The eight books our critics couldn't put down this month

Best new books, from Barbara Kingsolver, Min Jin Lee, Hernan Diaz and more

October was a huge month for books.

Barbara Kingsolver — whose 2022 bestseller, Demon Copperhead, transfixed readers the world over — returned with the much-anticipated Partita, a novel of music and what-ifs.

Fellow literary heavyweight Min Jin Lee, of Pachinko fame, questions the role of education in a family saga set in the influential world of for-profit tutoring businesses known in Korean as hagwons.

And a Pulitzer Prize winner, Hernan Diaz, imagines a dystopian future where the United States has fractured and electricity is currency.

Our critics review these books and more this month. Enjoy!

- American Hagwon by Min Jin Lee

- One for Sorrow by Favel Parrett

- Ply by Hernan Diaz

- Too LA by Eve Babitz

- Spent Light by Lara Pawson

- Music Against the Night by Yiyun Li

- Finding Justice by Larissa Behrendt

- Partita by Barbara Kingsolver

American Hagwon by Min Jin Lee

Fourth Estate

American Hagwon is both an epic yet intimate story of family and perseverance. Author Min Jin Lee balances social commentary with deep character work as the Koh family is buffeted across Korea, Australia and America by the winds of a personal betrayal and the 1997 Asian financial crisis. At the heart of this book is a conversation about education: what does it look like, who has access to it, what is it for and how can it change your life?

In her third novel, Lee — known for her exploration of the Korean diaspora in works such as Pachinko — introduces the reader to the world of hagwons, Korean private after-school tutoring businesses or "cram schools". The reader, as well as the novel's characters, must grapple with the efficacy and purpose of these businesses. Are they further perpetuating the pressure many children feel to get the best grades and entry into the best schools or are they spaces of learning necessary for success?

Helen and John Koh sacrifice much for their three children, Bo, DH and Mido, who come to learn that educational success is fundamental to their identities and self-worth. We follow the children as they go from students to teachers themselves, continuing to live by the tenet that education is the gateway to freedom from financial and societal vulnerability. Lion, a hagwon owner in California who employs Bo and Mido, is desperate for his community to reject this thinking, proclaiming "our children should not have to save us". However, he is met with exasperation and reticence by parents who want a better life for their children and see only one path.

Lee is a master of building rich, character-led stories. We follow characters' journeys rather than a plot-driven narrative, showing how each member of the Koh family rises to the challenge when met with obstacles and barriers over the course of their lives.

— Rosie Ofori Ward

One for Sorrow by Favel Parrett

Hachette Australia

Award-winning Australian author Favel Parrett's long-awaited fourth novel for adult readers was conceived during a writer's residency in Trondheim on the shores of Norway's third longest fjord. That intimate connection — notably with the landscape and seasons of that unique city, but also with its culture and people — pulsates through the prose, providing a rich backdrop to what deftly evolves into a heart-stopping tale of love and betrayal.

A two-hander told through the eyes of a child and his teacher, One for Sorrow opens with the now grown Einar returning to his hometown of Trondheim for a nostalgic sojourn. There he is persuaded to take an impromptu tour around his old school building where he is touched and somewhat perturbed by memories of an inspirational teacher. He visits his parents' and sister's graves but, we are told with an ominous thud, the teacher, Herr Kristiansen, "is not here".

The story then jumps back to 1939, when Einar is at primary school. Johan Kristiansen has struggled to find a teaching position in Oslo and is prepared to embrace a more parochial existence in this northern outpost, with its snowy and sometimes bleak beauty. Johan is vibrant, progressive, young; so different to the hated Herr Berg he is replacing, and Einar is quickly enthralled.

Johan reads to the class and later shares Ernest Hemingway's work with Einar, whom he recognises as a fellow scribe. A bond forms. But a clandestine passion has also been ignited between this charismatic teacher and Einar's mother. That love affair is painted with erotic tenderness that morphs into fevered desperation when Nazi occupation changes everything. Short chapters, written with a lilting cadence and sophisticated spareness, build tension and a brooding intensity reminiscent of Parrett's Miles Franklin award-shortlisted 2011 debut, the equally compelling Past the Shallows.

— Juliet Rieden

Ply by Hernan Diaz

Picador

Ply, the third novel by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Hernan Diaz, is set in an unnamed American city centuries in the future.

While people still prosper in the countryside, life in the city — reminiscent of New York — is hardscrabble. Life expectancy and the birthrate are low, and health care is primitive — a minor wound can prove fatal.

In this dystopian world ruled by gangsters and militarised corporations, humans rely on their ingenuity. The novel's narrator is a pincher, someone who makes a living from stealing electricity from the grid — controlled by a single energy giant, Tensor, and patrolled by private police force CTS — storing it in a "brick" and selling it on. The pincher, whose mother was a type of DIY mechanic or engineer known as a tinker, has developed a new, more powerful brick that promises her financial security.

The first 200 pages are a pleasing mix of world-building and plot, as the pincher reveals her past in flashbacks. She soon realises she is being followed — but by who? Thugs covetous of her high-powered brick? CTS contractors? Another malevolent actor?

In Part Two, the perspective unexpectedly shifts from the first to the third person as the pincher embarks on a project with Pola, an eccentric and, unusually for their world, mature-age scientist. Here, large blocks of scientific exposition act as a brake on the narrative but soon the plot picks up again, as the pincher and Pola plan an ambitious heist.

Diaz's play with perspective enables him to explore the idea of universal consciousness as a counterpoint to the individualism of contemporary Western society. He renders the world of Ply in lyrical prose, paying close attention to the unexpected beauty of the rewilded landscape. And while much of Ply is given over to high-energy physics, Diaz also describes more organic human pursuits, particularly music, in loving detail. Subatomic particles can generate unprecedented energy, he seems to be saying, but so can human connections.

— Nicola Heath

Too LA: Letters Never Sent (But Some Were) by Eve Babitz, contributions by Lili Anolik

Atlantic

Continuing Lili Anolik's chronicle of Eve Babitz's life — her previous book, Didion and Babitz, was reviewed here — Too LA puts Babitz's correspondence in conversation with Anolik's sassy commentary.

Born in the 40s to artist parents, Babitz was a chronicler of 60s and 70s LA, a masterful "gossip storyteller" who embedded herself within its cultural and artistic scenes. Her voice is at once intimate, excitable and fragile.

Anolik presents the material in a style that speaks to Babitz's own, appending photos, drawings and diary entries, annotated by Anolik's footnotes. What emerges is not only a picture of Babitz but LA in its hedonistic heyday. With her taste for good times and good company, names drop like nobody's business.

One moment she's in Florence, a city she dismisses for its "small town kind of atmosphere", dating "this typical La Dolce Vita type — handsome, rich", the next, her letters take on a spurned lover-esque quality as her other obsessions — notably Joan Didion — turn sour. The bubbly, charming, vivacious Babitz gives way, in the 70s, to a more brittle persona as her earlier success fails to grow.

Babitz channels her insecurities into diva strength, her hijinks showing how braggadocio and chutzpah can put life in the world. A 1964 letter to Joseph Heller inviting him to read her first novel (he responds that the draft "is eminently readable, but probably not publishable") becomes weightier when, several years later, she writes to him again, criticising the boxes in which female artists are placed. Responding to a man who says disappointment has made her "disciplined", she says: "Because I didn't ball him he assumes I must have some fantastic discipline."

Full of quotable tales and telling quotes, memorable side remarks and bristly, frank divulgences, Too LA is incisive and quietly moving. It has a lot to say about the City of Angels and about being a woman, a scenester and a lover of life.

— Declan Fry

Spent Light by Lara Pawson

Text Publishing

It starts so simply: the unnamed narrator's neighbour gives her a toaster after his wife dies. Inspecting the item sets our protagonist off on a wild train of thought: "Above each light, fractionally off centre, a word is printed in the same restrained font found in CIA documents. Together, they form a synopsis of the anthropocene: REHEAT DEFROST CANCEL."

London-based author Lara Pawson's experimental novel, her third book and first work of fiction, only gets more audacious from there. In every simple task she does lurks reminders of horrific chapters of history: "Standing here, in front of the cooker, peering down on the black grates that straddle the hob, swastikas are what I see. Looking at the dials, turning on the gas, who could fail to consider the camps?"

There's strange beauty, too. Someone mentioning Impressionist art on Antiques Roadshow sparks a reflection on how a moth trap "ripples and glistens, a little like Monet's lake with the water-lilies". These successive digressions take the place of a plot, as darkly funny stream-of-consciousness discursions reveal the ingenuity and tangled history concealed in the objects we use every day without a second thought.

Where other fiction strains for relatability, Spent Light takes a different tack, following its narrator's oddest impulses down endless rabbit holes. You may find yourself siding with the shopkeeper who bustles her out the door when she asks about knitting items from discarded dog's hair. On the other hand, if you've ever felt goaded by your toilet's immobility and "developed the urge to wrench it from the floor and shove it out of place", you may find a kindred spirit here.

In its disdain for formal convention, Spent Light captures something unique that a more traditional novel can't: the way the human mind pinballs between tenuously connected tangents, unpredictably bouncing from the fraught to the frivolous. You'll never look at your toaster the same way again.

— Daniel Herborn

Music Against the Night by Yiyun Li

Fourth Estate

American author Yiyun Li was born and raised in China, moving to the US in her 20s, but writes exclusively in English. Her books include fiction (The Book of Goose and others) and a memoir that includes reflections on the death by suicide of both her sons (Things in Nature Merely Grow).

The reason to mention these personal details is both to say that her latest novel, Music Against the Night, is drenched in grief and includes many stories of the death of children, and also that it is not in any way a work of autofiction or disguised autobiography.

Instead, this is a beautifully realised imaginative work of music and time, striving and finding, and lives that eventually meet — without sentimentality but with plenty of art.

The story centres upon the fictionalised lives of two real people born at the end of the 18th century: the Irish composer John Field, inventor of the nocturne, destined for acclaim — and a life soaked in vodka — and Adelaide Percheron, a mixed-race musical genius born in India, who also believed she was destined