A new book shows another side to ‘the guy who punched a shark’

The book lover’s favourite season continues into October. Christmas is looming, which means publishers are bringing out the big guns: door-stoppers, page-turners and enough literary catnip to see us through to summer. There are heavy hitters making much-anticipated returns and a few unexpected turns from local favourites. So let’s take our reading inspiration from Rocky Balboa, whose creator, Sylvester Stallone, has a memoir out this month, and remember: “Nobody owes nobody nothing. You owe yourself.” To the bookshop, then.

Ply Hernan Diaz Picador, $34.99 After looking backwards in In the Distance and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Trust, Hernan Diaz has decided to jump a few centuries into the future. So, a slight change of scenery. An orphan grows up in a city where the state has disappeared, and becomes a “pincher”, someone who steals electricity from the grid to power underground concerts. She then gets caught in a scientific experiment that could change reality itself. Diaz is thinking about technology and capitalism in this, his third novel, with a rather wild adventure to carry us through.

All Heart Mick Fanning Simon & Schuster, $37 Most people know Mick Fanning as a three-time world surfing champion. Or, thanks to one extraordinary day in 2015, the guy who punched a shark (a difficult thing to leave off any CV). All Heart shows us a different side of him, with Fanning writing about the highs of his surfing career alongside the terrible loss of his three brothers and his father. Our reviewer Malcolm Knox was deeply moved: “Fanning’s story can be an inspiration and a model for every man and for every person.”

Full Circle Chris Hammer Summit Books, $35 Chris Hammer leaves behind the characters from his two crime series for this standalone thriller. Travis Somerland arrives at Montechino, the secluded estate of the extremely wealthy Clapton family, and finds himself caught in a dynastic power struggle where money has a rather loose relationship with morality. There are murders too, naturally. Think Succession with an Australian crime writer let loose on the Roys. After Scrublands and the Ivan Lucic and Nell Buchanan books, it’s a chance for Hammer to go somewhere new – and very affluent.

American Hagwon Min Jin Lee 4th Estate, $38 Nearly a decade after Pachinko, Min Jin Lee is back. And she has not, it must be said, gone small. At more than 650 pages, American Hagwon follows John and Helen Koh and their children after the Asian financial crisis of 1997 turned their lives upside down. The family leaves Seoul for Sydney, then ends up in California. Lee is once again interested in what happens when a family crosses borders and tries to make somewhere new feel like home.