Fiction and non-fiction book reviews for December 2025

This week’s reviews traverse everything from the barbarism of Nazi Germany, to black social satire, a re-examination of Australia’s colonisation and a chilling look at the tech tycoons and autocrats intent on global regime change

FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK

The Matchbox Girl
Alice Jolly
Bloomsbury $42.99

The Matchbox Girl opens in Vienna, 1934, where Adelheid Brunner – a girl who draws maps and is obsessed by matchboxes but doesn’t speak – is taken to a children’s hospital by her grandmother. As Adelheid narrates, it becomes clear that she has autism, and that she’s been placed under the observation of Dr Hans Asperger, who identifies the importance of her fixations and scrutinises her behaviour as closely as she herself studies matchboxes. The tide of Nazism rises; the hospital takes on a much more sinister aspect. At first, the orderliness of the regime appeals to Adelheid, but she soon intuits that the hospital has changed. Medical care and science are warped by inhuman objectives. Failing a test, the reader knows, can lead to a patient being carted off to be murdered or subjected to ghastly experimentation. Jolly is at pains to recreate the cultural reality of this change, and how it happened, by anchoring it firmly in history. It’s an imaginative engagement that takes in the terrible contradictions – the humanity and the barbarism – involved in Asperger’s career, through the internal voice of a unique protagonist.

My Grandfather the Master Detective
Masateru Konishi
Macmillan, $22.99

An intergenerational bond lies behind this cosy crime novel from Japanese author Masateru Konishi. Kaede, 27, is a schoolteacher whose close relationship with her grandfather includes a shared love of classic crime fiction. Her grandfather used to be a member of the Waseda Mystery Club in Tokyo, but has recently been diagnosed with dementia, though his faculties remain sharp enough to tackle a seemingly unsolvable locked-room murder. Kaede herself has the odd ordinary, real-life mystery to solve at school. Her grandfather’s sleuthing skills – which include storytelling skills, or perhaps confabulation to make sense of the world – are up to the challenge. Meanwhile, a threatening shadow emerges in Kaede’s life when she becomes the target of a stalker. The police can’t intervene in the absence of hard evidence, and she faces an urgent case to crack with only her friends and grandfather to help. Konishi’s debut novel moves through some meticulously constructed classic crime set-pieces – more decorative than narratively engaging – before easing into a suspenseful mystery with higher stakes.

The Hiding Place
Kate Mildenhall
Scribner, $34.99

Black comic social satire meets suspenseful thriller in Kate Mildenhall’s The Hiding Place. When an abandoned mining town in the bush comes up for sale, Lou thinks it would make a great weekend escape. A left-leaning, progressive haven where they can do some good. Two old friends, Flick and Josie join with her and her wife Marnie to buy the place. It doesn’t take long before the murky ethics and self-deceptions of this set – so determined to see itself as virtuous – scupper the planned utopia. A stray deer causes a car accident. There are squatters on the land and a property dispute with the neighbours. Illicit crops, brazen affairs and white-collar crime are among the secrets being kept. When someone ends up dead on the very first night, their chances of conspiring successfully to hide the body seem slim indeed as their self-serving hypocrisies come to light, not least through the gimlet eye of Lou’s teenage daughter Stella. Mildenhall welds flensing satire to the perspectival narrative structure of The Slap, as this “paradise” on stolen land comes unstuck.

Orange Wine
Esperanza Hope Snyder
Bindery Books, $34.99

Colombian poet and author Esperanza Hope Snyder has written a misfire of a romance set in early 20th-century Colombia. The blurb seems to imply a story with feminist themes, so readers will almost certainly feel let down by the degree to which the plotting and characterisation undercut any such view. Ines Camargo is our narrator. In her telling, she’s nearly perfect – beautiful, a talented artist, irresistible to men – and the women in her life are (mostly) mean to her out of jealousy. When her husband has an affair with her sister while she is pregnant with her daughter Lucy, and then absconds, Ines must choose between what her strict Catholic family expects and being true to herself. The difficulty is that almost all of that “self” relies on how she positions herself in relation to men, and that she herself possesses no character flaws, inhibiting character development. Orange Wine is a regressive romance, an almost narcissistic fantasy, despite the obvious structural misogyny and repression of the society it depicts. Short chapters make it easy to breeze through, but I think even romance fanatics may flinch at the poison lurking under the passion.

Do We Deserve This?
Eleanor Elliott Thomas
Text Publishing, $34.99

Bean is the youngest of three and the least accomplished of the Halloway siblings. Still in her twenties, she’s used to being outshone by her brother Jeremy – a flamboyant, drama-addicted pop star with an overweening sense of entitlement – and her sister Genevieve, an ambitious lawyer who masks her emotions under a no-nonsense facade. When Bean buys a winning lottery ticket for their charismatic mother, Nina, and Nina falls into a coma before it can be given to her or claimed, the vast wealth Bean’s always said she doesn’t care about is suddenly thrust into her hands. Sensibly, the siblings agree to keep the ticket safe until Nina regains consciousness. Temptation mounts, though, and with each of Nina’s flawed children afflicted in various ways by her appalling parenting style, they’re soon at loggerheads over who deserves the money. The premise is ripe for character-driven conflict, and Thomas drops in a few secret motivations and plot twists. Ultimately, however, both pacing and tension slacken too much for Do We Deserve This? to be consistently satisfying.

NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK

Looking From the North
Henry Reynolds
NewSouth, $34.99

To read Looking From the North is to discover, with a jolt, just how skewed and blinkered our national story has been by a southern viewpoint. By the 1850s, when New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia and Tasmania were granted self-government, north of the Tropic of Capricorn – 45 per cent of the nation’s landmass – was “still the preserve of the traditional owners; there were no resident Europeans at all”. Which is why 78 per cent of this land has now been returned to Indigenous custodians. When historian Henry Reynolds moved to Townsville in 1965 he knew little about the history of North Queensland. Similarly, the textbooks at the time had little to say about this vast region. Reynolds spent the next 30 years trying to remedy this southern myopia:“There never had been a white Australia that far north, and there wasn’t one when I arrived in town.” The shift in perspective induced by this revelatory work of Australian history is nothing short of vertiginous.

The Hour of the Predator
Giuliano Da Empoli
Pushkin Press, $26.99

He calls himself an Aztec scribe reporting from inside the corridors of power on the arrival of the new conquistadors – the tech billionaires and the autocrats – and the epoch they are ushering in. Former political adviserGiuliano Da Empoli’s message is a chilling one. We might seem to be entering unprecedented territory, but we only need to look to the past, to the notoriously ruthless Borgias and to the writer Machiavelli, who understood “how power can be asserted amid chaos”. Anything that ramps up conflict is a godsend for Borgians, hence “wokeism has been the perfect fuel for their chaos machine”. Through contemporary vignettes about the collision between the old order and the new disorder, Da Empoli shows how traditional politics and rule of law have been upended by those who “draw their strength from instability, unpredictability, aggression”. While sometimes hyperbolic, this aphoristic and incantatory work makes for grimly gripping reading.

The Seven Rules of Trust
Jimmy Wales
Bloomsbury, $36.99

Real Politik exploits the worst in us. But we can, like Jimmy Wales, choose to place our faith in the best of human nature without becoming naive Pollyannas. When Wales founded Wikipedia more than 20 years ago, the doomsayers warned that governments, corporations, militaries, ideologues, zealots and cranks would manipulate the online encyclopedia for their own ends. It would become riddled with propaganda and go into a death spiral. But this didn’t happen because Wikipedia was founded on trust. It established ground rules that enabled editors and readers to have confidence in each other and in the information itself. At a time when distrust is corroding the public square, the example set by Wikipedia is more than heartening – it is a beacon. The rules of trust that Wales outlines cannot be dismissed as wishful thinking because they have been shown to work. This is an exemplary handbook for individuals, groups and organisations looking to combat the cynicism and cant that are corroding contemporary life.

An Inconvenience of Penguins
Jamie Lafferty
Wildfire, $34.99

From his front-row seat, Jamie Lafferty watched the Little Penguins emerge from the surf at Phillip Island and gather in a huddle. Most took off together for the dunes, but one locked eyes with Lafferty and, “running as fast as its daft, lizard feet would carry it, it came straight to me, moving like a thing foretold”. Then it bumped into his ankles. Perhaps it sensed that Lafferty wasn’t your average tourist, that he was, in fact, a penguin fanatic, travelling the world to meet all 18 species of penguin on the planet. His fascination with these birds began in Antarctica because they brought a sense of levity to a forbidding environment. “No penguins, no party.” While this is eco-aware travel-writing at its most entertaining, beneath the playful surface of the narrative can be heard a bass note of unease as Lafferty discovers how vulnerable certain species, such as the Happy Feet Emperor Penguin, are to climate change. Delight and sadness co-exist in Lafferty’s irreverent devotion, which perfectly matches the comic, contradictory qualities of the penguins themselves – birds utterly ungainly on land yet full of grace under the sea.

It Takes A Village To Teach Your Children About Consent
Jane Gilmore
Jane Gilmore, $34.99

Some sentence-long book titles can feel faddish. Others, like this one, perfectly distil the book’s message that we all have responsibilities to help children navigate the complex territory of consent. And to do that, we need to be informed about what consent is, how sex education is taught in schools, how to help kids recognise and speak up about sexual abuse and bullying, the role that shame and violence play, the importance of helping boys see that consent is not a formality and making sure that girls are not forced to be sexual gatekeepers. While this book is plain speaking, direct and full of useful information, it is also nuanced in its recognition of how consent plays out in real life and online. This is illustrated by case studies and Jane Gilmore’s own conversations with children and teenagers about their experiences. Talking to kids about sex can feel daunting. This sensible and positive guide demystifies the process and makes us wiser for it.