‘Radical’, ‘a headrush’, ‘insanely clever’: the best Australian books out in July

The End and Everything Before It by Finegan Kruckemeyer

Fiction, Text Publishing, $32.99

I read The End and Everything Before It as electorates across Europe rewarded representatives of the far right with their votes; as Joe Biden faltered and stammered and Donald Trump appeared to swell in strength; as bombs continued to fall on Gaza and on Ukraine.

Against this backdrop, Finegan Kruckemeyer’s debut novel is a startlingly optimistic work, a fable about making families and communities, about the practices that bring people together as the world wrenches them apart. – Catriona Menzies-Pike

Big Time by Jordan Prosser

Fiction, UQP, $34.99

Jordan Presser’s gripping debut is a headrush of cyberpunk satire. Australia’s eastern states are under military rule. A once-famous band is attempting to tour illegally, while being tailed by dark forces and threatened by their own egos. And a new designer drug called F is proliferating – a drop into each eyeball can allow the user to see into the future – throwing time itself into chaos.

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This is deftly realised, cinematic, insanely clever and very funny – if Fear and Loathing got a Visit from the Goon Squad, narrated by a veteran music journo who’s landed the story of a lifetime. Someone buy the screen rights. – Steph Harmon

Slutdom by Hilary Caldwell

Nonfiction, UQP, $34.99

Hilary Caldwell is a sexologist and, as she reveals publicly for the first time in this fascinating book, a sex worker. These two perspectives – the removal of academia and lived experience – lend her voice both authority and empathy, as she examines how shame, pain and politics influences the sex Australian women are having.

Her case studies are fascinating, from the elderly women who still need sex after their husbands get dementia – and decide to pay for it – to women with vaginismus, who argue sex work should be treated as akin to massage therapies. Slutdom is the right blend of educational and entertaining, and feels genuinely radical too. – Sian Cain

Life Goes On by Megan Maurice

Nonfiction, Hachette, $34.99

Megan Maurice was a regular Guardian sports contributor, a mother to a young daughter, going about her life when it was upended by a cancer diagnosis. Her new memoir recounts not the harrowing battle with cancer, but the disorienting experience of having defeated it.

The book is at once intimate and journalistic, Maurice using her tools as a reporter to make sense of the experience that was confounding her as a cancer survivor: what happens after survival? What if we understood life-threatening illness as a trauma? And how do you make a path for yourself having escaped death once, with the new knowledge that it lurks around the corner still? – Celina Ribeiro

The Honeyeater by Jessie Tu

Fiction, Allen & Unwin, $32.99

In The Honeyeater, Jessie Tu’s second novel, we enter an unassuming world of intrigue: literary translation. Fay is a young up-and-coming translator working in Taiwanese and English. We follow her as she holidays with her mother in France. Between sightseeing and work on a new translation job, Fay must negotiate the extremely close relationship she has with her mother, a woman whose life seems ruled by fear and fastidiousness. Meanwhile, Fay’s working relationship with her mentor/boss at the university is complex and exploitative. Throw into this mix an affair and two missing fathers and you have a beautifully written and paced exploration of academic and familial power dynamics. – Joseph Cummins

If You Go by Alice Robinson

Fiction, Affirm Press, $34.99

This rather hypnotic novel opens as Esther, a 40-year-old single mother of two, wakes up in the future, having been cryogenically suspended a century before. As she comes to grips with her situation, we slowly learn about her life before this: about her children Clare and Wolfie, her failed marriage, and her conflicted feelings about motherhood.

This is very solid speculative fiction, for anyone who enjoyed Megan Hunter’s The End We Start From. It asks important and complex ethical questions – should we all have children, and if we do, how do we explain the future we are leaving for them? – SC

For Life by Ailsa Piper

Memoir, Allen & Unwin, $34.99

When playwright Ailsa Piper married actor Peter Curtin a few months after meeting in 1986, they changed one vowel in their vows, promising to stay together “as long as we both shall love”. That edit would be indicative of their three-decade partnership – creative, pun-filled and deeply romantic, until he died suddenly in their bed in 2014 while she was away. “We thought we were so clever,” she writes, “but we forgot that love could outlive life.”

For Life is Piper’s memoir of recovery, but it’s also a love letter – to Curtin, to language and to the natural world – so full of hope and awe that I felt buoyed for days afterwards. I would have read this all in one sitting had it not compelled me often to take a breath and notice the sky. – SH

Black Witness by Amy McQuire

Essays, UQP, $34.99

This collection by Darumbal and South Sea Islander journalist Amy McQuire should be required reading for anyone working in journalism, or anyone concerned about the preoccupations of our mainstream media. McQuire is an unflinching, fierce writer, unpicking how Australian media has misrepresented Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, framing crime, disorder and violence as “biological, somehow innate to the Aboriginal race, or cultural – a practice formed over tens of thousands of years, before white people even arrived”.

None of this is by accident. But McQuire also shows what journalism can be at its best, what happens when Indigenous reporters are empowered to do the work that white reporters should have been doing for decades. – SC

Radio Birdman: Retaliate First by Murray Engleheart

Nonfiction, Allen & Unwin, $36.99

Released to coincide with their 50th anniversary – and what is likely to be their final tour – Murray Engleheart’s biography of Radio Birdman is likely to be the last word on this cult Australian band. The title Retaliate First sums up this provocative, yet somehow still mysterious group’s raison d’être, but Radio Birdman’s full-frontal attack was a necessary response to a local industry that was nowhere near ready for them when they emerged the mid-70s.

Engleheart’s approach is in keeping with the band’s songs, telling the story of their rise, fall and rebirth in sentences that are short, punchy and argumentative. Admirably, the band don’t get in the way of an honest retelling of events, with the animosities that animated them from the beginning still vivid after five decades: to quote one of their songs , they drove themselves insane alive. – Andrew Stafford