Fiction reviews: Lawrence Wright's The End of October and three others

PICK OF THE WEEK
The End of October
Lawrence Wright
Bantam, $32.99

Completed and sent to press before COVID-19 first appeared, this gripping novel by Pulitzer winner and prolific non-fiction writer and journalist Lawrence Wright, set in 2023, tells the tale of a global pandemic. A new disease, apparently related to the 1918-19 influenza that killed millions around the world, is dubbed Kongoli after the Indonesian refugee camp in which it first appears. Protagonist Dr Henry Parsons is a world expert in epidemiology but has a nasty secret of his own, which he must carry through his desperate investigations as people start dying all over the world and governments begin to fall apart. The breathtaking prescience of this book is something that Wright himself plays down. ‘‘I made some lucky guesses, but for the most part, what people are reading as prophecy is just what experts told me would happen.’’

Gulliver’s Wife
Lauren Chater
Simon & Schuster, $32.99

This spinoff story from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is a carefully researched and thoughtfully imagined tale, for a general readership, of the original Lemuel Gulliver’s near-invisible wife. Mary Gulliver is a London midwife trying hard to keep her home and children intact and thriving while the husband and father is having adventures abroad. But then he comes home, much changed, and things begin to fall apart. There is some intriguing material here about the historical status of midwives, the power of the church, and the ongoing attempts on the part of the male medical fraternity to disempower midwives and devalue their work. But the most impressive aspect of this novel is the finely tuned and nuanced treatment of the relationship between a mother and her rebellious teenage daughter.

Elly

Maike Wetzel; trans., Lyn Marven
Scribe, $24.99

Successful enough to have won several prizes, this debut novel by German writer Maike Wetzel is skilfully put together and shows the signs of her experience as a writer for stage and screen. Elly herself is an 11-year-old girl who has disappeared and whose distraught family, four years later, is informed that she has been found and will be returned to them. This short novel deftly explores the nightmare of such disappearances and the complexities of their aftermath. But all is not as it seems. The reader must piece together the facts and events from the voices of several different characters, and we learn at least as much about them as we do about Elly, with each voice seeming preoccupied and unreliable. Some readers might balk at a couple of obvious holes in the plot, but to point them out would be to give away the mystery.

The End of Cuthbert Close
Cassie Hamer
HQ Fiction, $29.99

Set in contemporary suburban Sydney, this well-crafted piece of commercial fiction is both warm and light of heart, though not without its tensions and threats. With distinct echoes of Neighbours and Summer Bay and Wisteria Lane, this novel tells the tale of three close friends living in the same street, and the disruption to peace and harmony that threatens when new arrivals turn up with their moving van in the middle of a street party. Alex is a corporate lawyer, Beth a five-star homemaker, and Cara an online food stylist making a precarious living. The glamorous but chilly Charlie Devine and her suspiciously nice daughter Talia are not a good fit in the chummy street community and after a long succession of dramas and mysteries, the reader finally finds out why. This is a satisfyingly chunky and intermittently very funny beach read.