Tears, fears and thrills

Top Of The Stack

1. NON-FICTION

CRYING IN H MART

Death is the central subject of Zauner's memoir Crying In H Mart, but the book brims with life.

Zauner, who is better known as the head of indie rock band Japanese Breakfast, centres her literary debut on her South Korean mother's death from cancer, but looks at it all lightly through the lens of food and its preparation.

Crying In H Mart was developed from a viral piece of the same name which first appeared in The New Yorker magazine in 2018.

It begins and ends with the making of Korean food, the H Mart of the title being a Korean supermarket popular in Western countries where Zauner often buys ingredients.

The strength of her writing lies in its emotional honesty. She confronts and documents her mother's deterioration from cancer with a great love unhampered by over-sentimentality.

On learning of her mother's diagnosis, she moves back to her home town of Eugene, Oregon, interrupting her life as a budding musician.

But she finds herself supplanted in the role of caretaker by an older South Korean woman named Kye, who flies in to help take care of her mother.

Zauner does not suppress her jealousy of Kye. Instead, she allows her annoyance to suffuse the prose, recognising that her feelings are rooted in a deep need to be needed by her mother.

The memoir also details her childhood and youth growing up half-Korean in small-town America.

Zauner, who was born in Seoul and whose father is American, comes to understand and connect with her mother and her culture through Korean food - especially after the death of her mother, as well as her grandmother and aunt before.

The book is filled with half-forgotten Korean words and a sense of the disconnect created by her mixed parentage.

She finds herself constantly explaining her identity to both Koreans and Americans, rarely understood by others or even by herself.

But in food, she finds meaning and closure, pulling together the various strings of her life and preserving them in the act of making kimchi, the iconic Korean fermented cabbage dish.

Fermentation, she writes, "is not quite controlled death" because the cabbage "enjoys a new life altogether".

A minor drawback of her essayistic style is its occasional disorganisation. Her prose sometimes reads like a journal and can be difficult to follow, prone to aphorism and sudden conclusion.

But as a map out of trauma, its messy form is perhaps appropriate.

If you like this, read: Just Kids by Patti Smith (Ecco, 2010, $29.81, Books Kinokuniya), the artist and musician's memoir of her youth as well as romance and friendship with the late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.

2. NON-FICTION

12 BYTES

British author Winterson is best known for her debut novel Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit (1985), but here, she delves into hard science with 12 essays on artificial intelligence (AI).

She continues her exploration of AI from her Booker Prize-longlisted novel Frankissstein (2019). She debates transhumanism and highlights the oft-overlooked women of scientific history, like 19th-century mathematician and computing pioneer Ada Lovelace, in a chapter niftily titled Love(Lace) Actually.

3. NON-FICTION

THE SEX LIVES OF AFRICAN WOMEN

Ghanaian activist Sekyiamah collects accounts drawn from six years of interviews on her blog, Adventures From The Bedrooms Of African Women.

More than 30 contributors open up about their sex lives: a Kenyan woman who shares her husband with multiple sister-wives, a 60-year-old polyamorous woman in Senegal, a Somali single mother who underwent female genital mutilation as a child and more.

4. FICTION

ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD

Award-winning film-maker Tarantino makes his fiction debut with this pulpy novelisation of his 2019 film of the same name, which harks back to 1969 Hollywood.

The characters are the same - Rick Dalton, an action star whose career is in the doldrums; his friend, stuntman Cliff Booth; and Dalton's neighbours, director Roman Polanski and actress Sharon Tate, who in Tarantino's universe will never know how close they came to catastrophe on the night Charles Manson's cult came knocking.

But Tarantino makes several changes. The climactic showdown gets a mere mention in the middle. He also introduces new insights into the interior thoughts and backstories of characters like Booth and precocious child star Trudi Frazer.

5. FICTION

THE STARTUP WIFE

Computer scientist Asha creates the algorithm for a social networking app that customises rituals for non-religious people, which could revolutionise the lives of millions. But it is her charismatic husband Cyrus who gets the limelight - and the credit.

Bangladesh-born British writer Anam is herself a "start-up wife" - she is married to American inventor Roland Lamb - and, here, she archly satirises tech culture and the industry's sexism.

6. FICTION

THE MAD WOMEN'S BALL

This French bestseller has been translated into English and made into a French film due out next month. It is set in the 19th century in La Salpetriere, a Parisian asylum filled with women and girls whose male relatives have committed them for hysteria.

The hospital holds an annual costume ball, where the bourgeoisie can indulge its fascination with the inmates.

The novel follows the points of view of three women: Louise, who dreams of fame as the patient of the hypnotic Dr Charcot; Eugenie, the 19-year-old daughter of a wealthy family who claims to see the dead; and senior nurse Genevieve, whose faith in her employers is tested.

7. FICTION

FILTHY ANIMALS

Taylor's campus novel Real Life was one of last year's breakout literary debuts, making the Booker Prize shortlist.

He returns with this series of linked stories about young people in the American Midwest, from a man who has sexual encounters with two dancers in an open relationship to a pair of women who muse on which of English king Henry VIII's wives they most identify with.

8. FICTION

NIGHTB***H

In Yoder's debut on the feral feminine, a middle-class stay-at-home mother in an American town finds a patch of coarse hair sprouting on the nape of her neck. Her teeth grow sharper.

"I think I'm turning into a dog," she says to her husband. He laughs. She does not.

Soon, the unnamed narrator has transformed into Nightb***h, prowling outside after dark and committing primal acts of violence.

9. THRILLER

FALLING

"When the shoe dropped into her lap the foot was still in it." So begins this high-octane thrill ride on board a plane to New York. Its pilot has been instructed by terrorists to crash it or his family will be killed.

Newman, a former flight attendant, keeps the adrenaline pumping in her suspenseful debut.

10. THRILLER

BILLY SUMMERS

Horror maestro King tries his hand at the "one last job" novel. His eponymous protagonist is an Iraq war veteran turned sniper-for-hire who wants to leave the assassin's life, but is offered a final hit too lucrative to refuse.

Set up in the town of Red Bluff, in an office overlooking the courthouse steps where his target will someday walk, Billy constructs a cover as a writer.

He does, in fact, start telling his story in a memoir, even as the days count down to the hit and he begins to think something about the job is wrong.