The Greek diaspora featured strongly in Andrew Pippos’s first novel, Lucky’s (2020), which traced the life of Chicago-born Vasilis ‘Lucky’ Mallios, who develops a chain of eponymous franchise restaurants often run by Greek Australians that mimic mid-twentieth-century American diners. The fortunes, and misfortunes, of Lucky and his restaurants in turn become the subject of a planned New Yorker article by journalist Emily Main.

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.

In her ambitious and skilful examination of childhood and play, Emily Gallagher has carefully foregrounded the voices and thoughts of children, situating them as sources as well as historical actors. This is no easy task. Histories of childhood are mostly told from the viewpoint of adults: they are about children, rather than by children. In colonial Australia, the daily existence of children was harnessed to the circumstances of the adults – mostly parents – who cared for them, and who made key decisions about their education, work, and aspirations. Wider social commentary about young people, either sparked by moral panic or casting the next generation as the embodiment of a hopeful future, was proclaimed by adult authority figures.

Aboriginal poetry has the ability to hold love and rage simultaneously. Luke Patterson’s début A Savage Turn does this masterfully, constructing pieces full of fire and defiance ‘amongst the love / poems’. In this collection, Patterson - a Gamilaroi poet, educator, and musician – unpacks colonial myth and legacy, subverts reader expectations, and teases out a tenderness that nourishes this collection.

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.

Like many edited collections, Fault Lines bears the marks of its origins in a conference, one on ‘Injustice, Survival, Memory’ at the Australian National University in 2022. The editors, in their introduction, explain that the central idea was to use the histories of the Dunera and Queen Mary (ships that carried interned Europeans to Australia during World War II) ‘as a basis for an examination of the theme of injustice in Australian history’.

Shakespeare is not a hoax, but he is hoaxy. The field of Shakespeare studies is brimming with fibs and fables. There are the ‘Shakespeare heretics’ who have posited, on flimsy evidence, that Henry Neville, Francis Bacon, Edward de Vere, or someone else was the ‘secret author’ of William Shakespeare’s works. There have been plenty of frauds and near-frauds on the ‘orthodox’ side of Shakespeare studies as well. A.L. Rowse, for example, simply made up an elaborate back story for the ‘Dark Lady’ of Shakespeare’s sonnets.

Across three lauded non-fiction books and countless essays and articles, Bri Lee has delivered an impeccably researched and ethically complex examination of a great number of contemporary topics. In a 2022 essay for The Guardian, it was Western storytelling under Lee’s microscope, particularly our obsession with ‘individual protagonists experiencing personal transformations’. Returning ad nauseum to this formula, argues Lee, is ‘distinctly not useful’ for understanding the slow-burn, widely dispersed crises of the modern age, most notably ‘a climate emergency that defies any sort of conflict-resolution arc’. It’s a brilliant essay, short and sharp, and with a punchy take away: ‘[It is] essential that we consider the power and the limitations of individual empathy ... there may be a better way.’

As the January-February issue of Australian Book Review went to print, a horrifying event was unfolding: the largest terrorist attack on Australian soil and one unambiguously targeting Jews who were celebrating Hanukkah at ‘Chanukah by the Sea’, on Bondi Beach. There is time for examining the deep-seated, long-standing, global factors which led to this – as well as, perhaps, the human-scale, emotional, even banal ones – but, at ABR, we decided now is a time for personal reflection, listening, and grace, as Waleed Aly recently put it. 

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’.