On October 15, 1970, a span of the West Gate Bridge in Melbourne collapsed during construction, killing 35 workers and sucking countless souls into the aftermath. Out of one of Australia's worst industrial accidents, Enza Gandolfo crafts a novel that imagines the long-term fallout as the 40th anniversary of the catastrophe approaches.

Newlywed Antonello was one of the survivors, an Italian immigrant trying to be "Australiani," working as a rigger high atop the structure. Nello lost friends and his father-figure foreman; he gained anger, depression and guilt--they had all known things weren't right with the bridge. In 2009, Nello is a grandfather with a lovely family. But he's just "partly human," unable to be the man he intended, emotionally blocked and haunted by persistent nightmares about falling: "There was no escaping the bridge."

Across town, single mother Mandy is struggling to get by with her 18-year-old daughter, Jo. Like Nello, Mandy sees signs of trouble but fails to speak out. The cost of staying silent is a tragedy that locks the two families together.

In The Bridge, Gandolfo tenderly explores the repercussions of trauma, providing a tribute to the men who built the bridge and their long-suffering families. Shortlisted for the 2019 Stella Prize, The Bridge is a gripping look at life through the prism of grief and blame. --Lauren O'Brien of Malcolm Avenue Review

For readers in search of a tautly streamlined, deeply resonating, contemporary family story, Big Familia by Tomas Moniz (Bellies and Buffalos) won't disappoint. In this short novel, Juan Gutiérrez is a longtime Berkeley resident, the amicably divorced father to high school senior Stella and a self-described Chicano--although his best friend tells him that Chicanx is more appropriate. Juan works from home, building websites. His apartment has stayed the same for almost two decades, while his neighborhood is replacing chain-link fences with reclaimed wooden ones and his local dive bar is morphing into a karaoke hot spot.
 
Recently, Juan's taken up biking over driving because he really enjoys the two wheels--not because his belly might be growing. He's not quite sure if his lover, Jared, for all his easy style and warm acceptance, is truly the one. Besides, Juan has his reliable regulars he sees Tuesdays and Thursdays down the street at Nicks. But when the oldest member of his drinking crew dies, Juan begins to realize that maybe, after all these years, he doesn't really know the people he's spending time with. Suddenly alone when Stella heads South for college, Juan's about to find out that the changes around him might mean he, too, will need to make a few adaptations and adjustments.

Without ignoring societal ills--racially charged police violence, incarceration bias, aggressive gentrification, generation gaps--Moniz creates a broadly diverse cast on the verge of transformation. Testing options, pushing past comfort zones and welcoming new bonds result in a big familia well worth getting to know. --Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon

South African cooking encompasses a variety of food, to be expected from a large country with a vibrant indigenous history and influences from colonization and immigration. Cape Mediterranean, the first cookbook by Western Cape food blogger Ilse van der Merwe, focuses on food from the Mediterranean-like climate in her region, adding to the "thriving, contemporary multicultural South African foodscape."

More than 75 recipes cover breads, braises and soups, sweets and much more. Some recipes are simple, with easily sourced ingredients, and sound familiar to anyone who has cooked from Mediterranean cookbooks: Tagliatelle with Fresh Basil and Pesto, for example, or Roasted Tomato Soup with Garlic and Thyme. But van der Merwe also includes more elaborate dishes with a South African flair. Baked Cape Figs with Fynbos Honey and Gorgonzola, an appetizer, lists locally farmed purple figs rather than imported figs, and South African Blue Cheese. Enthusiastic cooks will enjoy searching out these ingredients in well-stocked grocery or specialty stores, but can substitute more common ingredients if necessary. Pork and Fennel Ragu with Tomato and Preserved Lemon riffs on the classic heavy Mediterranean ragu by using tomatoes rather than tomato paste and preserved lemons (recipe included), making "a fragrance that is unusual and inviting."

Cape Mediterranean has full-color pictures throughout, and lists ingredients in both U.S. standard and metric. The recipes are clearly written to ensure success the first time. Cooks looking to expand their repertoire of modern ethnic dishes will welcome this practical cookbook to their shelves. --Cindy Pauldine, bookseller, the river's end bookstore, Oswego, N.Y.

Best known as the bassist and a founding member of Red Hot Chili Peppers, Flea (born Michael Peter Balzary) has written an affecting, emotional and keenly self-aware memoir focusing on his first 20 years. Although Acid for the Children ends just when he and best friend Anthony Kiedis form their band (with Hillel Slovak and Jack Irons), Flea packed a lot of living into those first two decades. This 400-page memoir moves at a galloping pace.

Born in Australia and raised in Rye, N.Y., Flea and his sister were raised by their divorced mother, who was vivacious and smart but not maternal. "There is not one instance in my life where I can ever remember her holding or cuddling me," he writes. Pretty much left on his own to wander the streets, he writes, "My earliest memories are rooted in an underlying sense that something's wrong with me, that everyone else is clued into a group consciousness from which I'm excluded." At age 12, the family moves to California, where he discovers marijuana, cocaine and crystal meth. "For clarity's sake, I've never been a drug addict," he writes. "A wildly out of control and misguided experimenter, yes.... Experiments that yielded sadness, neurosis, and physical damage." He finds his calling and community in music. "Punk rock opened the door to a new way of thinking that applied to every facet of my life," he writes.

Flea's impressive memoir is filled with outrageous and rambunctious memories but told with style and introspection. Happily, it ends with the promise of a second volume. --Kevin Howell, independent reviewer and marketing consultant

Revelatory and wild, Camgirl by Isa Mazzei portrays a woman's celebratory determination to discover herself. Mazzei always wanted attention. She led a protest over her school mascot at eight years old, cast spells on fellow 12-year-old girls during her Wiccan phase, and developed Isa's Rules for Seduction to become "Queen of Boys" in junior high. Mazzei loved breaking hearts and being hated--she even asked her mom to have "whore" written on her birthday cake. But the more she jumped from boy to boy and girl to girl through high school, then college, the more Mazzei hated sex, often turning to self-harm for being an "idiot," "disgusting," the "devil." Then a strip show sparked an epiphany: her love for seduction but not sex could be her career.

Mazzei became "Una," a cam girl broadcasting herself live online. During sexual shows, she read palms, practiced BDSM and made art, all while befriending regulars in her chat room who tipped her. Though she earned $15,000 in one month, Mazzei's discomfort with sex lurked. She regretted inviting fans to visit. She left an expo devastated when she couldn't stand participating with other naked girls. Admirably frank, Mazzei intimately details her struggle to understand why she didn't belong. She openly attributes her attention-seeking behavior to parenting bordering on abandonment. But faced with an alcoholic mother and bipolar father, Mazzei owned her eccentricities: "Without a sense of belonging even in my own family... I began to revel in the opportunities it presented." Mazzei took control of her life, always keeping her passion for whatever she did aflame--always searching for her calling. --Samantha Zaboski, freelance editor and reviewer

Having once walked from Siberia to Calcutta and once lived six months alone on the remotest Russian taiga, the French travel writer Sylvain Tesson has made a remarkable career of spinning stunt-ish adventures into art. The Consolations of the Forest, his marvelous account of that half-year of Siberian solitude, won 2014's Dolman Best Travel Book Award. Berezina, the second of his books to be translated into English, also recounts a harrowing feat, with typically illuminating results.

In 2012, Tesson journeyed 2,500 miles tracing Napoleon's Grande Armée's 1812 retreat from Moscow to Paris, a historic debacle in which some 400,000 French soldiers were reduced to a tenth of that number, freezing to death and eating their own horses. Exactly 200 years later, Tesson and his hard-drinking, history-mad comrades also endure the relentless cold of a Russian winter, but the greatest danger they face is vehicular. That would be the unreliable Soviet-era motorcycles, complete with sidecars, in which they barrel through western Russia, Belarus, Poland, Lithuania and Germany. "Nothing will stop our Ural," Tesson declares. "Not even its brakes!"

Tesson's wit and urgent, restless philosophizing set the book surging along. This brisk volume moves much more quickly than the author's obstreperous motorbike. Roadside disasters, incisive character studies and sharply rendered accounts of cities, snow, hotels and rivers all abound, but the book's heart is in Tesson's efforts to comprehend the horrors of Napoleon's long retreat--and to make sense of how people, nations and Europe itself have changed. --Alan Scherstuhl, freelance writer and editor

Novelist and essayist Darryl Pinckney has been a staple of New York's literary intellectual scene for decades. Busted in New York offers readers the first collection of Pinckney's nonfiction works. The essays included in this volume tackle George W. Bush's election, the Black Lives Matter movement and more. While the experience of reading essays like "In Ferguson" and "Dreams from Obama" may now feel retrospective, the works themselves, written from within these moments and others, represent illuminating slices of socio-cultural insight from recent history.

Pinckney's style is both lyrical and journalistic, erudite and lived-in. These snapshots of writing draw on the traditions of writers like Joan Didion, invoked by "Slouching Toward Washington," and James Baldwin, who exists as a patron saint of the whole collection but is given particular reverence in "Under the Spell of James Baldwin." Of particular note is the titular essay, "Busted in New York," which explores racial profiling and urban gentrification through Pinckney's arrest after smoking pot on the Lower East Side. In this essay, as in many others, readers can get lost in the intimate touch the author brings to the issues and historic tragedies that face our contemporary world. Pinckney ends "Beyond the Fringe," an essay documenting his Bush election reactions, with a statement that feels relevant today: "it was hard to believe that the country would recover soon from the defensiveness and bitterness that I'd observed--and felt." But it is in this act of recognizing fear that the collection finds its greatest strength. Pinckney manages, brilliantly, to contextualize fear, at once to acknowledge it and to put it in its place. --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor

For someone who produced 13 works of nonfiction along with multiple volumes of fiction and poetry, Brian Doyle (Mink River; The Plover)--who died of brain cancer in May 2017 at age 60--never achieved a popular reception commensurate with his impressive productivity. But now, thanks to One Long River of Song: Notes on Wonder, a generous sampling of the longtime Portland magazine editor's dazzling essays, there's a renewed opportunity for more readers to discover the insight and humanity of his work.

Compiled by Doyle's longtime friend David James Duncan (The Brothers K) and two co-editors, One Long River of Song's more than 80 pieces resist easy categorization. Among Doyle's preoccupations were basketball, hawks, the Gaelic language, his father, otters, and the beauty of the Pacific Northwest region where he made his home, but there are few important aspects of life that aren't at least touched on here.

As David James Duncan explains in an opening appreciation of Doyle's work, his friend, a "born cultural Catholic who cheerfully observed the rites of his inherited tradition," frequently turned to the subject of spirituality. Doyle's brand of theology will appeal to fans of the work of writers like Anne Lamott, as in the brief piece "Last Prayer" that concludes the book. In it, he thanks "Coherent Mercy," recognizing his complaints "were infinitesimal against the slather of gifts You gave mere me, a muddle of a man, so often selfish and small." Spirituality aside, readers fortunate enough to discover the many pleasures of Brian Doyle's work here will be grateful, too, for that encounter. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer

The authors of 2017's Turtle Island, an Indigenous history of North America, team up again to give young readers another enlightening and engrossing history: that of Indigenous rebellion and survival. Eldon Yellowhorn, professor of First Nations studies and citizen of the Piikani Nation, and Kathy Lowinger, longtime executive director of the Children's Books Centre, seamlessly mesh their writing talents in What the Eagle Sees: Indigenous Stories of Rebellion and Renewal.

The duo frames their historic viewpoint from the beginning with "Eagle's Tale": "Eagle flies over everything, so he sees everything.... Eagle's feathers are part light and part dark. The history in this book is like an eagle's feather. Past centuries have been full of terrible, tragic events for Indigenous people.... The light, hopeful side is that against all odds we have survived." In nine chapters, Yellowhorn and Lowinger bring readers through some of these tragic events, starting with the Vikings ("we fight them off") and finishing with "Understanding the Past, Soaring into the Future."

What the Eagle Sees includes information young readers may be unlikely to see other places: while it covers World War II code talkers, it also tells of the mysterious Madam Sacho, who put her life on the line to help her people. Maps, illustrations, pictures and sidebars add to the already substantive offering, giving extra tidbits or asking readers--in "imagine" sections created by the authors--to place themselves inside certain situations. Yellowhorn and Lowinger take their own advice in this slim yet exhaustive book: "If you want to understand the past, keep Eagle's ways in mind. Take the long view, like Eagle does." --Siân Gaetano, children's and YA editor, Shelf Awareness

Realistic, humorous and a bit satirical, Shine! is performer J.J. Grabenstein's middle-grade debut, co-written with her husband, the prolific author Chris Grabenstein (Word of Mouse).

When Piper, unassuming middle schooler and astronomy enthusiast, starts attending a ritzy private school where her music teacher father has just landed his dream job, she's not ecstatic. Although her cellist mom (dead for many years) was a star at Chumley Prep, Piper is not sure it's the place for her. Then the Excelsior competition for excellence is announced, and Piper sees it as a chance to make a mark equal to her mom's at Chumley: "I could have a plaque right next to one of Mom's." Can Piper win? And how can she stand out in a school full of wealthy, overachieving, snobby students?

The breezy text highlights the ups and downs of school life, the science fair, the talent show, class assignments that allow Piper to consider her life, and the mean girl behavior of Ainsley Braden-Hammerschmidt as contrasted with the welcoming attitudes of the Hibbleflitts (a group of Piper's nerdier classmates). Piper also gets a chance to show her stuff in many small but important ways: her willingness always to lend a hand (to overburdened nannies, school employees and frightened kindergarten students); her devotion to friends and science; and her optimistic approach to life. Though Piper doesn't share her parents' musical talents, she is a genuinely kind person whom readers would likely love to meet. With rockets and stars related to Piper's scientific interests decorating chapter beginnings and endings, Shine! is a quick read that gives kids a protagonist who is a thoroughly good person with some insecurities and a very positive attitude. --Melinda Greenblatt, freelance book reviewer