The Natural History of Love
Caroline Petit
Affirm Press, $32.99

A bitter inheritance trial in Melbourne in 1902 sets the stage for Caroline Petit’s well-researched and vividly imagined historical romance, where truth is every bit as strange as fiction. In Brazil, 1852, 16-year-old Carolina Fonçeca lives on a remote sugar plantation when a beguiling stranger comes into her life and changes it forever. The French consul, the Count de Castelnau, has fallen desperately ill on a naturalist expedition and takes time to recuperate with Carolina’s family. They share a passion for evolutionary science, and fall in love, but the count already has a wife and children in France. Rather than face disgrace in their homelands, false identities are assumed, and a new life begins in colonial-era Melbourne. It’s a gambit that a wily lawyer must uncover decades later if he’s to win a large inheritance from the Fonçeca clan for his client. Petit doesn’t seem entirely in command of fictional technique and style, but the true story is so fascinating that it holds your attention anyway.

NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
The Matter of Everything
Suzie Sheehy
Bloomsbury $29.99

You may not know what a particle accelerator is, or, the more formidably named particle collider (they smash atoms so that scientists can observe what happens), but you will be familiar with how particle physics effects everyday life, especially in medicine – CT scanners, for instance. Physicist Suzie Sheehy (Oxford and Melbourne universities), in this fascinating and highly readable study, takes us through the last hundred years of the great quest of physics (to understand matter, the stuff we’re made of) and how it behaves – from Wilhelm Rontgen’s accidental discovery of X-rays and the ripple effect of that, to the contemporary conclusion that only 5 per cent of matter is “known”, the rest being “dark” matter. Sheehy, who examines 12 pivotal discoveries, is a rare beast in that she is not only an expert but a first-rate communicator.

am I black enough for you?
Anita Heiss
Vintage $34.99

When Anita Heiss was young she was often asked how she could be Indigenous when her father was Austrian – something that stayed with her into adulthood when her aboriginality was questioned in the media in 2009, leading to the first edition of am I black enough for you? Ten years on, this is the revised, updated version. It’s a combination of memoir and statement, often focusing on identity and Australia’s fixation with it. In many ways, in going back through her family history – Indigenous mother, European father, Catholic education, country and urban upbringing, among other things – this amounts to a portrait of the complex nature of identity that defies simplistic reduction, Heiss equally at home with her Indigenous heritage and personal sacred sites like Maroubra beach, as she meditates on Gustav Klimt in Vienna.

Accidental Gods
Anna Della Subin
Granta $39.99

Columbus didn’t set out to be deified, but he was mistaken for a god by the islanders he encountered when his ship arrived in the Pacific as if descended from heaven. Along with Cook, who was greeted as a god when he arrived at Hawaii (but who made the fatal mistake of returning), they were accidental gods. Men, often as not white imperialists, deified. Subin, graduate of the Harvard Divinity School, traces the long history of deification, from the classical world to the present, taking in a veritable pantheon of case studies: Haile Selassie, more or less deified by National Geographic; General MacArthur, who achieved god-like status in the void left by the humanising of the Japanese emperor; and Gandhi, who was trailed by tales of miracles much like Christ. An epic but cautionary tale.

Moonshot
Albert Bourla
Harper Collins, $32.99

The eponymous moonshot is the story of Pfizer’s quest to “make the impossible possible” and produce a COVID vaccine ASAP. Written by Pfizer’s chief executive Albert Bourla, it raises immediate and obvious questions about objectivity – and, of course, Pfizer comes out looking terrific. He walks the reader through just about every step of the nine-month journey, the title coming from JFK’s famous speech about putting a man on the moon, the book frequently talking about aiming high while frequently quoting Aristotle. True, along with the work in Oxford to produce AstraZeneca, it was an amazing feat for which we’re all grateful, and a dramatic story. The writing, however, often reads like a mixture of rousing company report and management masterclass in how you, too, can make the impossible possible. All the same, fly-on-the wall stuff.