Cheon Seon-Ran, The Midnight Shift

 

- This bestselling cult novel from Korea is about vampires and how challenging they find humans. I found it exquisitely boring.  

- Nevertheless I continued reading it, not just because I'd bought it, but to see if some underlying theme would emerge that would give it some deeper meaning. It did, sort of. Loneliness is central. Vampires exploit loneliness. Children for example kill Santa when they're young, which is why every child gets lonelier and lonelier as they grow up.

- There are two central characters, Suyeon, a female detective, and Violette, a vampire hunter. Six suicides, or so it seems, have occurred at a Rehabilitation Hospital. The old women, who suffered from dementia or depression, had jumped from the sixth floor over a period of weeks. Surprisingly, there was hardly any blood. Violette concludes that a vampire did it. There were two holes above the left clavicle on each victim. Vampires suck so much blood that if humans fall from a height immediately afterwards, a minimal amount of blood leaves the body. 

- Or is there a human serial killer involved? Nanju, a nurse at the hospital, is a suspect, because she cared for all the victims, and was recently identified as a drug dealer. She owed money to criminals and was desperate. Nanju would have picked the victims, who were ‘tired of living'. 

 - Violette is an expert on vampires and knows some intimately. Lily is one. Lily discloses that vampires are two hundred years older than most humans. Violette also knows another vampire, Greta, who tells her about the old Agreement between humans and vampires: vampires would not kill humans by drawing human blood. They would only weaken them, and the victims would fully recover after a few weeks. 

- The novel doesn't end satisfactorily at all. The police don't believe in vampires, and mistrust Detective Suyeon and vampire hunter Violette. So that's it. 

 

Katie Kitamura, Audition

 

- Acclaimed American author Katie Kitamura's new novel is brilliant, to say the least. It focuses on the precariousness of life and relationships. Everything is a play. We're all actors. But pretence can’t last. Playacting can’t last. We can play it hard of course but eventually we're exhausted. 

- Then the quandary: what is the truth about us and our lives? Is it possible to get to the bottom of it?

- It's a 200 page novel in two parts. In Part One a middle-aged woman, who is an actress, meets a young student, Xavier, for lunch at a restaurant in the West Village in New York. Her husband Tomas, a writer, walks in, but suddenly leaves. He had come to the wrong restaurant. Did he see her there, with the young attractive man?

- Xavier had good reason to believe she was his mother. But she didn’t ‘give up a child’ as a journalist's article claimed. She had an abortion, we're told.

- She miscarried the second time, we're told. Her marriage was difficult. She had affairs, ‘an expression of restlessness’. 

- Currently she's rehearsing for the main role in a play called Rivers, and she's struggling with the role of a woman who switches at a key moment between two different characters. She has to move from a woman in grief to a woman of action. 

- In Part Two of the novel we learn that Rivers was a huge success, and her performance was enthusiastically celebrated by reviewers. But the story takes a shocking twist, which adds a whole new dimension to the novel. She is now continually referring to Xavier as her ‘son’ and she his ‘mother’. She even refers to Tomas as his ‘father’, and ‘our child’. Xavier, who has been promoted to the position of Assistant Director at the local theatre, ruptures their tired patterns. Like a kid coming into your life. There's a horror story element to it.

- She and Tomas agree to allow Xavier to stay in their large apartment ‘for as long as you like, it’s your home after all’. ‘I had a memory of the room in his adolescent years, a mess of dirty clothes and half-eaten sandwiches’. 

- Tomas is enlivened by Xavier’s presence in their apartment. ‘…a loosening of the old habits and constraints that had drawn the boundary around this person and made him who he was’. 

- Xavier asks if his girlfriend Hana can come live with him. Hana turns out to be a strong person. ‘He needs to grow up', she said of Xavier. And Tomas, 'an old man', seems attracted to Hana 'a young woman'. Another familiar pattern. 

- Eventually the actress recognises that the story they are playing is a pretence. ‘…in the end it took very little for the whole thing to collapse’. She realises she has become, or was always, a woman who cannot distinguish between what is real and what is not real. 

- Kitamura has written a provocative novel that challenges our ordinary patterns of life deeply. Acting, pretence, marriage, childlessness, loneliness, delusion. 

- As I said, brilliant. 

-(Unfortunately the novel is poorly edited. There are misplaced commas everywhere, and clumsy verbiage like this: ‘I was not indeterminate to myself’.)

Caro Llewellyn, Love Unedited

 

- Caro Llewellyn has written a lovely, delicious, paean to the publishing industry. Set in Sydney, Melbourne and New York it is a story of personal relationships and secret histories. People can love and care, but they can also deeply hurt and betray, parents included. 

- The book has a charm from the word go. Wet Melbourne streets, the leaves, the restaurants (Melbourne's much loved The European especially) all feature in multiple and enmeshed stories that are simply captivating. 

- The prime focus is the editor Edna and her passionate relationship with a famous (unnamed unfortunately) English author who is now living in New York. His wife and five-year-old daughter were killed by a speeding car when he was young man. He and Edna exchange affectionate emails every day.  

- Her parents 'abandoned' her, and she feels pangs of guilt. Her mother died when Edna was a child and her father shot himself a decade later. Edna departed Australia and found a job in NY as an editor at Random House. She attends the Frankfurt Book Fair, giving us a great description of it. And of course she meets up with her author/lover. They travel to Rome and indulge in its food and architectural glory. 

- As readers we glide between timeframes and cities. And we also meet Molly, an Australian book editor whose mother was called Edna. Edna died of Multiple Sclerosis when Molly was five. The echoes are ominous. 

- Molly settles in New York and meets Giancarlo, an Italian chef. They becomes lovers and longtime partners. She contemplates at one point: ‘how much literary business is done in the presence of food and wine’. Delicious food and whiskey and champagne are central in their lives. 

- Molly is reading the early chapters of a manuscript of a memoir that had been sent to her by literary agent Elaine Grimes. Grimes had died a few months earlier. Unfortunately the name of the author was never disclosed. But Molly is deeply affected by it and is eager to find her. 

- We know the memoir was written by Edna. And eventually Molly discovers that. Edna is currently in a nursing home suffering from MS. They eventually meet but Edna refuses to give her the full manuscript. However they talk for hours and bond with each other. Molly tells her about her career and her love for Giancarlo. Edna softens and hints she will complete it and gift it to her. 

- Edna dies a few weeks later and Molly receives the completed memoir. 

- The novel's ending is a gut-punch. It upends so much of what Molly and we as readers were led to believe. 

- This book is just so excellent on every level. One of the best I've read over the last few years. 

(The cover is disappointing. The model doesn’t look intelligent and looks bored. The very opposite of Edna). 

Tanya Scott, Stillwater

 

 - This debut novel from Australian doctor and writer Tanya Scott is a very detailed story full of characters across the love-hate spectrum.

- Most are likeable but a bunch are loathsome. It's about brutal gangsters forcing innocent young people to do want they want or suffer the consequences - like being shot. 

- It's a gripping read on a number of levels. The main character is Luke, a young man who faced a very difficult childhood. His drug addicted mother died and his father abandoned him. But he's highly intelligent and determined to succeed in life. He's also a good fighter, having learnt boxing in a gym run by a gangster called Gus. Gus wants Luke to do the dirty work for him and will not tolerate any resistance. Luke has no choice. 

- We go back and forth across different time zones, allowing the full picture of their relationship to emerge. 

- Another baddie is Jonathan, a rich but corrupt developer, whose daughter Emma meets Luke and is attracted to him. Jonathan and Gus both want Luke’s loyalty.  

- The story gets very bogged down at times. The constant fighting and arguing between the crims is off-putting. They are low-lifes with phones and guns, and as a reader I was utterly bored by the cliched interactions. 

- Luke and Emma are attractive though, and the more time we spend with them the better.

- Of course it's all resolved in your standard way. The baddies end badly, and the goodies survive and flourish. 

-(Scott writes well but the editing could have been better. The prose is littered with confusing pronoun references. One example of many: ‘Gus liked the cafe: Jack made excellent coffee and he could chat in Italian with Marcella’. Who does the ‘he’ refer to - Gus or Jack?)

Michael Robotham, The White Crow

 

- Celebrated Australian novelist Michael Robotham has just released The White Crow, his nineteenth.

- I've read a few of his crime thriller novels over the years and enjoyed them immensely, and this one is simply superb on every level. It's long, at 434 pages, but the chapters are short so it's a comfortable read. And it's set in London, which adds a very distinct dimension. The city is alive and also dangerous. 

- It's a complicated story of crime bosses and their ambitions and families, and the way the police on so many levels are threatened and compromised. A white crow is a person who stands out, and doesn't comply with the usual expectations and demands. Police Constable Philomena McCarthy's father and his brothers are criminals, and Philomena has distanced herself from them for over a decade. Joining the police force was her ultimate 'betrayal'. 

- But she's tough and relentless, and to her father, dangerous. 

- There are many threads and subplots but they all cohere and result in a very emotionally satisfying ending. 

- Take a break from the ugly world we currently live in and immerse yourself in this. I highly recommend it.   

Rob Franklin, Great Black Hope

 

- This is a debut novel from a young Black American gay writer. It's about the challenges the narrator and his friends constantly face just trying to survive in New York. They are well educated but have rather meaningless jobs in the corporate sphere, and spend most of their nights in the many bars and clubs that really define their lives. Drugs of course are commonplace.    

- It's a real challenge to read though, mainly because of Franklin's prose. Although very stylish and slick it's frequently pretentious. He's addicted to uncommon words. Here's an example:

...in college, they'd only come into occasional contact and, even in New York, seemed to pertain to variant slivers of the same milieu. That first postgrad summer in the city, Smith had zealously architected their distance: dinner with Carolyn and the friends with whom she'd grown up...then drinks with...the sleek, swart set to which they belonged...He'd watch their polite conversations from afar with a sense of mute anxiety, fearful that theirs would be a combustible union.

One day that first autumn, Smith awoke to rain, its soft patter percussive against all the city's cars.

- But, to be fair, sometimes the prose is just gorgeous: 

The day grew fat in its middle, then burned off in crimson wisps - the surprise of sunset arriving through a far window and engulfing every ordinary thing in gold. 

- Deep into the novel various storylines emerge that are very satisfying. And the friends and their families become very likeable. The narrator, David Smith Jr, gets charged with cocaine possession and is forced to undergo counselling, his flatmate Elle is found dead on the banks of a river, his friend Carolyn gets so sucked into the New York party scene she becomes alcohol and drug addicted and disappears. They are young, rich, party animals, ‘upwardly mobile urbanites’. 'Nothing good happens after midnight'. 

- In one section we're taken back to the South in 1942 and his parents' challenges. They are 'negroes'. Crack is becoming popular and Black kids getting longer jail sentences. It's ‘…a lifetime of dissonance, of alternately stunted and impossible expectations…’ 

- Franklin has written a love letter to New York:

...the mink-hatted older ladies walking their terriers on the Upper East Side; and down, down, in Midtown, where suits emerged from their gray-slat towers like tidal waves of minnows, their manic lunch-break motion some brief reprieve.

- Surprisingly, he makes no mention at all of key events of the time - 9/11, Obama, the Black Lives Matter movement, or even the experience of racism, subtle or overt. It's about the depth and meaning of personal friendships, and the comfort of welcoming social locales. 

- And it turns out to be a very satisfying read in the end.   

Philip Coggan, The Economic Consequences of Mr Trump

 

 - This short book by former Economist and Financial Times journalist, Philip Coggan, is a masterful demolition of Trump's obsession with tariffs.

- It's an extremely enlightening work, placing everything about tariffs and free trade in an historical and global context. And it's very clearly written. He provides loads of data and statistics, and it's totally up to date. The book has obviously been rushed into print over the last month. References to the ups and downs of what happened as late as the end of June are included. 

- It's very clear to everybody with half a brain that Trump's tariffs would not generate a mass return of manufacturing jobs to the US. The great bulk of the burden of the tariffs would fall on US businesses and consumers. Polls have shown that nearly 90% of Americans agree with that. Prices will increase full stop. And overall, the tariffs represent the largest tax increase on US citizens since 1993, costing the average household US$1,183 in 2025 alone. 

- The decline in manufacturing jobs in the US is part of a long-term trend that has emerged across the developed world, and is caused more by automation than by trade competition. 

- Obviously Trump does not like the multinational order that emerged after the Second World War. The trading system after 1945 was developed by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and then by the World Trade Organisation (WTO). The guiding principal was to create a climate where, as much as possible, nations treated each other equally. The result, over the decades, was a substantial decline in tariffs and an enormous expansion in global trade.   

- Coggan ends his book with a quote from Monty Python's Life of Brian where Reg, played by John Cleese, forcefully dismisses the benefits of Roman rule: 'Apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?'.

One could sum up the message of this book, in the style of Month Python, by saying 'Apart from the failed businesses, lost jobs, goods shortages, hits to consumer and business confidence, weakening of the relationship with key allies and decline of the US's international reputation, Trump has a brilliant plan'.