What to read this week: Sisters in Captivity and The Funeral Cryer hit shelves this week.

In 1937, the Nazi propaganda machine feted Friedrich Wilhelm Hymmen as a literary star. A decade later, he gave up writing fiction altogether as an act of self-punishment for his complicity in the crimes of the Nazi regime. Now his grandson, Melbourne writer Andreas Pohl, tries to find answers to the question of how a talented young man from an educated middle-class family was radicalised into joining the Nazi movement. It's a story about guilt, memory, and the joys and limitations of reinvention, and about whether the love of a grandson can withstand the revelations about his grandfather's past.

Caitlin Moran. Penguin, $35.

Moran spent 11 years writing bestsellers about women and dismissing the inevitable question "What about men?", having been very sure that the concerns of feminism and men are very different things. Then she realised that this wasn't quite right, and that the problems of feminism are also the problems of, yes, men. She looks at questions such as: Why do they only go to the doctor if their wife or girlfriend makes them? What is porn doing for young men? Are men allowed to be sad? And is Jordan Peterson just your mum - but with some mad theory about a lobster?

Colin Burgess. Simon & Schuster Australia. $34.99.

White Coolies (1954) was based on the secret wartime diaries of Sister Betty Jeffrey, who survived years in a Japanese prisoner of war camp and whose story inspired the film Paradise Road. This new book, supported by Jeffreys' family, provides a fuller biography, covering her early life and the influences that encouraged her to become a nurse as well as her post-war activities including her advocacy for returned nurses and her co-founding of the Australian Nurses Memorial Centre.

Miles Johnson. Hachette Australia. $34.99.

This book tells the real-life story of three men: Jack Kelly, a veteran US Drug Enforcement Administration agent, tasked with following a trail of dirty money across continents; Salvatore Pititto, an ambitious Mafia capo working on a vast cocaine shipment who is pulled into an arms-smuggling conspiracy; and Mustafa Badreddine, a master terrorist who has been secretly dispatched to Syria for his final mission. Set during 2015 and 2016, as the global order began to implode under the pressures of the Syrian civil war and the European refugee crisis, this book looks at the historical conflicts, events and personal histories that have shaped the lives of these three men

Wenyan Lu. Allen & Unwin. $32.99.

This is the story of a woman's mid-life reawakening in contemporary rural China. The Funeral Cryer long ago accepted the mundane realities of her life: avoided by fellow villagers because of the stigma attached to her job as a professional mourner and underappreciated by The Husband, whose fecklessness has pushed the couple close to the brink of break-up. But just when things couldn't be bleaker, The Funeral Cryer takes a leap of faith - and in so doing things start to take a surprising turn for the better.

Pip Adam. Giramondo Publishing. $29.95.

This story is part sci-fi, part social realism. A spaceship called Audition is hurtling through the cosmos. Squashed immobile into its largest room are three giants: Alba, Stanley and Drew. If they talk, the spaceship keeps moving; if they are silent, they resume growing. Talk they must, and as they do, they recover their shared memory of what has been done to their former selves - experiences of imprisonment, violence and misrecognition, of disempowerment and underprivilege. What happens when systems of power decide someone takes up too much room?

Anna Kate Blair. Simon & Schuster. $32.99.

In Blair's debut novel, Aussie Sophia is working at the Museum of Modern Art and living in a great apartment with a boyfriend who is interviewing for Ivy League teaching positions. They get engaged just before he leaves to hike the Appalachian Trail. Alone in New York City, Sophia begins to wonder what it means to be married - to be defined, publicly - in the 21st century. Can you be true to yourself and someone else? In a bridal shop she meets Cara, a young artist struggling to get over her ex-girlfriend, and the two begin a connection that leads Sophia to question the nature of her relationships, her career and the consequences of being modern.

Tony Santorella. Allen & Unwin. $39.99.

Aimless slacker Brian has been struggling to manage his transition to adulthood almost as much as his monthly transitions to a werewolf. His recent murderous slip-ups have caught the attention of Tyler, a Millennial were-mentor determined to take the mythological world by storm. Tyler has got a plan, and weirdly his self-help punditry actually encourages Brian to shape up and to stop accidentally marking out guys who ghosted him on Grindr as potential monthly victims. But he comes to realise Tyler's expansion plans are much more nefarious than they seemed.

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