<\/p>\n
“Buried secrets don’t want to stay buried forever,” Patrick Ryan, author of Buckeye, told NPR. (Supplied: Bloomsbury Publishing)<\/p>\n
Buckeye charts the fortunes of two families in the fictitious town of Bonhomie in north-west Ohio.<\/p>\n
The novel opens with Cal Jenkins, born in 1920 with one leg shorter than the other.<\/p>\n
For Cal, his disability is a curse that makes him unfit for military service, preventing him from joining the other young men who enlist, looking for revenge and adventure in the wake of the Pearl Harbor bombing.<\/p>\n
In the end, it’s a blessing. Many men never return; those who do live with the trauma of what they experienced during the war. And it means that Cal stays in Bonhomie, where he meets Becky Jenkins, the local girl who becomes his wife.<\/p>\n
Buckeye is also concerned with the Salts: Felix, a promising young executive with Tucks & Sons, and his beautiful wife Margaret, who move to Bonhomie from Columbus. They make a handsome couple but fail to connect in fundamental ways.<\/p>\n
ABC Radio National’s Top 100 Books of the 21st Century<\/a><\/p>\n Top 100 Books is Radio National’s new annual countdown where we hand over the reins to you to vote for your favourite books, and then we celebrate the Top 100 in a big weekend broadcast!<\/p>\n Author Patrick Ryan shows the damage untold secrets can cause. For his whole life, Felix has had to conceal his sexuality, while Margaret was abandoned as a baby and raised in an orphanage, something she never shares with anyone as an adult, including her husband.<\/p>\n Their mutual dishonesty has repercussions for their future \u2014 as does a short-lived affair between Cal and Margaret in the closing months of the war that binds their families together forever.<\/p>\n Cal and Becky, Margaret and Felix endure hardship and grief but moments of beauty and connection shine through. Ryan allows his characters the chance of redemption; people grow from their mistakes, and in this way, Buckeye is an optimistic \u2014 even sentimental \u2014 book.<\/p>\n It’s a realist novel, except in one regard. Becky has a gift; she is a spiritualist who can communicate with the dead. Her clients come (mostly) for two reasons: love and forgiveness. Becky doesn’t ask for payment and only offers the truth, even if it’s disappointing.<\/p>\n Whether you’re a sceptic (like Cal) or a believer in the spirit world, Becky’s ability underpins the book’s central message: if it’s an assurance of love or forgiveness you need from a loved one, don’t wait until it’s too late.<\/p>\n \u2014 Nicola Heath<\/p>\n Fierceland by Omar Musa<\/p>\n Penguin<\/strong><\/p>\n Fierceland author Omar Musa was longlisted for the 2015 Miles Franklin Literary Award for his debut novel, Here Come the Dogs. (Supplied: Penguin)<\/p>\n Omar Musa is a poet, hip-hop performer, novelist and visual artist who hails from Queanbeyan in NSW, with deep connections to Borneo and Brooklyn.<\/p>\n His powerful sense of cadence, poetry and visual storytelling feature prominently in his second novel, Fierceland. While his first, Here Comes the Dogs (2014), pulsed with an urban rhythm, Fierceland encompasses cities and forests, the past and the present, and ghosts \u2014 plenty of ghosts.<\/p>\n The forests of North Borneo have a voice \u2014 fragmented and impressionistic, thick with sap and birdsong \u2014 that punctuates the novel but, cleverly, Musa has used this voice sparingly. Too much and it would be overwhelming; this much, and it allows you to hear and feel it.<\/p>\n Listen to ABC RN’s The Bookshelf<\/a><\/p>\n The latest and best fiction reviewed by a team of dedicated bibliophiles.<\/p>\n In between, we enter into the lives of two children \u2014 Rozana and Harun \u2014 playing video games in Kota Kinabalu, awaiting the arrival of their adored businessman father, Yusuf.<\/p>\n As children, they fight and angle for attention. They also give us an energetic and cheerful perspective on the world that is forever splintered after an ill-fated trip up the river and into the forest.<\/p>\n In this beautifully lush place the children witness a terrible event.<\/p>\n This sounds more straightforward than it is because as readers our perspective flips between timeframes.<\/p>\n We meet Rozana and Harun as adults as they move to Australia and the US, pursuing different paths in life, and grappling with the political, environmental, personal and artistic impact of what happened in the forest. Then, when their father dies and they return home for the funeral, they have to confront this betrayal of memory and ideology and money.<\/p>\n As the novel weaves its way through this landscape of jungle and memory, there are ghosts everywhere you look. Ghosts whose spectral gaze looks to Australia as much as it looks to Borneo.<\/p>\n \u2014 Kate Evans<\/p>\n Moderation by Elaine Castillo<\/p>\n Atlantic<\/strong><\/p>\n Moderation follows Elaine Castillo’s debut novel, America Is Not the Heart, published in 2018.<\/p>\n American author Elaine Castillo’s sophomore novel follows Girlie, a content moderator who spends her days sifting through the worst of the internet. She is soon headhunted for a new role in virtual reality and her routine life is forever altered.<\/p>\n Girlie is a dry and cutting protagonist, described as “not a shy person \u2014 silently judging yes, but not shy”.<\/p>\n As an eldest daughter who’s learned to suppress her emotions from a young age, she is brilliant at her job, able to keep her feelings at bay while wading through the internet’s depravity from her cubicle.<\/p>\n Cynically, Girlie sees herself continuing her matrilineal destiny \u2014 a Filipina woman cleaning up after Americans, drawing a line from her “aunts and distant cousins all nurses and maids and cleaners scattered everywhere” to her own role “there in the office park cleaning the feeds of their stubborn stains of rape and bludgeoning”.<\/p>\n August’s best new books<\/a><\/p>\n In this month’s best new releases, humans transform into trees, grief meets the supernatural in a haunted house and a volcanic eruption disrupts life in rural New Zealand.<\/p>\n Set in Las Vegas, a city described as “very virtual reality-coded”, Castillo expertly caricatures American consumerism and corporate culture, with karaoke machines offered in lieu of a raise or better conditions for workers. When sparks begin to fly between Girlie and her new boss William, she worries that without the skin suits and shiny avatars of virtual reality, there might not be anything real between them.<\/p>\n While there may be romance in the background of this story, its strength is in the sharp analysis of how the paradises we hope to create can be tainted by humanity. A gripping read for fans of Severance or Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, or anyone in need of an excuse to step away from the doom scroll.<\/p>\n \u2014 Rosie Ofori Ward<\/p>\n What We Can Know by Ian McEwan<\/p>\n Jonathan Cape<\/strong><\/p>\n What Can We Know is the latest novel from Ian McEwan, who won the Booker Prize in 1998 for Amsterdam. (Supplied: Penguin)<\/p>\n What will people make of us, 100 years into the future?<\/p>\n In Ian McEwan’s new eco-novel, the British author (Atonement, Amsterdam) finds a clever way to get us thinking about our place in history. His narrator, Thomas, is an academic living in the 2120s, whose area of obsession is our era, right now \u2014 the beginning of what he and his colleagues know as the ‘Derangement’.<\/p>\n England of the future has been ravaged by nuclear war and climate change, reduced to a series of archipelagos where resources are limited and life moves slowly. He works as a university lecturer, teaching disinterested students about the excesses of the early 21st century.<\/p>\n Listen to the podcast<\/a><\/p>\n Your favourite fiction authors share the stories behind their latest books on ABC Radio National’s The Book Show.<\/p>\n This time jump is a genius move by McEwan. So, too, is the choice to blur the climate change story into the background. Instead, the narrative focus of the novel is Thomas’s quest to find a “lost” poem, recited by the era’s great poet at a famous dinner party in 2014. The poem was read aloud only once, and there is believed to be a single copy inscribed on vellum, but it’s never been found.<\/p>\n Tom’s research brings the dinner to life, and zeros in on the central couple. The poet Francis Blundy is gifted, passionate, obstinate and proud. But it’s his wife Vivien who is the novel’s real centre \u2014 a woman of great intellect, capable of great love and cruelty, and the keeper of a terrible secret.<\/p>\n What We Can Know is an inventive and compelling page-turner about art and love, and an urgent call to protect the natural world. It’s a stunner.<\/p>\n \u2014 Claire Nichols<\/p>\n The M\u00f6bius Book by Catherine Lacey<\/p>\n Granta<\/strong><\/p>\n Catherine Lacey, author of The M\u00f6bius Book, has been twice shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize for young writers. (Supplied: Allen & Unwin)<\/p>\n This is a masterful book. (Maybe I’m gushing \u2014 but when love comes along, what else can you do?) Readers of Catherine Lacey’s latest novel, The M\u00f6bius Book, can choose to begin at either end. In one half, Lacey writes about the end of a relationship with another author. It’s an unsentimental accounting \u2014 and an act of unsparing self-interrogation. She certainly recounts some cowardly behaviour (he breaks up with her via email).<\/p>\n In the other, more explicitly fictional, half, two women who have known each other their entire adult lives meet up for drinks. Shared intimacy allows each to read something of her own life in the other’s small gestures and what is left unsaid. As they struggle together to make sense of past relationships and the complications of new ones, a mysterious pool of blood seeps from the room next door.<\/p>\n The author telling queer stories differently<\/a><\/p>\n Author and human rights lawyer Keio Yoshida draws on both their personal experience and their legal expertise in their latest book.<\/p>\n Lacey asks whether idealism or prudence keeps people attached to their old commitments and promises \u2014 as well as their unreciprocated feelings and resentments (Never see them again! Never talk to them again!). She recalls the Christian depredations of her youth, denying the body in order to admit the soul. Later, surrendering to sex and self-annihilation, she seeks earthly redemption, if not simply vulnerability. (The famously ascetic Christian mystic Margery Kempe would blush.)<\/p>\n The M\u00f6bius Book is about finding faith in oneself, in one’s reality and one’s agency. It’s often very funny, too.<\/p>\n “We didn’t actually want to reach the end of our questioning,” Lacey writes toward the end (or is it the beginning?) of this twisty narrative.<\/p>\n All I know is, I never wanted to reach the end of this marvellous book.<\/p>\n \u2014 Declan Fry<\/p>\n The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones<\/p>\n Titan Books<\/strong><\/p>\n The Buffalo Hunter Hunter author Stephen Graham Jones has published more than 30 books. (Supplied: New South Books)<\/p>\n Stephen Graham Jones is a member of the Piegun Blackfeet Tribe: a Native American writer who explores colonial and contact history, using genre to tell bloody stories.<\/p>\n Really bloody. We’re talking horror and vampires, dripping fangs and scalps, painted skulls, and the abandoned carcasses of buffalo, skinned and left to rot on the Great Plains, a tragic reality that left behind starving people and bleating calves in the 19th century.<\/p>\n A mash-up of real history and playful storytelling, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is both funny and furious. It is raging, melodramatic and knowing in the way it leans into literary tropes.<\/p>\n In 2012, a woman named Etsy (short for Betsy) is given access to a 1912 journal belonging to her great-great-grandfather, a Lutheran preacher.<\/p>\n Here’s literary device number one of many: the framing story, the found manuscript. Then, as another device, we’re inside that journal, as a mysterious Native American man, Good Stab, appears inside the church and tells his story.<\/p>\n It’s a confession and a reckoning, as he explains his connection to the bodies found outside the town \u2014 skinned, painted, looking something like a slaughtered buffalo.<\/p>\n Behind it all? A mystery. Why is this vampire-figure telling his story to this particular preacher \u2014 who he calls Three-Persons, as a nod to the Holy Trinity? What is the event that connects this place in Montana, this long-lived Blackfeet man and the preacher, a skittish former soldier and napikwan (white man) with missing toes, who now wears religious robes?<\/p>\n Something happened on January 23, 1870 \u2014 a real massacre \u2014 where 200 or more women, children and old people were “mistakenly” killed. And Good Stab? “What I am is the Indian who can’t die.\/ I’m the worst dream America ever had.”<\/p>\n \u2014 Kate Evans<\/p>\n Cannon by Lee Lai<\/p>\n Giramondo Publishing<\/strong><\/p>\n Lee Lai, author of Cannon, has lived in Montreal since 2016. (Supplied: Giramondo Publishing)<\/p>\n Stone Fruit, Lee Lai’s Stella Prize-shortlisted debut, was one of the best graphic novels to appear in 2021. Her latest, Cannon, exceeds it.<\/p>\n Working as a chef in Montreal, the protagonist, Cannon, serves not only food but the needs of those around her. Stoic and uncomplaining, she finds a kindred soul in her high school best friend, Trish. Now both in their 20s, they unwind by watching horror films like Body Melt and Howling III: The Marsupials together.<\/p>\n Each wonders if they might be drifting apart. Yet scarier than potentially losing a friend (or zoning out to Carrie) is Cannon’s sense that she’s surrounded by insufferable jerks.<\/p>\n An excerpt from Cannon (2025), a graphic novel by Lee Lai. (Supplied: Giramondo Publishing)<\/p>\n Cannon’s boss is a smarmy, self-aggrandising bully. Unable to work with Cannon’s “difficult” grandfather, his carers force Cannon to spend much of her free time tending to him. Trish, meanwhile, is intent on her latest hook-up, Kam, with whom she’s on the rebound following the end of a long-term relationship. (“I’m alone and bereft right now! I deserve an uncomplicated fuck.”)<\/p>\n Cannon’s sense of claustrophobia and loneliness begin closing in. How long can she remain stoic? (The civil, mild-mannered soul being driven to the brink, of course, is a beloved horror\/thriller film trope.)<\/p>\n Lai’s artwork is evocative and vivid. Throughout the novel, Lai delicately explores different forms of care and caregiving, often to devastating effect. Affecting and laugh-out-loud funny, Cannon is a triumph.<\/p>\n \u2014 Declan Fry<\/p>\n Cursed Daughters by Oyinkan Braithwaite<\/p>\n Atlantic<\/strong><\/p>\n Cursed Daughters is Oyinkan Braithwaite’s third novel. (Supplied: Allen & Unwin)<\/p>\n While Oyinkan Braithwaite’s long-awaited follow-up to My Sister, the Serial Killer is not a thriller like her 2018 debut, it has all the same charm, intrigue and addictive qualities.<\/p>\n Cursed Daughters is a winding intergenerational story about the lives of the Falodun women, who, centuries ago, were plagued by a curse to never keep their men.<\/p>\n The book begins on the day that Monife is buried and her niece Eniiyi is born. Even as a baby, Eniiyi bears a startling resemblance to her aunt. As she grows up, she is haunted by Monife, unable to escape her heartbreaking legacy. As the narrative shifts between Monife in the 2000s and Eniiyi in the 2020s, we see both are headstrong and determined women but when love is involved they throw themselves in heart first.<\/p>\n Where Braithwaite’s writing shines is in the family dynamics of the Falodun women as they snark and bicker and support each other, dropping in and out of the Yoruba language. As Eniiyi reflects, “[the Falodun women] were in the hallways, looking out from photographs, whispering to her and appearing before her in dreams”. The spirits of each heartbroken woman flow through this book as Braithwaite shows how far they will go to outrun this curse in Nigerian society where marriage equals success.<\/p>\n As the book continues, Eniiyi is plagued with visions of Monife, fearing how “every night when she closed her eyes, Monife was there waiting.” The family is determined to keep the truth of Monife’s death from her but as the book rushes towards its ending, the story unravels and Eniiyi is compelled to determine once and for all whether she is living her own life or if she is destined to follow the same path as Monife.<\/p>\n In Cursed Daughters, Braithwaite has written another easy and compulsive read, demonstrating the beauty and merit of contemporary Nigerian literature.<\/p>\n \u2014 Rosie Ofori Ward<\/p>\n Tune in to ABC Radio National at 10am Mondays for <\/strong>The Book Show<\/strong><\/a> and 10am Fridays for <\/strong>The Bookshelf<\/strong><\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Welcome to the ABC Arts wrap of the best books out in September. This month, our book-loving critics…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":93347,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[266],"tags":[25455,25460,1879,359,25456,18,117,14766,60489,19,17,60490,60488,25452,25453,1641],"class_list":{"0":"post-93346","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-best-books","9":"tag-best-new-books","10":"tag-book-reviews","11":"tag-books","12":"tag-books-to-read","13":"tag-eire","14":"tag-entertainment","15":"tag-ian-mcewan","16":"tag-ian-mcewan-new-book","17":"tag-ie","18":"tag-ireland","19":"tag-lee-lai-cannon","20":"tag-patrick-ryan-buckeye","21":"tag-the-book-show","22":"tag-the-bookshelf","23":"tag-what-to-read"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93346","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93346"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93346\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/93347"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93346"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93346"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93346"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/p>\n
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