The novel’s sexual politics are most confronting in Sidney’s memories of her adolescence in 1980s rural Victoria. Her recovered diary entries deftly capture the angst, boredom, and burgeoning sexuality of an intellectually curious teenage girl in a parochial country town. Equally convincing, as well as chilling, are memories of overt and more insidious forms of misogyny, ranging from slut-shaming and casual sexual predation to calculated sexual violence. Sidney’s memories also reveal the ease with which young women learn to be sexually competitive, or become abject and self-victimising. It’s a depressingly familiar scenario, but Chandler’s astute eye for detail and keen ear for adolescent dialogue make the familiar seem shockingly real.

After the protracted and increasingly disturbing nature of Sidney’s recollections, however, the conclusion feels rather rushed and its resolution too neat. At times, Chandler fails to trust the reader’s intelligence; we don’t need, for example, instructions on the affective power of smell to trigger memory or a psychological explanation for the novel’s use of a split point of view. And while it offers an ethically worthy plea for an understanding of mental ‘illness’ – a term Sidney rightly disdains as ‘offensive to many because it sounds like a contagious disease’ – the novel also perpetuates the unfounded stereotype of writing as a form of neurosis or madness, even quoting Elmore Leonard on writing as ‘a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia’.

Despite these concerns, All That I Remember About Dean Cola is an absorbing, suspenseful narrative about the precariousness of memory, a brutalising misogyny, and the possibilities of resistance to oppressive masculine power.

Catch Us the Foxes by Nicola West

Simon & Schuster, $32.99 pb, 376 pp

Catch Us the Foxes, the début novel of Sydney-based writer Nicola West, is a psychological crime thriller about the misogynistic reduction of women to ‘madness’. The plot centres on the search for the killer of a young woman in a New South Wales country town; its chief sleuth is the aptly named Marlowe Robertson, a former school friend of the murder victim. Marlowe’s genuine desire for justice is, however, tainted by her ruthlessly keen desire to boost her profile as a reporter, and the novel uses this ambivalence to question both the morality of investigative journalism and the gendered issues of ontology and culpability. Was Lily, the town’s sweetheart, the victim of a sinister cult that practises ritual sacrifice, or was she suffering, as her psychiatrist father insists, from a debilitating schizophrenia? Was Lily duped by a male friend into believing that the cult was real, or was he the victim of her deluded fantasies? Is Marlowe’s policeman father an upholder of the law or complicit in appalling crimes?

It is heady and engrossing material, but the mounting number of suspects and plot twists, as well as repetitive explanations of possible motives for the crime, results in a loss of narrative momentum. Suspense is also dissipated, in some instances entirely lost, by psychologically implausible digressions during emotionally heightened scenes. When Marlowe prepares to meet a possible assailant, for example, her palpable sense of fear is suddenly interrupted by an extensive description of the history of the town’s lighthouse. The town itself, described by Marlowe as a ‘fit in or fuck off’ kind of place, is never fully realised: while its homophobia and irrational suspicion of outsiders generate aspects of the plot, there is little sense of the lived experience of the inhabitants. The novel’s style is sometimes distractingly clichéd or stilted: legs turn to jelly, people run the gauntlet or don’t sleep a wink; Marlowe’s uncontrollable bodily sensations are described as being ‘on a predestined path’. And while the final plot twist is nicely unexpected, the true nature of the crime feels sensationalised rather than genuinely horrific. Such structural and stylistic problems detract from what could have been a more emotionally and ethically compelling story.

Spring Clean for the Peach Queen by Sasha Wasley

Pantera, $29.99 pb, 476 pp

Perth-based Sasha Wasley’s second novel, Spring Clean for the Peach Queen, is, as its quirky title suggests, an altogether less disturbing narrative about female experience. An example of rural romance, its plot centres on the moral development of Charlotte (Lottie) Bentz, reinvented in the city as Charlize Beste, aspiring actor and social media junkie. When her career is derailed by a scandal, Lottie returns, humiliated and friendless, to the hometown she disdains. The novel’s use of the traditional trope of city versus country – in this case narcissism, opportunism, and conspicuous consumption versus honesty and integrity – is neither simplistic nor sentimental. In her home town Lottie must contend with an intrusive local media, a bullying farmer, an entrenched social hierarchy, and a stubborn sense of pride in the family name. The novel also acknowledges the influence of feminism on the changing realities of country life: traditional marriages fail; women lament their isolation and loneliness; Lottie even changes the name and role of Peach Queen in the local beauty contest to the more gender-inclusive and socially productive Peach Ambassador.

While the novel’s depiction of the rural is admirably complex and often delightfully humorous, its treatment of the romance plot is less satisfying. The romantic hero, Angus, is predictably and ruggedly handsome, emotionally remote and brooding. The depiction of his relationship with Lottie is inclined to the formulaic, and the nature of his secret comes as no surprise. The more credible and engaging relationships are between women. Lottie’s stoushes with her staunchly feminist mother about feminine identity are complicated and enlivened by the vulnerability, resentments, and regrets of the two characters. Lottie’s relationship with the elderly Mrs Brooker, through which she moves from self-absorption and self-pity to compassion and love, is a moving depiction of an ethics of care. But perhaps the novel’s most crucial relationship is between Lottie and her conscience. Initially and wryly self-deprecating – she describes her early, superficial attempts at moral self-improvement as akin to ‘a stain-remover commercial’ – she comes to understand the value of genuine human connection. This blend of deft comedy and moral seriousness makes Spring Clean for the Peach Queen a heartfelt and highly enjoyable read. As a bonus, city folk unfamiliar with the physical labour of country life will learn how to make excellent jam, how to keep bees and chooks, and how to rid a peach crop of potentially ruinous infestation.