FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK The Little Clothes Deborah Callaghan, $34.99 Brilliant lawyer Audrey Mendes is pushing 40, but she has never made partner. Audrey gets constantly bulldozed and taken for granted by her extroverted colleagues at work, and her home life is lonely, eccentric.
She spends nights in with her pet rabbit, between casual relationships, seeing her ageing parents, and inexplicably, buying baby clothes despite never having had a child. One evening, Audrey gets ignored at the bottle shop and nicks off with a bottle of vino. That theft is just the beginning of a rebellion that will allow a key childhood memory – one that has cast a long shadow over Audrey’s life – to resurface.
Former publisher and literary agent Deborah Callaghan has written a novel with features of Sad Girl fiction, but it isn’t remotely performative or infatuated with its own woe. Instead, it’s wise and darkly funny, with a convincingly lopsided protagonist whose story is full of acute observations on the psychological effects of trauma. Mrs Gulliver Valerie Martin, Serpent’s Tail, $32.
99 It’s 1954 on the fictional tropical island of Verona. Brothel madam Lila Gulliver runs a classier type of establishment and tries to look after her girls. She takes a chance on 19-year-old Carita, stunningly pretty and blind from birth.
When the son of a judge falls wildly in love with Carita on their first encounter, however, the stakes are high for everyone. A tale of power, intrigue, corruption.