At first blush, the subject of Carmel Bird’s twelfth novel, the seventeenth-century court of Versailles, might come across as a surprise. Bird was born in Launceston and lives in Victoria, and she has traditionally focused on Australian subjects in her extensive body of fiction. Cape Grimm (2004) and The Bluebird Café (1990) engage with Tasmania’s Gothic past, from the horrors of colonialism to the Martin Bryant massacre. Red Shoes (1998) was inspired by the Melbourne cult known as ‘The Family’, while The White Garden (1995) was based on the controversial deep-sleep therapy and sexual abuse that occurred at Sydney’s Chelmsford Psychiatric Hospital in the 1960s.

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’.

Zadie Smith’s essay collections have an uncanny habit of arriving precisely when the culture shifts. Changing My Mind (2009) appeared as the iPhone began transforming daily life; Feel Free (2018) followed Donald Trump’s first inauguration; Intimations (2020) captured the disorientation of the pandemic’s early months; and now Dead and Alive appears in the wake of Trump’s return to office. Comprising essays written between 2016 and 2025, most of them first published elsewhere, the collection gains an unexpected coherence in retrospect.

In 1997, a first-time writer came out of small-town Kerala, God’s own country, and wrote a novel exploring the nature of maternal love and the constrictions placed upon who can love whom and how. Narrated through the perspective of dizygotic twins – with their ordinary words capitalised and scattered across the pages to symbolise children encountering an adult world with equal parts awe and apprehension – this work went on to win the 1997 Booker Prize. Those of us whose minds were forevermore imprinted with Arundhati Roy’s sheer idiomatic chutzpah and semantic cosmopolitanism in The God of Small Things will find the writer in fine fettle in her latest work, Mother Mary Comes to Me.

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.

Today, women’s sports are undergoing a major transformation. The change is dramatic, especially in cricket and football, sports previously seen as non-traditional for women. These sports are experiencing a surge in player numbers, an increase in revenue, sustained sponsorship, record crowds, improved recognition, media and television coverage, and advances in governance. This has led to a greater thirst for and curiosity about the players’ stories. In turn, this has resulted in the timely commercialisation of their histories.

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.’

Things can turn very quickly, my mother says. Be careful who you associate with. Με όλους και με κανέναν. With everyone and with no one. Watch what you do and what you say because they’re always watching – then, one day, they’ll write your name on ‘the list’ and we’ll never see you again.

To celebrate the year’s memorable plays, films, television, music, operas, dance, and exhibitions, we invited a number of arts professionals and critics to nominate their favourites.

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.