Non-fiction
Lives of the Publishers
In his posthumously published masterpiece 2666, Roberto Bolaño is clear-sighted enough to know that a visionary writer amounts to little without a visionary publisher. What would Benno von Archimboldi, the ‘great black shark’ of world literature, have been without Jacob Bubis, the German publisher unconditionally committed to him?
Brittle and brilliant: Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century
A new and comprehensive biography by Australian-born Britten scholar, administrator and conductor, Paul Kildea, is a worthy addition to the already significant pile of biographies and scholarly tomes on the composer. And it comes with a new controversy.
Digging a Hole in the Ocean: The Sea Inside by Philip Hoare
The Sea Inside plays with associative knowledge and pattern recognition, giving it a sometimes surreal quality as it leaps between informational clusters. Chronicled within its pages are scientists, docents, authors, bohemians, monks and adventurers, notable Indigenous figures, warriors and mystics.
The beginning is nigh: The Book of Barely Imagined Beings
Book of Barely Imagined Beasts… takes the bestiaries of the Middle Ages and uses them as the model for an attempt to tease out the way animals (and the ways we choose to think about them) are integral to our understanding of ourselves and our place in the world.
In defiance of time: The Broken Road by Patrick Leigh Fermor
The finest travel narrative of the twentieth century can at last be read in full in the second decade of the twenty-first, some 80 years after the events it describes and two after its author, Patrick Leigh Fermor, died at the splendid age of 96. These temporal perspectives are worth noting at the outset because time – its passing and loss, its magical recuperation and crystallisation through the white magic of narrative – is at the heart of Leigh Fermor’s enchanting trilogy.
The grey zone: Night Games by Anna Krien
Night Games is not simply an exploration of a particular case. It lays bare football’s problematic sexual culture, which treats women as objects for men’s sexual use. It also highlights flaws within the legal processes that are in place to deal with rape cases. In a non-judgemental and engaging style, Krien presents her book as a consideration of the wider issues of rape, sex, sport and law.