Best Australian books out in May: Robert Forster’s crime caper, a ‘superb’ new novel and Periodic Bitch

default *** Capture by Amanda Lohrey Fiction, Text, $34.99 Amanda Lohrey is one of Australia’s most exhilarating novelists, not least because her works take such tremendous risks: her characters are not always likable and their trajectories don’t yield easy moral conclusions. This superb new novel from the Miles Franklin-winner is a psychiatrist’s account of the research he has undertaken with “experiencers”, people who claim to have been abducted by aliens. His colleagues are incredulous. Maybe Lohrey’s readers will be too. Aliens? And yet Lohrey here crafts a gripping fable that animates urgent questions about how we make meaning of our own experiences and those of others. – Catriona Menzies-Pike *** Periodic Bitch by Emma Hardy Nonfiction, Allen & Unwin, $29.99 For years Emma Hardy struggled with intensely distressing and debilitating periods until a doctor diagnosed her with PMDD (premenstrual dysphoric disorder), a condition that can cause extreme irritability, depression and anxiety during the luteal phase, the days before menstruation begins. This thought-provoking book weaves Hardy’s personal experience with a broader cultural look at menstruation and medical misogyny. She examines how menstruation has historically been linked to monstrosity and hysteria, drawing on feminist theory, folklore and literature, and poses the question: when is female rage a symptom, and when is it simply a rational response to an often enraging world? – Sian Cain *** Mantle by Romy Ash Fiction, Ultimo Press, $34.99 Killer mushrooms strike again! That could be the tabloid takeaway from Romy Ash’s impressive second novel. But Mantle unfolds a far more beguiling vision of a near-future when fungi become the great survivors of climate change. The first-person protagonist, Ursula, is a geologist who visits her dying mother in Tasmania. A new pandemic has broken out, in which fungal spores enter the lungs and sprout as mushrooms. The imagery is b…