Great new reads to please even the pickiest of bookworms.
HELD
Anne Michaels | Bloomsbury, $33
From the author of the Orange Prize-winning Fugitive Pieces. Described by Margaret Atwood as “compelling”, “timely” and “luminous” and by The Observer’s John Berger as “monumental … The most important book I have read for 40 years”, the poetic, uniquely constructed Held begins on a battlefield in Europe in 1917 and spans four generations.
MURRAY BALL: A CARTOONIST’S LIFE
Mason Ball | HarperCollins, $45
The first biography to be written about farmer, rugby player and much-loved Kiwi cartoonist Murray Ball, whose son Mason tells the humorous and heartwarming tale of how his father became the leading cartoonist of his generation, how his endearing characters evolved and the long years of hard graft that went into what would become the wildly successful creative enterprise Footrot Flats.
DAY
Michael Cunningham | HarperCollins, $38
From the brilliant mind of Pulitzer Prize winner (for The Hours) Michael Cunningham, Day, set in a Brooklyn brownstone on April 5, 2019, 2020 and 2021, is a searing, exquisitely crafted meditation on love and loss, and the struggles and limitations of family life – how to live together and apart, and maybe even escape the marriage plot entirely.
KILL YOUR HUSBANDS
Jack Heath | Allen & Unwin, $37
Three couples rent a house in the mountains for an unplugged weekend of drinking and bushwalking. No internet, no phones, no stress. On the first night, the topic of partner-swapping comes up. It’s a joke, at first, then an agreement is made. But when the lights come back on, somebody is dead, and the car key is missing. They’re stranded. And the killer is just getting started… A wild, witty whodunnit from award-winning Aussie author Jack Heath (Hangman, Kill Your Brother).