5 New(ish) Australasian Books for Your Reading List

The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. Sign up to get it by email. This week’s issue is written by Natasha Frost, a reporter in Melbourne.

Visitors to Australia and New Zealand would do well to carve out some time for their independent bookstores. A few immediate standouts: Unity Books in Wellington, Time Out Bookstore in Auckland, Readings in Melbourne (the Carlton branch is particularly good) and Gertrude & Alice in Sydney.

I tend to seek out the section dedicated to local writers. It’s here, from my experience, that you’ll find the real gems — titles that you can’t pick out at any airport bookstore and may never have heard of.

Consider this shortlist of five books your whistle-stop tour of recent Antipodean reads that might have slid under your radar, some of which will soon be published internationally.

To step into someone else’s shoes, try …

“Grand: Becoming My Mother’s Daughter,” by Noelle McCarthy

Most New Zealanders have some familiarity with Noelle McCarthy’s voice, whose Munster-inflected vowels have floated through its airwaves for much of the last two decades.

That same brogue is instantly recognizable in her memoir “Grand.” In just under 300 pages, it trips through a life lived at once too close to, and never far away enough from, her mother, who haunted the pubs of Cork City; who transformed, werewolf-like, at the first sip of Carling; and who fought tooth and nail to get her daughter into a “stuck-up school” with “an outlandish green uniform.” (Disclosure: McCarthy and I both worked at Radio New Zealand in 2015 and 2016, though on different teams.)

“Grand” hooked me like a fish. It is a tale of recovery and growth; deep, deep love; and almost insurmountable pain. In places, it is almost too raw to read — and the author’s note at the end left me ruminating on the nature of memory and memoir for months down the track. Not for nothing has it been picked up internationally by Penguin Sandycove, whose representative called it “brave and astonishing,” and which intends to publish it globally in July.