Niki Savva, Earthquake

 

- Earthquake is celebrated journalist Niki Savva's fifth book, and in my humble opinion, her best. 

- She's not just a close observer of Australian politics, she writes clear and lucid prose, never bogging the reader down in details that aren't essential to her story. And she’s hard hitting. She doesn’t pussyfoot around. 

- It's so obvious she’s grounded in the lives of ordinary Australians. She doesn’t sit in an ivory tower nor is she a prisoner of an ideology or bias. And she is probably the most respected journalist and political author in Australia. And I can imagine that no matter who you are or how important you are in the political sphere, if she calls you answer. 

- Her prime focus in this book is the lead up to the 2025 election and the groundbreaking result. And basically how Dutton completely stuffed it all up on every level. 

- Her respect for Albanese and what he achieved in the election is outlined in detail, and, in a way, her moderate small-l Liberal background gives that credibility. She was a fly on the wall at all political meetings from the PM’s down. 

- The book has two parts. Part 1 republishes 60 of her SMH/Age columns that were written between August 2021 and March 2025, including a speech she gave in Parliament House in September 2024. I had read all these at the time they were first published, so didn't need to read them again. Part 2 focuses on the 2025 election, and it is simply superb.

- If you're interested in politics, this book is a must read.  

Geoffrey Robertson, World of War Crimes.

 

- Renowned human rights lawyer and author Geoffrey Robertson has written a highly informed critique of the United Nations over the last hundred or so years since its inception. He doesn't hold back. In fact he eviscerates the organisation, particularly the Security Council, neutered as it is by the world's five most powerful aggressors whose vetoes continually undermine its power to confront atrocities, particularly against democratic nations.

- The book was completed in late October 2025 so is fully up to date. He delves into Putin's war on Ukraine, Netanyahu's genocide against the Palestinians, the crisis in Sudan, and other brutal and criminal wars over the decades.   

- He damns Putin and his fear of Ukraine's ambition to join NATO as a 'threat' to Russia as an absurd overreaction. The perceived threat was non-existent. His 'persistent accusation of genocide - he alleges that Ukraine threatened to eradicate the 4 million inhabitants of Donetsk and Luhansk - is pure fantasy...Ukraine did not attack Russia and was not equipped or capable of attacking Russia, even with the help of NATO, of which it was not a member'.

- The UN Security Council is worthless. It has become the main obstacle to accountability. Its five permanent members - the US, Russia, France, the UK and China - are able to veto any resolution which runs counter to their national interests.  

- ‘The prospect that those who bomb civilians, starve populations and unleash drones upon cities will ever be held to account is as distant as ever.’ 

- Robertson argues persuasively that major reforms are needed to make the UN the powerful international organisation the world now desperately needs in our age of horrendous wars. 

- I wholly recommend this detailed, highly informed book to anyone who is, like me, in a state of despair over the current state of the world. 

Lily King, Heart the Lover

 

- Lily King is the bestselling American author of six novels, including Euphoria and Writers and Lovers. This new novel is the first of hers I've read, and I'm so glad I did.  

- It's an enthralling and delightful story about college students and their relationships, sexual interactions and breakups. And their lives two decades later, where there are new elements - family, sadness, illness and death. 

- Miss Jordan Baker meets two young men, Sam and Yash, in her first year of college in Minnesota. They are studying literature and the Latin and Greek classics. She and Sam become intimate, but Sam is very religious and refuses to have sex with her. They inevitably break up. 

- She then falls for Yash, who is of Indian heritage, and they indulge in sex constantly. After graduation she accepts a job offer in a restaurant in Paris, but Yash can’t go. She stays with Lea, who says ‘these decisions we make in youth are everything…Marry him and have your babies. It doesn’t matter what happens after that’. 

- Yash decides to go to New York, and he barely writes to her. She finally decides to join him and they arrange to meet up at the airport. But he doesn’t arrive. She’s also recently learnt that she's pregnant. 

- In Part Two it's twenty-one years later. We learn that her baby was adopted out to French parents. She's married to Silas and they have two boys. Yash went to law school and now has a legal career. She’s never told Yash about their baby. 

- Unfortunately Yash gets cancer. She and Sam meet up again when they’re visiting Yash in hospital. Sam is married with kids but still very close to Yash. The three of them talk about their lives together as friends and the deep memories they share. ‘The two of you were my real education’ she tells them. 

- Her husband Silas urges her to tell Yash about his child, but she’s afraid it will hurt him. At the same time Jack, her sick son, is scheduled for brain stem surgery in a few days. 

- The novel ends with immense sadness and sensitivity. But we're reminded of the beauty and courage in all of us as we confront our challenges.   

-(By the way this has to be one of the ugliest covers I’ve seen ever!) 

Dan Wang, Breakneck

 - Dan Wang has written a brilliant book on all levels. In clear, very readable prose, he tells the story of the dynamic post-Mao China over the last fifty or so years, focussing particularly on the current Xi Jinping era. China has evolved into an 'engineering state', relentlessly building big at breakneck speed. All twenty-five members of the Politburo, China's cabinet, are engineers, and male. 

- In contrast, the US has floundered over the same period, losing its manufacturing capabilities and ambitions. In stark contrast to China it has become a 'lawyerly state', bogged down in administrative procedures, legal processes, and judicial restraints which stall every attempt to make change. 'Lawyers create so many complications that the rules governing everything from health care and housing to banking have become incomprehensible'. 

- A very enlightening feature of the book is the way Wang describes the huge cities of Shanghai, Beijing and Shenzhen and paints a picture of what living in them actually entails. Shanghai is by far the best place to actually live, rather than just work, 'where many streets have remained human-scaled rather than being built for cars'. It's full of cafes, has a Paris edge, is easy to get around by bike, and is highly walkable. The other large cities are dominated by tall tower blocks and highways. They are cold and lack charm. 

- As for the people, they are lightly taxed, in fact three-quarters of them pay no income tax at all. There are no broad property taxes either, so the rich do well. But there are severe consumption taxes which are regressive because they burden the poor rather than the rich. As Wang notes 'China is a country governed by conservatives who masquerade as leftists'. 'Low taxes make China stingy on welfare. Around 10 percent of its GDP goes towards social spending, compared to 20% in the United States and 30 percent among the more generous European states...Only ten percent of the unemployed are eligible for modest benefits'. 

- Wang goes into great detail about the two disasters that the Chinese leadership brutally forced on their citizens over the recent decades - the One Child policy introduced in 1980, and the Zero-Covid policy.  Both were cruel, inhumane and destructive. 

- I would have liked Wang to go deeper into the foreign policies of both China and the US, particularly over Taiwan, but he doesn't go anywhere near that, apart from hinting that if the US goes to war with China over Taiwan it will lose. As we know the US is a warmongering nation but China isn't, despite Xi's massive spending on defence and weapons over the last decade. 

- China calls itself a developing nation. The US should too.

- Read this magnificent, highly informed book. 

(Dan Wang is a research fellow at the Hoover History Lab at Stanford University)

Trent Dalton, Gravity Let Me Go

- The only Trent Dalton book I'd read before this one was his bestselling first novel Boy Swallows Universe, which was just so damn good. As was the TV series. 

- His new novel Gravity Let Me Go is a different beast altogether. It's lighter and far less realistic but it's also immensely enjoyable. What's on show is Dalton's huge talent for brilliant comic writing. His prose is slick and utterly absorbing. 

- Noah Cork is a freelance journalist who was fired by the Murdoch-owned The Courier Mail. He was famous for his writing on crime in the Brisbane area.  Unfortunately the police hated him for his frequent condemnation of their ineptitude and put pressure on his piss weak bosses. 

- He has two daughters - Erin, who is fifteen years old, and Clementine, who is twelve. Erin is a pessimist: ‘The world is sick and dying and cannot be saved, and anybody who doesn’t see this truth is either wilfully ignorant or profoundly stupid’. Clem on the other hand is utterly delightful. She's highly intelligent and into literature - ‘Is this a circumstance of great peril, Dad?’

- Noah has just published a book about an unsolved crime - ‘Anonymous Source: The Disappearance and Discovery of Tamsin Fellows’. It's become a bestseller.

- He and his family live in the upmarket Northern Brisbane suburb of Jubilee. Their modest house is in a cul-de-sac and they're friendly with all their neighbours. The trouble is there's been a kidnapping and murder of one of them, and, predictably, the police are getting nowhere.  

- At times the story gets quite weird as Dalton indulges in all sorts of comical extremities, but it stays absorbing. It's a thriller and the ending is surprising and very satisfying. 

- I relished his prose. He's an exceptionally talented writer.

Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper, Sarah Krasnostein, The Mushroom Tapes.

 

- I was extremely reluctant to read this or any other book on the mushroom murders. The media's constant, bland, repetitive reportage of it over the last two years has been insufferable. 

- Yet this book is written by three of my favourite Australian authors. I had to read it.

- I actually enjoyed it immensely. It's balanced, open minded, and not biased in any way. Though they’re exasperated. They’re not writing, they’re talking to each other, and their discussions about the two month trial are being recorded. And hence this book. 

- And the real joy is they’re highly literary. There are lots of meaningful quotes from ancient and modern authors dotted throughout. On all sorts of aspects of what it means to be human.  

- The trial was held in Morwell, east of Melbourne in Gippsland. They drive there regularly over the course of the trial, often staying for a few days in some dump of a hotel. They’re talking to one another all the time, trying to explore Erin’s background and upbringing and her psychological makeup. And her family, particularly her feminist mother whom she resented. 

- Simon, her husband, was authoritarian, and a fervent Baptist. He was coercive and  controlling. 

- Helen is reflective and confronts the real questions: why did she do it? ‘What is in your head and how did it get there?’ She was…'overwhelmed by her emotions...In order to live a life, women have to throttle back in themselves huge amounts of aggression. So I'm never surprised when I hear about a woman killing someone. It doesn't surprise me at all.' 

- Chloe, on the other hand, is ‘the hard arse’. ‘What if we expected a broken person and we’re seeing a monster?’ ‘Of all the huge stories happening in the world, why are we all here? Climate change, the Middle East, AI about to take our jobs, the threat to democracy. But that is exactly why everyone is here. So as not to think about these things.'

- They talk about country towns, and the Baptist church. Erin's husband's father was the pastor.  

- And, of course, the mushrooms. Erin thoroughly researched death cap mushrooms, and where to find them. Details of all types of mushrooms are presented by experts during the trial. Health and Childcare officials had tried to question Erin on where she bought the mushrooms. But she'd change the time and location. She constantly lied.  

- What absolutely gobsmacked me was Erin’s previous attempts to poison her husband, Simon. After eating food prepared by her he was hospitalised four times during 2021 and 2022!! That’s why he declined to attend the family lunch. 

- As Sarah observes: ‘…I think this accounts for why people are so gripped by this. It’s a very recognisable, unexplosive-until-the-end narrative of the domestic and the everyday.’ 

- Erin’s testimony is somehow convincing. Helen would not be at all surprised if she was declared ‘not guilty’. Helen is more sympathetic to Erin throughout the whole book. ‘I don’t really believe in the devil, but I do believe that people become possessed by evil. You can talk about it in psychological way - that she’s very twisted. But there’s this great wretched darkness that she seems to reveal. I have a horrible sense of her as a kind of black hole, a vortex.’ 

- These profound reflections are what makes this book so interesting, and in fact absorbing. The murders of entirely innocent people by a lying, brutal, self-righteous animal are a stain on our humanity. 

Andrew Pippos, The Transformations

 

- Australian author Andrew Pippos, famed for the much loved novel Lucky's, has just released his second, The Transformations.

- It focuses on the dynamics of love, sex and relationships, and the changes that are an inevitable part of life. The quote from Ovid's Metamorphoses in the prologue is so apt: What we were once, and we are today, we shall not be tomorrow.

- In plain prose, full of sentences that are simple statements or describe simple facts, he delves deep into the lives and workplaces of his main characters who are journalists at a quality newspaper called The National. It is owned by a wealthy family and was founded in 1963. It competes with Murdoch's The Australian, also, ironically, founded around that time. The National is progressive in its political and social outlook, unlike The Australian which is simple rightwing trash written by and for old men needing comfort. 

- George Desoulis, 35, is a subeditor. Hilary Benton is the editor-in-chief. The time frame is around 2015. Newspapers around the world are diminishing and closing. They are going online, and there are severe staff cuts. Revenues and profits are collapsing, and advertisers are exploring other options. 

- George was married to Madeleine and they had a kid called Elektra. They split up however, and Elektra was brought up in Melbourne by Madeleine's rich and conservative parents. She is now fifteen and hates them. She wants to live with her father George back in Sydney. He's into books, as is Electra. She gets her way. She's tough and highly intelligent, and one of the novel's most enlivening characters. She's also gay, and into weed. So things were changing, or 'transforming' if you like. 

- George, in the meantime, has fallen very much in love with his work colleague Cassandra (Cass). But she's married to a bloke called Nico who is a recovering alcoholic. They have an 'open marriage', which works for both of them because they can have frequent sex with other partners. So George and Cass have frequent sex, normally once a week, as does Nico with his girlfriend. 

- So we're in a world of personal, sexual and social transformations. It's a revolution really. 

- As the book progresses of course, things start to get complicated and start to change. Pippos dives deep into all the things that effects the characters' lives and careers. No one is spared from the challenges. There is no stability. Nothing can really be relied on. 

- A full and meaningful life demands, above all, love, belief and courage. And hope. It will work out, it really will.