The Grimmelings
Rachael King, Allen & Unwin, $22.99

The evocative Scottish word grimmelings refers to the first or last gleams of sunlight in a day. It’s a great title for a children’s novel steeped in Scottish folklore. Growing up in New Zealand, 13-year-old Ella has a deep love of equine creatures, her pony Magpie chief among them. So when she curses Josh Underhill and the boy promptly disappears, just as her father had, she’s unnerved by the black horse-like entity she spots on a nearby hill. This spirit is known as a Kelpie, unwittingly spirited halfway across the world by Ella’s Scottish grandmother when she emigrated, and together with Magpie, Ella must brave its vengeance and find a way to stop it from snatching anyone else. Rachael King’s latest YA book takes this eerie inheritance and turns it into a tense tale of animal companionship, wild magic, and the majesty and awe nature inspires.

NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
The End of Eden
Adam Welz, Bloomsbury Sigma, $34.99

This is not a lament for the mythical playground of Adam and Eve but for the natural diversity and abundance that we are so wantonly squandering.

And it is not surprising to learn that naturalist Adam Welz wrote this book with an increasingly heavy heart such is the toll that climate breakdown is already taking and is still to take. Yet his lyricism and storytelling skills ensure that the reader cannot look away, whether it is from the disappearing Joshua Trees of the Mojave, the Puerto Rican parrots devastated by hurricane, the Macquarie perch suffocated by ash-sludge after our Black Summer bushfires, or the “ghost moose” of northern Maine under attack from a tick thriving in higher temperatures. Welz has a gift for explaining the scientific fundamentals to illustrate how rises in temperature cascade through habitats, upsetting the natural balance and reshaping the world.

The Shortest History of Italy
Ross King, Black Inc., $27.99

Reading this compact chronicle of the past 3000 years of Italian history is a bit like whizzing through a slideshow of hazily familiar images: Romulus and Remus being suckled by a wolf, a parade of toga-clad leaders forging the Roman Republic with its three branches of government, Rome’s ever-expanding dominion of the known world built on slavery and endless warfare, the hilltop fortifications of the Middle Ages and the glories of the Renaissance. But it is also a user-friendly way of filling in the many blanks in one’s knowledge. For instance, satellite images show a strong link between Roman roads and modern European concentrations of economic affluence. Other buried facts excavated include women artists such as 16th-century portraitist Sofonisba Anguissola, and more recently the 70,000 female resistance fighters in the Second World War, thousands of whom were executed.

Love and Money, Sex and Death
McKenzie Wark, Bloomsbury, $22.99

“Maybe there really is nothing but fiction and property holding the self together through time,” writes McKenzie Wark in a letter to her younger self. This impulse to embrace uncertainty, this intuition of unboundedness “pooling beyond what’s known” ripples through Wark’s epistolary meditations on becoming a trans woman in midlife, and the experiences and insights that forged her sense of identity. Yet this is not a book driven by identity politics. Incisive, wry and distinguished by an absence of self-pity, it is much more expansive and nuanced than that. While Wark describes her previous incarnation as cool and beyond reach, this memoir is fuelled by tenderness for the mother she lost when she was six, for her former self, for lovers and friends, for her sister who raised her, for her ex-wife and children and for writing as a form of play, a liberation from “the same old tune”.

Time to Reboot: Feminism in the Algorithm Age
Carla Wilshire, Monash University Publishing, $19.95

Put simply, women’s rights are regressing under the influence of algorithms and AI created by men. To read this bracing essay is to be confronted with the daunting task faced by fifth wave of feminism.

It’s not just that the gaming industry, coding, designing and technology in general are male-dominated. It’s the way the platforms, digital services and generative AI feed on existing biases, prejudices and stereotypes, amplifying and distorting them to a frightening degree. From obliging, compliant female voice assistants to deepfake porn videos and chatbots that serve up misogyny and racism, “virtual bias has real implications”, says Carla Wilshire. There is also the long-term economic impact of feedback loops driven by content-serving algorithms that condition girls to spend and boys to invest. If technology is destiny, says Wilshire, society better get cracking to make this space equal for all.

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