Troy Bramston is fast becoming the Peter FitzSimons of Australian political biography. Every few years a door-stopping volume on a prime minister appears, brandishing the same formula of ‘never before seen’ documents and ‘fresh revelations’. In the Acknowledgements to this latest biography of Gough Whitlam, Bramston virtually pleads with readers to render homage to the ‘hundreds’ of interviews he conducted, the ‘thousands’ of pages turned in archives, the miles clocked in libraries visited. There is a diligent busyness to the enterprise. But Bramston’s relentless emphasis on the quantitative smothers his underlying inability to master the material. The result, sadly, is an incomplete picture of Whitlam: a workman-like chronicle of the life, but not a deep exploration of the political and intellectual dimensions of the man.

To explain the great arc of human experience is daunting. In Guns, Germs and Steel: The fates of human societies (1997), Jared Diamond argued that environment and geography shape culture and technology, allowing some societies to prosper while others fail. In Sapiens: A brief history of humankind (2011), Yuval Noah Harari described successive revolutions that saw one variety of humans transform the planet. Harari lamented the decision to leave the hunter-gatherer life for agriculture; populations grew in number but became victims of regular famine, war, and disease.

In 1921, during his brief tenure editing The Mildura and Merbein Sun, the charlatan and blackmailer Grant Hervey combined satire and legend in a regularly serialised novel, hoping to forge a foundation myth for the Mildura region. The hero of A Don Quixote of the Saltbush was an American adventurer, Stephen Puritan; his loyal sidekick was a poorly conceived, simplistic Aboriginal man known as Pinggali. The two ride the bleak, rusty terrain of Mildura vowing vengeance on wrongdoers, to be enacted through a reinvention of the landscape via the installation of modern irrigation technology.

I also went to the Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s production of Siegfried, as reviewed by Peter Rose (ABR Arts, 11/25), but to the Sunday performance. The performance had gone up quite a few notches. The singers seemed to let it all out; it was outstanding. In Tuscany, where I lived for many years, the state classical station would broadcast Bayreuth live. Growing up in Melbourne in the 1960s, my mainstay for classical music was the ABC. This was when John Charger was introducing us to Mahler and Bruckner, so difficult out of a tinny radio. I feel that the younger generation and the taxpayers are being sorely treated.

A curious feature of the creamy new edition of Helen Garner’s diaries: it carries only one blurb, and it is not by some literary heavyweight but by Nigella Lawson. At first, I found this confounding, but I soon began to see parallels between the two. Both are funny, spontaneous sensualists; both have been subjected to harsh public scrutiny and experienced a certain degree of messiness in their personal lives; and both are magnificent women. In the words of Anne Enright, they are, in their various ways, ‘acclaimed celebrator[s] of the poetic quotidian’.

Writing about her mother, who is a presence in many of the essays in Attention, Anne Enright recalls the two reciting poetry together. Despite her mother steadily declining into dementia, Enright adjudges the lines of poetry, as well as the books her mother continues to read, as bulwarks against the withering of her mind. ‘It seems’, Enright writes, ‘as though her mind is not putting the words together so much as the other way around.’

One Thousand and One Nights begins with an ending in sight. Unless Shahrazad can keep her husband, the Sultan Shahryar, entertained with her stories, she will follow the virgins before her who marry him only to be beheaded in the morning. Shahrazad’s means of escaping this response to his first wife’s infidelity opens the heart of Jeanette Winterson’s new book about what stories can do and be: ‘magic words that get us into the treasure and out of danger’.

Now eighty-eight years old, the famously private Thomas Pynchon has produced his first book since the publication of Bleeding Edge in 2013. Shadow Ticket – appearing sixty-two years after his first novel, V. – is immediately recognisable within Pynchon’s distinctive, postmodern oeuvre. The plot swerves between real and alternative worlds, various literary and cinematic genres are parodied, and established conventions of narrative representation are undermined.

There is change. Then there is rate of change, known as velocity. Then there is rate of rate of change, known as acceleration. In physics, the three are distinct; psychologically, however, the distinction is more difficult to conceive. Certainly, this seems the case for Richard King in his latest book, Brave New Wild: in detailing an apparently new techno-political phenomenon called ecomodernism, he seems to confuse an uptick in the rate of technological change for a distinct change in itself, arguing that we are at the start of a paradigm shift.

Else is not your average climate change novel; it is too rich and strange and visionary. Civilisation is collapsing, though we see very little of that. We follow the exodus of a woman and her teenage daughter from Melbourne to a future Mornington Peninsula over several seasons, across a territory alternately submerged in floods and blasted by fire.