Meredith founded the Copeton Crochet Collective hoping to attract a circle of friends – a circle with her in charge and no men in sight. Her sorority doesn’t quite work out as planned when Edith brings her dishy grandson Luke, who’s keen on handicrafts, but everyone has their own reasons for joining. For Claire, it’s to escape the relentlessness of children, while Lottie and Harper harbour secrets they’d rather not unspool. But it is Yasmin – an Australian Muslim sick of being asked about her hijab – around whom the CCC must rally when a proposed mosque leads to anti-Muslim sentiment in the neighbourhood. Will a bright crocheted solution be enough to keep bigotry at bay? Kate Solly’s debut novel is certainly big-hearted feel-good fiction with larger-than-life characters. The plot doesn’t work in social issues as seamlessly as it could, and it is a touch predictable, but the characters are as vivid as the sense of community they share.

NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Lone Wolf
Katharine Murphy, Quarterly Essay, $24.99

Two metaphors govern this essay – the lone wolf of the title and the more expansive conceit of survival in the surf. During the plague year of 2020, Anthony Albanese’s strategy was not to struggle against unfavourable circumstances but, in his words, to “dive down deep, come up for air, and wait for the right wave to come in”. This strategy marked the transformation of Albanese from lone wolf to collaborative leader, says Katharine Murphy. While biding his time did not come easily to the rhetorical bomb-thrower of the Left, the skill of planning ahead was honed in his youth. His mother, Maryanne, was often unwell with rheumatoid arthritis, and it fell to him to look after her. Murphy helps us see how such an underestimated politician was able to harness the electorate’s appetite for a political sea change and ride the teal wave all the way to the shore.

Blurb Your Enthusiasm
Louise Willder, One World, $29.99

It’s a wonder Louis MacNeice didn’t biff T. S. Eliot in the nose when he read the blurb for his book of poems. “His work is intelligible but unpopular...” Strangely, Eliot was considered Faber & Faber’s best blurb-writer, although his reverse psychology may have been too subtle for most readers. As a copywriter for Penguin for 25 years, Louise Willder well appreciates the nuances of the finely crafted blurb and its role in a book’s publishing history. Along with analysing the nuts and bolts of finessing a killer blurb, she surveys the history of cover copy, the bliss of blurbs so bad they are good, and how different genres demands different blurb styles. The wit and flair Willder brings to her job is best captured in this haiku about how brevity and layout can make a blurb sing: “Don’t be scared of white space/ Space is your friend./ It makes everything you write/ Look better.”

Neverland
Tricia Shantz, Surf Research, $70

A hard, conservative, industrial, working-class town. These are not adjectives normally associated with Byron Bay. Yet this was the world that Australian and American surfers encountered in the 1960s and ’70s, when they came to the far north coast of NSW and “set the agenda for what Byron was to become”. Tricia Shantz has conjured up the early days of this transformation through the eyes of the entrepreneurial and creative bunch of surfers who fell in love with the waves and the natural beauty of the place, becoming bearers of the counterculture ethos that is now Byron’s brand. Evocative images combined with the recollections of surfers now synonymous with Byron such as Rusty Miller and Bob McTavish capture the unique vibe and adventurous spirit of these early days before, as Lissa Coote puts it, the lotus eaters fled and “the town settled into a sort of middle aged spread”.

Great Australian Places
Graham Seal, Allen & Unwin, $32.99

In the cult film Paul, two British sci-fi nerds go on a UFO road trip across America only to have their holiday hijacked by a wise-cracking alien. Timed for the summer break, this armchair road trip to haunted, sacred, weird and iconic places in Australia provides a possible template for the kind of holiday in which reality and myth collide. Places from the Tiwi Islands to Botany Bay where the arrival and impact of alien Europeans on Indigenous peoples can be encountered in the landscape; where the brutal treatment of convicts is memorialised in “the Bloody Bridge” of Norfolk Island; where vast tracts of land from Port Augusta to Darwin hum with the story of the overland telegraph; where the origins of the Labor Party can be found beneath a ghost gum tree at Barcaldine. This is old-style Australian folklore updated for the sensibilities of the 21st century.

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