The second novel from reviewer and editor Angela Meyer might have an outer space hook – it starts with an astronaut keeping a bizarre secret – but it launches into an earthbound search laced with erotic melancholy. Mila is 40 and not yet ready to mourn the fact that she’s still single and childless. She puts herself out there on a “sugar baby” dating site, attracting the vibrant, much younger Josh. They develop an emotional intimacy, and she’s shocked when her lover vanishes in Berlin, a presumed suicide. Together with Josh’s best friend Kyle, Mila journeys across the world to pursue the truth, suspecting a hoax of some kind, but fearing the worst. Moon Sugar roves from inchoate grief to the fluidity of contemporary sexuality, with a bizarre, consciousness-expanding foray into speculative fiction that gives it a strangely uneven quality. It’s “genre-defying”, to be sure, and takes bold risks, but can’t quite decide what it wants to be.

NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
My Sweet Guillotine
Jayne Tuttle, Hardie Grant, $32.99

The eponymous guillotine refers to a freak accident Jayne Tuttle had with a descending Paris lift and that ended her time in the city as depicted in Paris or Die. That near-death experience is the shadow that falls across this second instalment in a proposed trilogy: physically, psychologically and legally – Tuttle taking the apartment owners to court, which amounts to a harrowing re-enactment of the accident. But it’s also a portrait of living, loving and working in Paris that’s full of light and shade, setbacks, joys and often simple pleasures (such as the deeply satisfying taste of cheap wine after the opening night of a play she’s written) that really draws you in. And there’s an engaging gallery of characters. The writing is as crisp and evocative as ever, only this time from a more mature narrator whose portrait of Paris rings with authenticity.

Chasing Wrongs and Rights
Elaine Pearson, Scribner $34.99

Elaine Pearson’s early days working on human rights abuses focused largely on sex-trafficking, which led to her sitting in a brothel display window in Amsterdam (at the owner’s suggestion) to get the feel of the work for her research. She wasn’t investigating prostitutes who chose to be sex-workers, but those who’d been trafficked, such as “Mary” from war-torn Nigeria. From there her on-going work led to a wider range of, sometimes “hidden” abuses, such as repressive dress codes for women in Indonesia and the Orwellian “disappeared” in Sri Lanka. Then there’s the nail-biting stuff such as the 2019 case of Bahraini-born refugee Hakeem al-Araibi, an Australia citizen who went to Thailand on a belated honeymoon only to face deportation to Bahrain. This is human rights from the inside, the genuine risks and the hard-won triumphs.

Big Things Grow
Sarah Donnelley, Allen & Unwin. $32.99

Wilcannia. Population: 745. Formidable reputation. An unlikely place for an uplifting teacher’s story. Maybe not. When Sarah Donnelley left Sydney for the town she describes as having “an incredible Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal history … a melting pot of different cultures”, she already had experienced teaching Indigenous students. Even so, being a young teacher alone in a small town is a challenge. But this vivid, often moving memoir documents how the town embraced her and she it. To this extent, she’s written a love story to Wilcannia and its people: getting to know the elders of the community, parents, understanding her students (the way she sets her classroom up is a lesson in itself) and the country. There is darkness, early deaths of locals from disease and illness, but it’s a tale of light and hope.

Fair Game
Andrew Leigh, Monash University Publishing, $19.95

When Labor MHR Andrew Leigh says that Australian economic policy could take lessons from the success of our sport, both national and international, he is not advocating Darwinian, dog-eat-dog competition. The continuing themes running through this essay are that our national economy lags our sport both in innovation and fairness, and that sporting success doesn’t necessitate unfairness. To an extent, this is a portrait of a stagnant economy – one of the mind-boggling facts to emerge being that many of the top 10 companies of 1907 still are today. Just as an innovation such as rugby league – born of a desire for fair pay to amateurs – changed the game forever, our economy needs to be more dynamic: curbing monopoly powers, greater worker mobility, defending penalty rates, greater diversity and improved education.

THE BOOKLIST

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