‘My favourite book of the year so far’: the best Australian books out in May

Australian literature got an energising kick up the backside when Siang Lu’s debut The Whitewash – a thrilling inventive oral history of a fictional Hollywood blockbuster with an Asian lead – was released four years ago.

Alongside recipes are lively essays about her experience working in small, traditional eateries in Turkey and Greece, where slow food took on a whole new meaning (on windy days, chips could take 40 minutes to cook on an open fire) and language barriers caused friction with surly kitchen colleagues whose idiosyncrasies rival the cast of The Bear.

One story has a girl emailing chunks of her freshly written screenplay to her grandmother, who is actually, it turns out, a tampon salvaged by astronaut Sally Ride.

Cher Tan’s debut collection of essays is rambunctious, feisty, intellectually fierce and incredibly funny – she has a knack for deadpan one-liners that are devastating in effect.

Tan writes about the early collaborative internet, about DIY culture and punk, about her employment in a series of “shit jobs” – and above all else, what it means to carve out an existence and a sense of a self on the margins and as an outsider.

Jonathan Seidler started out submitting album reviews to a free weekly I once edited; his debut, It’s A Shame About Ray, was as much about the illness that tore through his family as it was his love of Linkin Park (no judgment!