What to read next: Our verdict on the week’s biggest new releases

This week’s books take readers from cartel-ravaged Mexico and windswept Scottish islands to the wilds of Tasmania and the grubby backstreets of colonial Sydney. Our critics cast their eyes over the latest fiction and non-fiction releases to hit our shelves.

Medea Sang Me A Corrido by Dahlia de la CerdaScribe, $27.99Femicide in Mexico has received significant literary attention: Roberto Bolano’s masterpiece 2666 devotes large sections to the killing of women in Ciudad Juarez in the 1990s. Dahlia de la Cerda writes into the bitter truth that the murders haven’t ceased. Medea Sang Me A Corrido shows the human face of a long-running conflict between cartels and government forces. Each chapter features a character touched by the violence – from the desperate trophy wife of a narco to a doomed boy inducted into a street gang – and each episode culminates with the arrival of Medea, the defiant murderess of Greek myth, who appears, often in a modern gothic incarnation, sporting snake tatts to offer assistance or vengeance or closure of some kind. De la Cerda creates a sense of pace and peril in a way that resembles Bolano’s The Savage Detectives more than it does 2666. It’s largely composed in a vernacular that obeys rules of spoken rather than written language, and thrums with immediacy as it engages with and subverts patriarchal culture. Anyone interested in Mexican literature should be drawn to this one.

John of John by Douglas StuartPicador, $35Scottish writer Douglas Stuart won the 2020 Booker Prize for Shuggie Bain, and his second novel Young Mungo was just as impressive. Both novels foreground parental dysfunction, closeted homosexuality, and the effects of class in a hard-edged Glaswegian neighbourhood. While queerness, and cultural hostility to it, remain integral to John of John, this book charts a freer course and doesn’t feel like it’s banging the same drum. Young Cal is skint, forced back to his ancestral home on the isle of Harris after finishing art school. His father, John, a sheep farmer, is a devoutly religious Presbyterian, confused by his son’s long hair and refusal to believe. John is blithe, too, to the stirrings that led Cal to seek out other lonely men like himself, if there are any, on his return to the fold. Keeping a fragile peace is Cal’s Glaswegian grandmother Ella, who doesn’t see eye to eye with her son-in-law. As time passes, tensions in the community will force a reckoning, in another bleak but sensitive and engaging novel from one of Scotland’s finest contemporary writers.

Every Wild Soul by Katherine Johnson HarperCollins, $