Word: picador
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Politicians looking for a hotline to Middle Australians, the battlers whose dreams and disappointments can determine an election, need look no further than the 17 short stories of Tim Winton's The Turning (Picador; 317 pages). In this trailer park of a collection, characters move from the suburbs to the coast and back again, serial sea-changers in a state of transcontinental drift. There's caravan dweller Raelene, beaten senseless by her craypot-lugger husband, who looks for God between the bruises (The Turning). And teen tomboy Agnes, who spends her evenings wading the shallows for catfish after her drunken...
...Cinque is dead. It's the leitmotif and only real truth in Helen Garner's true-crime account, Joe Cinque's Consolation (Picador; 328 pages). He was the good-natured son of Italian migrants who moved from Newcastle to Canberra to live with his sexy law- student girlfriend. She is Anu Singh, the indulged daughter of Sydney doctors whose eating disorders and Prozac popping saw her charge reduced to manslaughter, and who walked away with four years in jail and a masters' degree in criminology. A decade ago, in The First Stone, Garner lifted the lid off a famous sexual...
...experience is unique. It seems there's now a book reflecting every style of motherhood, from Ayun Halliday's The Big Rumpus (Seal Press), a breezy chronicle of raising children in the more bohemian neighborhoods of New York City, to Rachel Cusk's cerebral A Life's Work (Picador), an almost anatomical examination of the thousand shocks that new motherhood inflicts on a woman's psyche...
...hell with all that, the browser, the literary gossip and even the Maynard fan must think at some point: tell us something we really want to know. And now, Maynard has tried to oblige. In At Home in the World (Picador; 352 pages; $25)--yes, it's another memoir--she lifts the veil on the devastating affair she had with J.D. Salinger when she was 18 and the reclusive author of Catcher in the Rye was 53. Maynard's recounting is full of all those key details sympathetic girlfriends require. He made her eat frozen Birds Eye peas for breakfast...
This drumming ancestral cadence, after building slowly in Ricci's two earlier, related novels (including the prize-winning The Book of Saints), comes to a mist-wreathed climax in Where She Has Gone (Picador USA; 325 pages; $25). Here the sins of the Old World seep across the New as blood across a sheet. Vittorio Innocente--the name itself doesn't travel light--lives unanchored in a Toronto of immigrants, with nothing, as he says, but his freedom. Driving around town in his late father's Oldsmobile, he cannot slough off his mother's infidelity and the out-of-wedlock...