Looking for a reprieve from the news cycle? Escape into Australia’s recent past and the near future in outer space with our March fiction picks.
Stories: The Collected Short Fiction
Helen Garner (Pantheon, 208 pp., $27, March 2026)
In times as bleak as these, many people may feel a desire to escape into a different era—at the very least, that seems to be the case for the editors and publicists at Penguin Random House. This month, the U.S. publisher released a collection of short stories by celebrated Australian novelist Helen Garner that debuted in her native country nearly a decade ago. She wrote many of the stories in the last century, during the 1980s and 1990s.
“Most of Garner’s stories are fronted by Australian women living in the transformative period of feminism’s second wave,” American author Jonathan Escoffery writes in the foreword to the new collection. Garner’s blunt prose eschews euphemisms and confronts matters of sex and gender head-on. Crossword-playing fathers grow visibly uncomfortable as, across the living room, their daughters and wives muse about tampons and periods. When two female friends discuss experimenting with lesbianism, the one who has only ever had sex with men asks, “[I]f both of you have the same equipment does that mean it’s more equal?”
For all her piquant observations of Australian life (“Have you ever noticed,” one character says, “how Australian men, even in their forties, dress like small boys?”), Garner devotes many of her pages to other continents. She takes readers to England, France, Germany, and, briefly, Pakistan. A recurring character is from dictatorship-era Brazil; “We don’t have elections,” he says, causing the story’s Australian protagonist to feel ashamed that she has the privilege of casually debating politics with friends.
Of Karachi, Garner writes: “Everything outside was dust-coloured, and shimmered.” In Germany, she takes care to highlight locals’ accents as one describes being “a souzand miles from the ocean!” She spends several paragraphs satirizing the French obsession with food pairings after a Parisian man refuses to eat fish and green vegetables together, even though those are the only things left in his fridge. And she lists the smallest observations with rigid obsession, noting, for example, how “non-European paper” has “horizontal lines instead of squares.” (This reviewer has a strong preference for the latter.)
Garner is at her best when she puts words to intangible sensations, such as feelings of cultural limbo. Upon visiting England, an Australian character who lives in France says: “I hate being able to understand everything that’s going on around me. I miss that feeling of your senses having to strain an inch beyond your skin that you get in places where people aren’t speaking your language.” In another story, Garner describes watching a German man talk: “He looked as if the words he spoke were made of soft, unresisting matter, as if he were chewing air.”
Despite her geographical crisscrossing, Garner never forgets where she and most of her characters come from. She whisks readers from Sydney to Melbourne and Adelaide to Perth, with stops in nondescript Gold Coast condos along the way. One Australian expat in London says that, when homesick, he would routinely “take down the atlas and gaze at the page with Australia on it: I loved its upper points, its vast inlets, its fat sides, the might of it, the mass from whose south-eastern corner my small life had sprung.”—Allison Meakem
Celestial Lights: A Novel
Cecile Pin (Henry Holt and Co., 256 pp., $26.99, March 2026)
So well-trodden are narratives about space, hubris, and human ambition that one hardly expects to be surprised or delighted by yet another addition to the genre. But Cecile Pin’s modest yet deeply ambitious sophomore novel, Celestial Lights, somehow stands apart, weaving a tale as luminous as its title suggests.
The book follows the commander of the first manned spacecraft sent to Europa, one of Jupiter’s many moons, where a vast ocean harboring potential life lies beneath an icy surface. Pin uses a braided narrative, told between the narrator Ollie’s past—from his youth in a rural English village to his career as an engineer in the Royal Navy to his first forays into space—and the personal log of his days on the 10-year voyage, which range from banal to tragic.
It’s a thematic departure from Pin’s debut novel, Wandering Souls, an intergenerational tale of Vietnamese refugees who landed in London after the fall of Saigon—and one that Pin pulls off expertly, thanks to the careful research underpinning the scientific and technical aspects of the book, from the minutiae of reentering Earth’s orbit to the disembodying experience of a spacewalk.
Partly driving the narrative are the ambitions of an enigmatic billionaire, whose nuclear-propelled spacecraft turns the United Kingdom into a leading space power. His goal, Ollie thinks, is “best described as mastery: of technology, of science, of the universe, of anything that was within his reach, and perhaps even more so, that wasn’t.” This Elon Musk-type figure puppeteers Ollie’s career in the cosmos, personally choosing him to lead the Europa mission, a joint project with NASA, the European Space Agency, and his private company.
What lends the story emotional weight is Ollie’s relationship with his wife, a fiery biologist who is devoted above all to the living beings already within reach, from her family to the spotted butterflies whose migration patterns she researches. “I spent my time gazing up at the universe, while Philly spent hers peering down at a microscope or a field,” Ollie thinks. Their tender, fully rendered marriage throws into relief the sacrifices that Ollie must make to satisfy his voracious ambition. Even he doesn’t fully understand his choice to leave behind his wife and young son for a decadelong mission, but the world, in his view, is a “field of possibilities waiting to be sown.”
En route to Europa, Ollie notes, “I see the Milky Way in all its glory, untainted by city lights, and the sun rising over Earth’s atmosphere. I see them all, those celestial lights, and I know that no other path would have shown them to me.” Pin’s novel explores whether that path is worth it, with care and a reverence for the unknowable parts of the universe and the human mind.—Chloe Hadavas
March Releases, in Brief
One Delhi family fumbles through personal and political dramas in Karan Mahajan’s much-anticipated The Complex. Asako Yuzuki’s novel of obsession, Hooked, is translated from the Japanese by Polly Barton. Yann Martel, who won the Booker Prize for Life of Pi, returns with Son of Nobody, a retelling of the Trojan War. Northern Irish poet Eoghan Walls dramatizes 19th-century ornithology in his novel-as-notebook, Field Notes From an Extinction. Literary fantasy meets the London Blitz in English author Francis Spufford’s Nonesuch.
The nine short stories in Colm Toibin’s The News From Dublin probe the nature of love, loss, and family across America, Ireland, and Spain. Álvaro Enrigue’s alt-Western, Now I Surrender, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer, brings to life the end of Apachería. A Mask, the Color of the Sky, a novel written in prison by Palestinian author Bassem Khandaqj, is translated into English by Addie Leak. Russian American author J.M. Sidorova’s The Witch of Prague takes a magical realist lens to the 1968 Prague Spring. And a woman is compelled to reexamine her adolescence in Norwegian writer Vigdis Hjorth’s Repetition, translated by Charlotte Barslund.—CH
