A Great Hope is a family saga set in the politically turbulent years surrounding Australia’s 2007 election

A GREAT HOPE Jessica Stanley (Picador, $32.99) In her debut novel, A Great Hope, London-based Australian author Jessica Stanley delves into a period in recent Australian history that feels all the more pertinent in the midst of a Federal election: the politically tumultuous years surrounding the 2007 and 2010 campaigns, when news of Kevin07, leadership spills, Australia’s first female Prime Minister and a hung parliament dominated the headlines. It all makes for an intriguing backdrop to Stanley’s compelling but at-times overcrowded tale centred on influential union boss John Clare. Having helped Rudd get elected in 2007, John is tipped for political success but shockingly loses his bid for a safe Labor seat in 2010. The novel begins less than a week later, with his death in a fall from the roof of his family’s home in inner-suburban Melbourne — an incident that we, as readers, are aware was not an accident or suicide but something sinister involving an unnamed woman. What ensues borrows some of the scaffolding of a murder-mystery, but A Great Hope is, at its heart, a character-driven family saga laced with satire and set against an insider-y account of Australia’s political class. It’s focused less on John himself than the people around him, and particularly the women in his life, among them his embittered wife Grace, their chaotic daughter Sophie, and John’s serious-minded younger girlfriend Tessa.. Indeed, these women become the novel’s emotional and narrative core as Stanley cleverly walks the line between showing her readers the genuinely awful things each of them says and does while also, often quite against the odds, rendering them sympathetic in their individual complexity and nuance. Informed by her own experiences of working in politics and the media, she offers up sharp social and political commentary along the way — its bite only slightly lessened by an ending that’s perhaps a little too zealous in tidying up loose ends — and perceptive observations on family, love, betrayal and power. THE JANE AUSTEN REMEDY Ruth Wilson (Allen & Unwin, $32.99) At 70, Ruth Wilson made “a difficult, complicated and emotionally painful decision”: having realised her unsmiling face in the photos from her birthday celebration suggested a broader unhappiness, she resolved “to spend my time trying to understand my malaise, to find a happier way of being”. Leaving behind her husband of 50 years, she took up residence in a Southern Highlands cottage and immersed herself in reading — always her “greatest love outside family and work” — and specifically the novels of Jane Austen. As she recounts in her new book, Austen’s writing thus became “a starting point for exploring the satisfactions and dissatisfactions of my own life, framed and illuminated by her fictional universe”. THE TORRENT Dinuka McKenzie (HarperCollins, $32.99) Having won praise from the likes of Dervla McTiernan and Emma Viskic, Sydney writer Dinuka McKenzie has been hailed as the next big thing in Australian crime fiction for her first novel, The Torrent. Its protagonist is Detective Sergeant Kate Miles, a police officer in a small town in New South Wales who is a week away from beginning maternity leave — and battling colleagues’ perceptions she’s “too late in her pregnancy to be effective” — when she’s assigned two seemingly unrelated cases that prove more complex than they first appeared. One involves a teenage girl injured during a hold-up at a fast-food restaurant, the other the apparently accidental drowning of a man during recent summer floods. SOUNDINGS Doreen Cunningham (Virago, $32.99) Nature writing and memoir combine in this lyrical, award-winning debut, which begins with Irish-British author Doreen Cunningham back on the island of Jersey, where she grew up, and staying in a hostel for single mothers with her one-year-old son, Max. Feeling “as if I was learning to walk and talk all over again”, she starts to reflect on her time in far-northern Alaska and the grey whales that migrate to the region. So a plan is born: to travel with Max along North America’s west coast as the whales make their epic annual journey between Mexico and the Arctic, and relearn “how to mother, how to endure, how to live”.