I learnt about the Erin Patterson verdict from Allen & Unwin. They broke the news with a PR blast for Greg Haddrick’s The Mushroom Murders: ‘A family lunch. Three deaths. What really happened?’ (a tagline designed to fit any outcome). I checked the timestamps. The jury had been discharged from the Morwell courthouse at 2:28 pm; the marketing email landed in my inbox at 3:28 pm. It takes longer to wrap and roast a beef wellington.

There is a video clip somewhere of Dennis Altman on the ABC’s Monday Conference program, a forerunner to the late (and unlamented) Q+A. The year is 1972 and Altman is defending his book Homosexual (1971) against a Methodist minister whose name escapes me and the conservative politician and journalist Peter Coleman. The minister is the more strident of the two, suggesting that homosexuality is the consequence of disordered sexual development and citing some specious research to that effect. Coleman takes a more nuanced line. One of the best things about the book, he suggests, is that it confirms one of the right’s main objections to ‘gay lib’: the movement, he says, is aimed as much at the transformation of society as it is at the liberation of gays. Smiling slightly mischievously, Altman is more than happy to agree.

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.’

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.’