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PICK OF THE WEEK
The First Woman
Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, OneWorld, $34.99
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In Kintu, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi explored masculinity through myth and history; The First Woman uses the same sweeping canvas to portray a discovery of womanhood. Its charming and inquisitive heroine, Kirabo, is a girl living in a Ugandan village during the dictatorship of Idi Amin. She is surrounded by strong women, including her formidable grandmother, but always wonders why her mother abandoned her. As Kirabo grows up she seeks out knowledge from other sources – the village witch Nsuuta offers a primal explanation for her rebelliousness. Indeed, Kirabo develops often amusingly antagonistic relationships with various mother-figures but must at length make her own way, finding a path that mingles Lugandan mythology and contemporary feminism.
Unstable Boys
Nick Kent, Constable, $32.99
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Rock critic Nick Kent revitalised British music journalism in the 1970s. He hung out with the likes of Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones before developing a heroin habit that stunted his career. Kent has written famous memoirs about the music scene, but Unstable Boys is his first novel. A black comedy on the cult of rock, it features a bestselling crime writer on a downward spiral. Michael Martindale had an affair. It became public in the worst possible way, and his wife left him and took the kids. Marinating in self-pity and prone to regressing, he publicly declares his fandom for the Unstable Boys, an obscure rock band from his youth – only to find its deviant lead singer, the Boy, on his doorstep. The tormented history of the band and the series of unfortunate events that derailed it rubs against dangerous nostalgia in this sardonic rock novel.
The Gaps
Leanne Hall, Text, $19.99
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Leanne Hall’s dark YA novel The Gaps unfolds from a shocking crime: the abduction of 16-year-old Yin Mitchell at an exclusive private school. The fallout from this event is intense. Rumours and conspiracy theories swirl about the schoolyard. Anxiety runs high among the traumatised students left behind. Hall takes two perspectives – the scholarship student Chloe, a misfit who usually stays on the margins of school life; and Natalia, the queen bee of Year 10 – and shows them forming an alliance amid tragic uncertainty. This a cleanly constructed novel examining female friendship forged in a grim atmosphere, and it benefits immensely from realistic teen dialogue and well-distinguished voice creation.
Leanne Hall is a guest at Sydney Writers’ Festival (swf.org.au).