The nine books that knocked our critics' socks off this month

Welcome to the ABC Arts wrap of the best new books published this month.

In a huge treat for readers, both Ann Patchett (of Tom Lake fame) and Maggie O'Farrell (Hamnet — need we say more?) have new books out. Find out what our reviewers made of these much-anticipated novels below.

Also among the best new releases in June are a memoir by Ralph Jackman detailing his experience teaching students in a youth justice facility and a comic Italian romp from Pulitzer Prize-winner Andrew Sean Greer.

Happy reading!

Land by Maggie O'Farrell

Tinder Press

Maggie O'Farrell's novels include The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, The Hand that First Held Mine, the international bestseller Hamnet and the memoir I Am, I Am, I Am. Her fiction travels the world, in both geography and time, but with her latest — Land — she's covering both time and place via one small wet peninsular in Ireland.

A man named Tomás is mapping the land, reshaping it with language and charts, in the shadow of the Great Hunger, the terrible famine that ravaged the land and families including his own. With him is his 10-year-old son, Liam. They're working for the Red Coats — the English — translating and re-naming abandoned buildings and ancient springs, both because the father has the skills, but also because they need the money.

Something happens — a crisis of belief, politics, landscape and identity — that shakes the father to the core and jolts the son onto a new path. Meanwhile, our own reading pathway is anchored in this green place but stretches back into the sod and the peat and the bogs of history where we meet characters from a distant past, and then moves decades into the future as well, as Ireland both recovers and changes. We meet the wife and mother, the sisters and an otherworldly younger brother of the lead pair, and we track them through workhouses and into education, in and out of churches and ships and disguise, onto thatched roofs and in and out of patches of old forest.

O'Farrell knows how to weave a family saga and tell an immersive tale. But under all of that? She's furious, and the rage at imperial power keeps this book moving along at pace and with considerable energy.

— Kate Evans

Nymph by Sofia Montrone

Text Publishing

In Greek mythology, nymphs were earthly deities, beautiful and dangerous. In biology, the same word describes a young grasshopper that sheds its skin to take on its adult form. Both meanings feel equally apt as the title of Sofia Montrone's debut coming-of-age novel, set over two heat-soaked Italian summers eight years apart.

In the first section, set in 2010, Leo is 10 years old and working in her family's run-down mountainside hotel, cleaning rooms with her younger brother Max. Their father, charming but self-destructive, looms large in their lives, captivating them and shaping their worldviews as he recounts the grisly epic tale of Odysseus.

The youthful Leo has an antenna for signs of death and bodily decay; she is fascinated by the life cycle of insects and intrigued by the discarded Band-Aids and stray hairs that litter the hotel rooms. She mostly watches the guests from afar, searching for clues of their mysterious adult lives.

Eight summers later, with another faltering Italian World Cup campaign in the background, a more world-weary Leo has drifted away from Max. We find her "looking out into a world that has turned its eyes from her, unhappy with what it has seen". But when Dolores, an American, visits to learn violin-making in the summer before she goes to college, Leo finds someone to return her gaze.

Together, Leo and Dolores play cards, swim, eat slivers of prosciutto and ponder the universe. Their melancholic romance and the story's languid pacing invite comparisons with Call Me by Your Name, but there's something singular here, a series of small moments rendered in vivid and strange detail that builds into a pointillist portrait of a relationship doomed to end with the season.

Still transfixed by insect life, Leo reflects that the grasshopper nymph is "at its most vulnerable" as it grows into its new skin. It's this tender and transformative stage of life that Nymph captures with moving precision.

— Daniel Herborn

Detention by Ralph Jackman

Allen & Unwin

Ralph Jackman, formerly a sports broadcaster and briefly an actor (his youngest sibling is Hugh Jackman), had talked about teaching for years, but it wasn't until his early 50s that he took the plunge and enrolled in a master's in teaching.

Parkville College, the educational facility attached to a high-security youth detention centre in inner-city Melbourne, was far from his dream first teaching job, but it was all he could get. Despite the much-vaunted teacher drought, Jackman says finding employment was incredibly difficult.

Driving to the interview he passes a string of private schools, helicopter parents lining the route in SUVs for drop-offs in front of billboards boasting 'Our girls change the world'. At Parkville, there was just one vehicle, a white van with dark windows disappearing through an industrial roller-door into the Youth Justice precinct where signs screamed 'RESTRICTED AREA'. Jackman says all the right things about wanting to make a difference and work one-on-one with students and he means it, but he suspects the reason he got the job was because he was the only candidate.

What happens next is the heart of this bold memoir. On his first day, Jackman's wife tells him, "You don't have to do this … It's not too late to pull out." Her concern is justified; the danger, violence and trauma Jackman comes to witness are shocking and hard to read.

Interlocking narratives reveal students' damaged backgrounds but Jackman's impressive commitment to the transformative powers of education provides the story with a sense of hope. The structure, which darts back and forth in time, incorporating snatches from Jackman's life story, leaves the reader frustrated at times and wanting to know more. There is a similar sense of incompleteness in some of the boys' stories, possibly because names and situations have been changed for privacy. But where Detention soars is in the growing rage that drives Jackman to take on the Department of Justice and Community Safety and expose what he believes is a catastrophic breach of the human rights of our most desperate children.

— Juliet Rieden

Villa Coco by Andrew Sean Greer

Sceptre

In Villa Coco, Andrew Sean Greer — who won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel Less — draws on his time as executive director of the Santa Maddalena Foundation, where he worked alongside its president, Beatrice Monti della Corte, to run a writers' residency in Tuscany. The baronessa was popular among visitors; according to former guest Zadie Smith: "The only things Beatrice won't talk about are things that are boring."

The Baronessa of Greer's novel, the eponymous 92-year-old Coco, is similarly refined in taste and intolerant of dull conversation. The narrator, unnamed until the end but nicknamed Giovedì by the Baronessa, is a newly graduated archivist who has been dispatched to Italy from the US by his parents to learn "to take life seriously" after spending three-and-a-half dissolute years at college. At 21, he is "[a] Boy Scout of a man … in no way prepared for the crucial final exams of Real Life".

Giovedì, having sworn off men and youthful hedonism, is determined to complete the task for which he has been employed by the Baronessa: to ostensibly catalogue the innumerable treasures filling her house. Instead, he finds himself picking olives, pruning roses and hunting an elusive marten. At Villa Coco, he finds an eccentric cast of characters: Ghazel, the Lebanese handyman; the mysterious Italian Algerian neighbour Estelle; the Sri Lankan cook Nimali and her husband Vinsanda; the dapper artist Oscar and the Baronessa's nervy cousin, Giacomo. As Giovedì accompanies Coco on her various escapades, it becomes clear a mystery is afoot.

Villa Coco is a comic and poignant coming-of-age novel in which Giovedì learns how to live — and how to dress for dinner. Told in three parts tracking the seasons, the novel also considers the seasons of life. While Giovedì is in his summer, the Baronessa and Oscar, who leaves a strong impression on Giovedì, are fast approaching their winter. As the Baronessa says, misquoting La Princess de Clèves: "There is a heavy price we have to pay for seeing things as they are. The price is our youth."

— Nicola Heath

Jean by Madeleine Dunnigan

Daunt Books

Jean is 17, Jewish and struggling. Studying at a rural boys' boarding school in the UK for troubled teens, he feels alienated from his peers, many of whom are fee-paying while he is on a scholarship.

Jean has a troubled relationship with his German-Jewish refugee mother, Rosa, and absent father. But he is trying to make friends. One boy in particular, Tom, promises escape.

With Tom, he begins to form his first romantic relationship and to venture out into the world. It is not only that he has trouble connecting to others but that others have trouble connecting to him. Could Tom be different? Could Jean?

Small epiphanies are threaded throughout Madeleine Dunnigan's astonishingly assured debut. We follow Jean's narrow yet also slowly changing conception of himself, the world and who he is in it. Cannily, and with some pathos, Dunnigan captures his interiority and limited understanding. She also convincingly details Jean's abbreviated relationships with women. There are hints of undiagnosed ADHD and of other unspoken or ignored aspects of the boy, who has grown up among the laissez-faire, boho-hippie currents of the 70s. Stoned hangouts with the boys make him feel like part of something; they also let him mask dyslexia.

Dunnigan writes with a lovely sense of subtlety about things that are both dark and beautiful. What this mesmeric novel offers is a remarkable sense of presence. It's more unpredictable than you might expect — and eerier, too.

— Declan Fry

Said the Dead by Doireann Ní Ghríofa

Faber

Doireann Ní Ghríofa is a bilingual Irish poet and writer of prose who can stop you in your tracks with a string of words, a striking image, a precise rendering of both feeling and experience. Like many arresting stories, this one begins with a knock on the door, because "[t]he knock in the night has always been my calling, opening bleary doors to find strangers whispering urgently of illness or injury. I have never refused them. Never will." See how with the decreasing number of words per sentence, she increases their value?

But wait, who is knocking and what do they want?

It's a woman from the past: "Dark eyes, dark hood, muddy boots."

The narrator of this book, The Reader — almost, but not quite, the author herself — regularly walks past an abandoned mental asylum in Cork. It's being repurposed as luxury apartments, its history painted over. She enters the old buildings, sometimes illegally, and re-animates them through careful historical research, filling the spaces with the lives of women patients and the doctors and other workers who documented them. In the process, she tracks the lives of two sisters, the Misses Strangman, who trained as doctors in the 1890s, one of whom — Lucia — ended up working for years in the asylum. Ní Ghríofa decodes clinical notes from casebooks, looking closely at apparently bloodless phrases like "No change/No change" appended next to a woman confined for year after year in this place.

Said the Dead is full of arresting pen portraits of women who slip in and out of abandoned spaces, knock on imagination's door in the night, demand to be heard; but there's more going on alongside that. In another time and place, The Reader knows, she might have been locked up herself, in her own postnatal crises. It's also one of the best renderings of the thrill, beauty and surprise of archival research I've ever read.

— Kate Evans

I Love You Don't Die by Jade Song

Bonnier

I Love You Don't Die is both the title of New York author Jade Song's sophomore novel and the reprieve its protagonist Vicky repeats to her loved ones, terrified and hyper-aware that one day they might leave her.

Vicky is obsessed with death. She lives above a funeral parlour, collects zhizha (Chinese paper offerings made for funerals) and takes her dates to her favourite cemeteries. She makes her money as a copywriter for Onwards, an end-of-life startup headed up by a celebrity orphan who has found a way to commodify and commercialise death. Through building her life around death, however, Vicky has lost any zest for life.

Song dives into the well-trodden genre of (as my favourite Goodreads list calls it) 'women vs the void'. Its novels, featuring prominent authors like Otessa Moshfegh and Halle Butler, focus on women whose melancholy can be traced back to the overwhelming and exhausting forces of modern capitalism and individualism. They are sad, lonely, and bored of being told to hustle themselves out of their ennui.

As Song writes: "Everybody is unhappy and everybody is dying. It isn't that Vicky doesn't care. More that she cares so much that the amount paralyzes her. Easier to ignore the truth of imminent monotonous disaster. Easier to stay in bed. Easier to pretend everything is fine."

When Vicky begins dating a couple, Kevin and Angela, the naivety of her ideas on life — and death — are put to the test. The ensuing reflections on love, grief, and depression are delivered through Vicky's dry yet warm inner monologue.

Song has brought death to the party and it works. I Love You Don't Die is an intimate and intriguing novel. Quirky, uncomfortable and odd, it asks the reader: how do we love and live when we know one day it will end?

— Rosie Ofori Ward

Whistler by Ann Patchett

Bloomsbury Publishing

Call me naive, but I am a sucker for optimistic fiction. Ann Patchett's 10th novel, Whistler, is about good, kind people being mostly good and kind to each other, and I absolutely love it.

Whistler opens at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in present-day New York City. Fifty-something (good, kind) Daphne and her husband, (good, kind) Jonathan, are looking at the exhibits when Jonathan notices another man following them from room to room. It turns out this stranger is Eddie Triplett, a man who was Daphne's stepfather for a brief time when she was a child. She hasn't seen him in over 40 years.

Forget anything awful you've ever been told about step-parents. Eddie is, you've guessed it, good and kind, and he and Daphne are determined to make up for lost time. They crash a wedding, drink too much champagne and delight in each other's company.

It's all pretty joyful, but there's some serious stuff to unpick here, too. As the pair grows closer, we find out more about Eddie's difficult inner life, Daphne's father's illness and death, and, most importantly, the terrifying car accident that marked an abrupt end to Eddie and Daphne's relationship all those years earlier. There's a poignancy to this story, and a great sense of what has been lost in those years of separation.

Patchett says Whistler was a pleasure to write — and it shows. The story rockets along, with the mysteries of the past revealing themselves seamlessly. There is a great warmth and maturity to our narrator, Daphne. You'll want to linger with her and all these good, kind people long after the last page is read.

— Claire Nichols

Worry Doll by Laura McPhee-Browne

Scribe Publications

Two women unmoor one another in Laura McPhee-Browne's claustrophobic third novel.

Middle-aged Heloise yearns for Lacey, 24, but fears her husband will find out about the relationship. It's not her only insecurity: their well-heeled, inner-city residence is subsidised by her in-laws and, working at a women's shelter, she is self-conscious and prim in a way that makes her feel both older and younger than her age. There are signs she is psychologically troubled, but in what way is unclear. She tends to forget things and does not know why.

Lacey is an engineering student who seeks "[t]he capturing of uncertainty, the attempt to make sense of the world". Her parents are separated yet remain tied in small ways (her mother still wears her engagement ring), an idea that consoles Lacey.

It is also an idea that animates this short, anguished novel. There is a fugitive, chiaroscuro quality to Heloise and Lacey's lives. Both women are full of longing and dissatisfaction.

The novel is divided into two halves, each told from one woman's perspective and taking place over the course of a week. There are sly hints that Heloise's ways of thinking may have influenced Lacey's — although that "may" is a big one. Both women tend toward compulsive habits and ways of thinking, some of them obscure (Heloise often repeat things three times), others seemingly therapeutic (Lacey is aware of her walking, of putting one foot in front of the other). Lacey herself pines for another woman, Dale, inciting Heloise's jealousy. While Heloise is prone to forgetting things, Lacey tends to remember them; she keeps seeing Dale when Dale isn't there in the faces of strangers and passers-by.

Both women worry they are losing their grip, although what they may be losing their grip upon is kept ambiguous. Worry Doll suggests many things are difficult to hold: trauma (Heloise's mother dies in circumstances the novel hints may have involved instability), a person, or simply the words to express things.

Gentle, lonely, dreamy, pained, Worry Doll is about yearning to unlock a person, whether it's oneself or someone else. Toward the end, Lacey reads from Annie Ernaux's Simple Passion — Olivia Rodrigo, yearner extraordinaire, is also a fan — and quotes a line that feels key to Worry Doll, in which Ernaux suggests that there may be little difference between reconstruction and hallucination, memory and madness.

— Declan Fry

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