FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK The Mark, Frida Isberg Text, $34.99 Empathy is no panacea for social ills, as Icelandic author Frida Isberg keenly demonstrates in her dystopian novel The Mark . In an alternative Reykjavik, the Icelandic nation is facing a referendum on whether to make the Empathy Test compulsory.
Two-thirds of the population have taken the test, and those who haven’t face increasing pressure to conform and progressive discrimination if they fail to submit. Four characters with divergent perspectives – a teacher, a psychologist, a businesswoman, and a high-school dropout – canvas the politics of empathy and social polarisation in the lead-up to the referendum. Confronting the ethical dilemmas in mandating a standardised test for compassion and antisocial behaviour, the novel exposes how preconceptions about empathy can be shaped, how they’re affected by social disadvantage and traumatic experience, and how counterproductive coercion can be as a progressive political tactic.
The Story Thief Kyra Geddes, Affirm Press, $34.99 Lillian was born in 1892, the same year Henry Lawson’s short story The Drover’s Wife was published. She attends a convent-run school as a girl and first encounters Lawson’s tale as a teenager.
Convinced it is based on her family, Lillian wants to confront the author she believes to be a “story thief” and becomes obsessed with proving Lawson used her mother’s life for inspiration. (Perhaps, while she’s at it, Lillian might ask .