. The ghostwriter records people's life stories, crafting them into customised biographies. His clients are exclusively women. He does not judge them, no matter how confronting their stories are.
The transcriber cannot help growing attached to the stories of the women she listens to. She is completely removed from them and the women have no knowledge of her existence, yet she identifies with them.
When she hears a woman in a recording say: "I have seen you. Have you seen me?", it is the first time anything has happened to upset the equilibrium she feels between herself and her subjects. Someone seems to be trying to pierce her one-way mirror.
Entrancing and eerie, Body Double pulses with atmosphere. Fans of filmmakers like Krzysztof Kieślowski (the Three Colours trilogy) may recognise something like his films here. The gorgeously noirish narrative even makes reference to a lipstick, Veronique — a possible reference to Kieślowski's 1991 film The Double Life of Veronique.
Johansson's metaphysical thriller makes you question the limits of personhood and individuality. As she ratchets up the creepiness, you can't look away.
— Declan Fry
Nonesuch by Francis Spufford
Faber
Francis Spufford began his career writing non-fiction, publishing his first novel in 2016, when he was 52. (Supplied: Allen & Unwin)
English novelist and non-fiction author Francis Spufford is fascinated by cities and what they offer the imagination: 18th-century Manhattan, when its name, identity and currency were still unstable, in Golden Hill; London in 1944, when a set of possible futures arise from a bombed Woolworths, in Light Perpetual; an invented 1920s American city with a radical politic and shades of noir in Cahokia Jazz. And now, in Nonesuch, he has returned to London in World War ll — or a version of it. While all these cities appear different, each changes shape in some way.
As Nonesuch begins, London is in a moment of instability. It's 1939 and the city is on the brink of war. Iris, our hero, is clever, ambitious and defiantly non-conformist. She works in the City in finance, however, her future is hampered by her class and gender and an event from her past. We follow her as she meets some posh strangers, including a proto-fascist woman, and has a fling with a nice young man.
As the Blitz takes hold, Nonesuch offers a recognisable depiction of a city under siege: the blackouts, air raids, political debates, social change as women step into new roles and careers; rivalries and love; hints of espionage and dastardly organisations. But there are also unexpected elements: creatures made of shadows and discarded newspapers, angels and demons exploited for political purposes, statues that come to life and rooftop chases.
Spufford has transformed a city once again, using fantasy to lean into (rather than away from) the drudgery and fear of living in a city without light, the shock of buildings disappearing in the night, the threat of fascism, the divisive clash of morality and politics. He does it all with characters who are well-realised and nuanced, particularly Iris, whose spiky interest in career and money, having been denied both, makes her a wonderfully strong hero.
— Kate Evans
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