The nine books that knocked our critics' socks off this month

Wondering what to read next? June's best books feature not one but two coming-of-age tales set in Italy. (ABC Arts: Nicola Heath) Link copiedShareShare articleWelcome to the ABC Arts wrap of the best new books published this month. In a huge treat for readers, both Ann Patchett (of Tom Lake fame) and Maggie O'Farrell (Hamnet — need we say more?) have new books out. Find out what our reviewers made of these much-anticipated novels below. Also among the best new releases in June are a memoir by Ralph Jackman detailing his experience teaching students in a youth justice facility and a comic Italian romp from Pulitzer Prize-winner Andrew Sean Greer. According to family legend, O'Farrell's ancestor worked for the British Ordnance Survey, which mapped Ireland in the 19th century. (Supplied: Hachette Australia) Maggie O'Farrell's novels include The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, The Hand that First Held Mine, the international bestseller Hamnet and the memoir I Am, I Am, I Am. Her fiction travels the world, in both geography and time, but with her latest — Land — she's covering both time and place via one small wet peninsular in Ireland. A man named Tomás is mapping the land, reshaping it with language and charts, in the shadow of the Great Hunger, the terrible famine that ravaged the land and families including his own. With him is his 10-year-old son, Liam. They're working for the Red Coats — the English — translating and re-naming abandoned buildings and ancient springs, both because the father has the skills, but also because they need the money. The latest and best fiction reviewed by a team of dedicated bibliophiles. Something happens — a crisis of belief, politics, landscape and identity — that shakes the father to the core and jolts the son onto a new path. Meanwhile, our own reading pathway is anchored in this green place but stretches back into the sod and the peat and the bogs of history where we meet characters from a distant past, and then moves decades into the future as well, as Ireland both recovers and changes. We meet the wife and mother, the sisters and an otherworldly younger brother of the lead pair, and we track them through workhouses and into education, in and out of churches and ships and disguise, onto thatched roofs and in and out of patches of old forest. O'Farrell knows how to weave a family saga and tell an immersive tale. But under all of that? She's furious, and the rage at imperial power keeps this book moving along at pace and with considerable energy. Montrone teaches creative writing at Columbia University in New York. (Supplied: Text Publishing) In Greek mythology, nymphs were earthly deities, beautiful and dangerous. In biology, the same word describes a young grasshopper that sheds its skin to take on its adult form. Both meanings feel equally apt as the title of Sofia Montrone's debut coming-of-age novel, set over two heat-soaked Italian summers eight years apart. In the first section, set in 2010, Leo is 10 years old and working in her family's run-down mountainside hotel, cleaning rooms with her younger brother Max. Their father, charming but self-destructive, looms large in their lives, captivating them and shaping their worldviews as he recounts the grisly epic tale of Odysseus. The youthful Leo has an antenna for signs of death and bodily decay; she is fascinated by the life cycle of insects and intrigued by the discarded Band-Aids and stray hairs that litter the hotel rooms. She mostly watches the guests from afar, searching for clues of their mysterious adult lives. Ellena Savage's debut essay collection, Blueberries, was a surprise hit. In her new novel, The Ruiners, she takes on Charles Dickens. Eight summers later, with another faltering Italian World Cup campaign in the background, a more world-weary Leo has drifted away from Max. We find her "looking out into a world that has turned its eyes from her, unhappy with what it has seen". But when Dolores, an American, visits to learn violin-making in the summer before she goes to college, Leo finds someone to return her gaze. Together, Leo and Dolores play cards, swim, eat slivers of prosciutto and ponder the universe. Their melancholic romance and the story's languid pacing invite comparisons with Call Me by Your Name, but there's something singular here, a series of small moments rendered in vivid and strange detail that builds into a pointillist portrait of a relationship doomed to end with the season. Still transfixed by insect life, Leo reflects that the grasshopper nymph is "at its most vulnerable" as it grows into its new skin. It's this tender and transformative stage of life that Nymph captures with moving precision. Jackman says he wrote his memoir, Detention, to "give a fuller picture of the boys I was lucky enough to work with". (Supplied: Allen & Unwin) Ralph Jackman, formerly a sports broadcaster and briefly an actor (his youngest sibling is Hugh Jackman), had talked about teaching for

The nine books that knocked our critics' socks off this month

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