When a family goes missing from a house they had specially built, its architect becomes obsessed with their disappearance.

Minoru Aose is an architect, struggling with direction in his life. A recent economic downturn hit him hard, but he managed to find employment with an old friend, Akihiko Okajima. Okajima runs his own design company and it is while working for him that Aose designs the famous Y Residence, built near Mount Asama. It's a prize winning piece of architecture and has been profiled in industry magazines. The building was commissioned by Touta Yoshino and his family.

A mystery occurs when the architect Aose discovers the family hasn't moved in at all. The beautiful residence, with its stunning north lighting, has been left empty. Why? Aose starts to inquire as to what has happened to the family. On a visit to the house he discovers it has been broken into, but a beautiful chair by the German designer, Bruno Taut, has been left behind. What could it all mean? As Aose delves deeper into the mystery, more and more layers are revealed, including his own backstory, which involved a peripatetic childhood and the early loss of his father. The many strands of this story are finally woven together and the reader discovers how art and fate can intertwine.

Hideo Yokoyama's The North Light is an absorbing, slow moving novel of intrigue and fascination. There are many convoluted plot strands, but Yokoyama skillfully guides the reader through this dizzying labyrinth, making the journey a pleasure. The novel's main themes are about family and place, dislocation and loneliness. The novel also provides a meditation on art, and how it affects us emotionally, often working as a balm for the soul. The detailed descriptions of the Y Residence provides a calming, Zen-like experience in itself.
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Readers who enjoy immersive, slow-moving mysteries will get many hours of enjoyment out of The North Light. 
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The North Light, by Hideo Yokoyama. Published by Riverrun. $32.99

Review by Chris Saliba

​In a work of peerless research, David Marr shows how Australia was won by the rifle, the carbine and the sword. Not by peaceful settlement.

In 2019, journalist David Marr was asked by his uncle about a mysterious person in their family. Marr's great grandmother, Maud, was still alive when he was in his twenties, but he'd lost contact with her since the age of eight. What had happened to her in the intervening years? What Marr's research found was that Maud's father Reg, and his brother Darcy, were part of Australia's Native Police. They essentially cleared the land of its Indigenous people so squatters could run their sheep.

In Marr's portrait of early Australia, the country is little more than a brutal money factory. Official word from the English Crown and Parliament was that the native inhabitants were to be left alone. The English knew it was their country; they also knew it was being usurped. These fine words from the mother country, however, evaporated upon Australian shores. No vigorous laws protected Aboriginals or their right to Country. In the early years of the colony, Aboriginal people weren't even allowed to give testimony in court, ensuring the law worked to advance white interests. Public concern in protecting Aboriginals was lukewarm at best. The mood was one of turning a blind eye to atrocities committed, allowing the Native Police to do its unspeakable work. It was in everyone's best interests to secure as much land as possible.

Killing for Country quotes extensively from the contemporary record of letters, journals, memoirs, newspapers and parliamentary record. (The book is a triumph of research.) It seems clear that everyone knew what was going on. Through the newspaper reports of the time, it was part of public discourse and couldn't be ignored. Terrible mass killings were taking place, but there was no one – no laws, moral authority or public outrage – that could stop it.

Perhaps one of the greatest tragedies is that land use could have been negotiated and much bloodshed avoided. Early pastoral leases actually stipulated shared land use between settler and traditional owners – but none of this was ever observed. It was rather a brutal land grab.

David Marr's book makes for ugly, confronting reading. Even those who have read much about Australia's Frontier Wars may still be shocked by how pervasive and widely known the killings were. How little was done to stop it. And ultimately, that this was the method by which the early colonies established themselves, paving the way for modern Australia. 

Killing for Country, by David Marr. Published by Back Inc. $39.99

Review by Chris Saliba

Tony Birch revisits scenes from his working class youth in a finely crafted novel.

Eleven-year-old Joe Cluny lives with his older sister Ruby and Mother Marion in a dingy working class suburb. It's 1965 and life is lived on the streets. News of who's doing what travels fast. The street is a lightning quick conveyer of information. Joe's father, Stan, is an absent figure. He runs a dodgy business and abruptly left Marion soon after Joe was born. It was a loveless marriage from the get-go, so Marion is happier without him. Joe attends the Catholic Our Lady's School, where the nuns instill terrifying stories of hell. The boy's only outlet is his relationship with his grandfather, Charlie. A retiree from his job as a street sweeper, Charlie collects unwanted junk and employs Joe to help him sort it. His time spent with his grandfather is a respite from the poverty of working class life and cruelty of Catholic school.

Marion's younger sister, Oona, is having troubles. A feisty and assertive girl in her youth, she married Ray Lomax in a flush of youthful excitement, believing she was in love. But the marriage has problems, serious problems. One night Oona turns up at Marion's house distressed. It turns out she's been beaten by Ray. Marion tries to help, but Oona declares she's going back to Ray. The sisters fight, and swear not to see each other again. But Marion's daughter, Ruby, decides to make an impromptu visit to her aunt. What she finds shocks her to her core.

Tony Birch paints a realistic picture of working class life in the 1960s, when women had little agency and men felt they could treat their wives any way they liked. The novel has a wonderfully gritty, pared back atmosphere, written in plain, direct prose. It was a time when people didn't have much in terms of material possessions, a fact highlighted by the junk trader Ranji, grandfather Charlie's good friend. As Joe, Charlie and Ranji go sifting through junk, looking for treasure, it's a reminder of how scarcity can create value. Found objects become revered artifacts. The very opposite of today's throwaway culture. The story isn't all doom and gloom, however. We are given hope that the future will be better. Joe grows up with strong female role models and learns from his grandfather the importance of respecting women. Wife beater Ray Lomax gets his comeuppance in a surprise ending. And there's a great scene where Joe's sister Ruby gets into fisticuffs with some bullying boys, and beats them hands down.

A bracing and realistic portrait of working class Australia in the 1960s.

Women & Children, by Tony Birch. Published by University of Queensland Press. $34.99

Review by Chris Saliba

​A successful woman's self-image crumbles when forced to confront her past.

Joan Scudamore seems to have it all. A husband, Rodney, is doing well as a lawyer. Three grown children – Tom, Averil and Barbara – are all settled in their own way. What could there be to complain about? On a solo trip back from Iraq, after visiting her daughter Barbara who has recently married and moved there with her husband, she gets stuck at a rest house in Tell Abu Hamid, a small town between Aleppo and Mosul. There have been floods and the trains are delayed as a consequence. She could be stuck there for days. In a random twist, she runs into her old school friend Blanche Haggard while in the dining room of the rest house. Blanche is travelling in the opposite direction, to Iraq to be with her new husband. The portrait we get of Blanche is of a reckless bon vivant who has left a trail of destruction in her wake. She's not a malicious character, but someone who has made mistakes in her life but whose attitude is to keep on moving. Joan can't help but contrast her life against Blanche's, and is full of self-congratulation on how successfully she's managed her own.

This early encounter with the fast-track, no regrets Blanche Haggard, which opens the book, sets the scene for a series of personal contrasts. Blanche soon departs and Joan finds herself stranded at the rest house. She has a book to read, but soon polishes that off, only to find herself staring at the dry, endless sand dunes of Tell Abu Hamid. With nothing to occupy her mind, she starts going over her life – her friendships and relationships, and how she has conducted herself. Pretty soon she finds herself full of self recriminations, endlessly tortured by her own thoughts. She fears she is going mad and tries to escape by going for walks, then literally running, even praying, but finds there is no way out of the mind's relentless poking and prodding, that ceaseless internal critical voice. The reader soon learns that Joan is a perfectionist and a control freak, and her refusal to see reality, rather hoping to impose her version of it, has caused grief for both her husband and family. After this torturous confrontation with her true self, Joan decides to change, but can she? Can she let go of her steely ego that seems to offer protection of a certain kind.

Agatha Christie wrote six novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott. Absent in the Spring was the third novel Christie wrote under this name, and was published in 1944. It was apparently one of her favourite novels and was completed in a matter of days. The novel's tight plotting and brisk pacing is reminiscent of a Christie murder mystery. She really is a technical magician, effortlessly weaving together a range of characters and their backstories and problems, making for a highly readable story. What is surprising is how starkly revealing Absent in the Spring is. One wonders, is Joan Scuadmore a self-portrait of Christie herself? The novel does an expert job of portraying that mad state of mind where guilt, anxiety, self-reproach can relentlessly assail us. In the desert, stuck there for days with nothing to do, Joan Scudamore quickly starts to crumble. Her strong character is a social fiction. Interestingly, the cast of hopeless characters that surround her (there are quite a few more Blanche Haggard-type train wrecks in Joan's circle), turn out to be, if not successes, at least admirable failures. We recoil at their bad choices, but respect their humanity.

A brilliant, unforgettable psychological portrait from the Queen of Crime.

Absent in the Spring, by Agatha Christie. Published by HarperCollins. $19.99

​Review by Chris Saliba

Melissa Lucashenko has written a cracking follow-up to her Miles Franklin award winner Too Much Lip.

Award winning Goorie author Melissa Lucashenko's new novel Edenglassie alternates between two time frames. The first chapter set in 2024 (the year of Brisbane's bicentenary) introduces Eddie Blanket, a centenarian Indigenous woman who has taken a fall. She's a flinty old trooper and has seen more than her fair share of trouble. She's saved by a group of passing foreign students and taken to hospital. On the hospital ward she meets  journalist Dartmouth Rice. Running into Eddie, he thinks he's snapped up a ripper of a story, and she indulges the journo with some embellished tales. Through Eddie, we meet her feisty granddaughter Winona. She's a sharp tongued activist who tells it like it is. When Eddie's doctor, Johnny, meets Winona he's smitten. It's almost a case of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew: can he satisfy her many criticisms and win her over?

The major storyline takes place in 1854. Goorie man Mulanyin has left his home in Yugambeh Country and now stays with his law-brother Murree in Yagara Country, the area that is now Brisbane. There he meets the beautiful Nita who is a servant for the white Petrie family. They treat her well, but condescending attitudes nonetheless prevail. Meanwhile, trouble swirls around them. The white invaders – “dagai” they are called in the local language – are intent on grabbing as much land as they can, despoiling Country and over farming it, ignoring traditional ways of preserving the environment's status quo. Some whites, such as the Petrie family, are decent enough, but a murderous racism is on the rampage. Mulanyin and his family hope that the rule of law – Goorie law – can prevail, and the white invaders will retreat, but that looks less and less likely every day. When Mulanyin attends the botched execution by hanging of resistance fighter and lawman Dundalli, he is deeply shaken. While he dreams that he and Nita will have lots of children to replace his fellow countrymen who have been murdered, the walls start closing in on him.

Edenglassie is an ambitious epic giving an alternative Australian history, one seen through First Nations eyes. The novel excels in creating a believable mid-19th century mise-en-scene. The descriptions of Country – its flora and fauna – are wonderfully rich, almost lush. The cast of Goorie characters are dynamic and three dimensional, with deep inner lives. The story of Mulanyin and Nita very much carries the reader away, hoping that their lives will be happy and fruitful. The contemporary narrative, set in 2024, is often brutally funny and the two timelines end up coming together in the most ingenious way.

Razor sharp and brilliantly imagined. A book that all Australians should read.  

Edenglassie, by Melissa Lucashenko. Published by University of Queensland Press. $32.99

Review by Chris Saliba

Louisa Hall examines reproduction, the treatment of women's bodies and technology's unintended consequences.

The unnamed narrator of Reproduction begins by telling the reader she had meant to write a novel about Mary Shelley and her novel Frankenstein, but abandoned the project. It was 2018 and she was pregnant for the first time, suffering nausea and disturbing dreams. But parts of Mary Shelley's story “detached themselves from the page and clung to my life” and so she continued to ruminate on the subject. 

Reproduction is American writer Louisa Hall's fourth novel. It's divided into three sections: conception, birth and science fiction. It reads as autobiographical – some of the things that happen in it you can't make up – but Hall's prose manages to keep an elegant distance from her visceral subject matter, giving the text the formality and tone of fiction. This is quite a feat, considering how raw some parts of Reproduction are.

The narrator describes a particularly difficult pregnancy – sickness, nausea, pain – and its aftermath, an almost life threatening case of hemorrhaging. In between there are miscarriages and further misery. Hall doesn't flinch from giving the reader all the details, often gorey. She describes pregnancy as like living on a totally different planet. The feeling is one of intense aloneness – even her husband is no use, failing to provide enough empathy and understanding.

The third and longest part of the book, titled “Science Fiction”, concentrates on medical interventions in pregnancy and bioethical questions on genetic engineering. The narrator's friend, Anna, is a scientist whose work involves genetics, and when she becomes pregnant, with technological help, she starts making some interventions on her own pregnancy which are quite frightening. Weaved through this narrative of horror-like reproduction is a discussion of Mary Shelley and what influenced her to write Frankenstein. Readers might not know the biographical details of Shelley's life, the miscarriages and death of three of her children in infancy, and how deep her grief must have been. Louisa Hall speculates on Shelley's life and what could have caused her to write Frankenstein and her other science fiction novel, The Last Man.
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A visceral and confronting novel that raises many questions -  emotional, legal and ethical - about the darker side of birth and pregnancy.  

Reproduction, by Louisa Hall. Published by Scribner. $32.99

Review by Chris Saliba

A group of five puppets go on a journey

The story starts with an old sea captain named Spelhorst who once lived above a tailor's shop. The old captain liked to wander around the city, to take his mind off his troubles. His heart had been broken many years ago and he'd never gotten over it. On one of his walks he comes across a toy shop. Hanging in the toy shop's window are five puppets – a king and a wolf and a girl and boy and an owl. The sea captain eventually puts the puppets in a trunk with the name Spelhorst written on it. Sadly the captain dies and the trunk is sold on. Eventually the puppets come into the possession of two young girls, Emma and Martha. They create a special performance using the puppets.

Meanwhile, the puppets are animated and have a life of their own. They talk among themselves about their fate and have their own distinct, sometimes comical, characters. The king sees himself as an exalted monarch, while the wolf is proud of her prowess as hunter. In one amusing scene the maid, Jane Twiddum, mistakes the owl for an old duster and throws him in a bucket. In another hair-raising encounter the boy is picked up by a hawk and taken on a ride, only to be dumped in the forest.

Kate Di Camillo has set her magical tale in an imagined early nineteenth century setting. There are maids and parlour rooms and the clip clop of horses' hooves – think the Regency period of Jane Austen. The novel is rich in atmosphere and Di Camillo's language expertly evokes a fabled world of long ago. The story cleverly ties up the sad longing of the sea captain in the puppet's final performance.

An entirely satisfying story mixing elements of imaginative play and grief. Children's storytelling doesn't get much better than this.  

The Puppets of Spelhorst, by Kate DiCamillo. Published by Walker Books. $24.99

Review by Chris Saliba