Anomaly
Emma Lord, Affirm Press, $22.99

Fuelled by a trope popular from dystopian survival stories such as 28 Days Later, Emma Lord’s Anomaly sees Piper wake as the lone survivor of a virus that’s wiped out most of humanity. There, the similarities end as she (accompanied by her dog Griff) scrambles to find food and shelter, all the while developing a mysterious power she must fight to control. Encountering the wounded Seth, close to death after being attacked by mind-devouring beings called Reapers, the traumas of the past are woven into imminent horrors beyond comprehension. Intended as the first in a trilogy, Lord’s assured world-building creates a devastated Australia, through which the brave and vulnerable teen heroes make their way. Featuring relatable adolescent characters in a horrifying future, Anomaly builds towards epic intimations that should have younger readers hanging out for the next volume.

NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Kingmaker
Sonia Purnell, Virago, $34.99

In 1940, 20-year-old Pamela Churchill – armed with evident seductive powers as well as an astutely perceptive intelligence, was mobilised by the British government and sent to war. She was daughter-in-law of Winston, and her brief was to win the Americans over to the war effort. First was a charm job on FDR’s confidante Harry Hopkins, which helped considerably in producing the Lend-Lease program. Her seduction of US special envoy in London, Averell Harriman (whom she later married), went beyond charm and was, as the phrase went, “thorough going”. Purnell’s argument is that she has either been forgotten or spitefully remembered as a gold-digging “tart”. Her influence (taking in JFK et al) covered five decades, and her story, often told with a kind of breathless confidentiality, makes fascinating reading.

Frank Knopfelmacher: Selected Writings
Edited by Andrew Knopfelmacher, Connor Court $34.95

Vienna born Frank Knopfelmacher (1923-1995) – who, during WWII, worked on an Israeli kibbutz and fought with the English Eighth Army, before fleeing Czechoslovakia after the communists came to power, eventually fetching up at Melbourne University in 1955 – was a bete-noire of the left when I was at uni in the early 1970s, largely because of his pro-Vietnam war stance. It’s a fair bet, he still would be. These essays, edited by his son, run from 1958 to 1993 and cover a wide variety of topics (including an astute defence of Hannah Arendt), all united by a defining hatred of totalitarianism, that often translated into contempt for most of the left. The key essay is My Political Education, an intriguing autobiographical piece, that charts his progression from Marx to Muggeridge. By turns passionate, self-opinionated and uncompromising.

Race Mathews: A Life in Politics
Iola Mathews, Monash University Publishing, $39.99

When former federal and Victorian MP Race Mathews was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2022, he was four chapters into his autobiography. The completed work is what you might call an unintended collaboration between Race and his wife Iola. The story, drawing on his own writing, shifts from first person to third from chapter five on. As is often the case with political tales, this one is a portrait of the man and his times – charting the influence of his parents (political and literary), Melbourne Grammar, the Fabian Society, becoming Whitlam’s private secretary and an MP. It also provides a first-hand account of what it was like to ride the Whitlam wave to power in 1972 and experience the dumper of dismissal in 1975. A portrait of decency and idealism tempered by realism, that has the immediacy of those who were there.

The Bravest Scout at Gallipoli
Ryan Butta, Affirm Press, $34.99

When Sergeant Harry Freame, DCM, disembarked in Sydney in 1916, he was the “Marvel of Gallipoli”, hailed in the newspapers for his exploits as a scout, entering no man’s land to gather intelligence and often posing as a Turkish officer behind the lines. But by the end of WWII, he was virtually forgotten. Ryan Butta’s thoroughly researched, engaging study delves into the enigma of Harry: a Japanese-Australian, born in Japan, with an adoptive father who trained him in the Bushido code, who, after a colourful seafaring life, arrived in Australia in 1913 where he enlisted a year later. In 1940 he was recruited as a spy and sent to Tokyo where the secret police attempted to garrotte him in the street; Freame died soon after. An intriguingly complex tale that examines the racial and cultural implications of Harry’s fall into obscurity.