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This is an elegant and satisfying novel. Like fine food, good sex, lasting relationships, and memorable music, it takes time to develop and the artistry that sustains it is understated and deceptive. It is, however, memorable. There is the instant gratification of Farmer’s delicate but sensuous prose and a finely woven narrative about a Danish woman, Dagmar, who is ‘over-wintering’ in Australia after the death of her husband, but this is definitely the tip of the iceberg. It is the cumulative effect of this virtuoso performance that surprises. Throughout, Farmer maintains a balance between the apparent simplicity of one woman’s exclusive story (with its nuances, modulations and personal significances) and the intricacies of a narrative (a kind of linguistic tessellation) which demonstrates a thesis about the inter-relatedness of our ‘one world’.

Draw an outline of the Cape York Peninsula, far north Queensland. Just a rough one. An isosceles triangle, more or less. Now draw its mirror image away from the baseline. Imagine it in 3-0. Two cones. Two cyclones joined, spinning in opposite directions. Male and female vortices balancing each other, consuming each other. That’s it. Two novellas making a novel: Thea Astley’s brilliant Vanishing Points.

Alex Miller’s third novel treads some complex and difficult territory, staking out the past, memory, and the creation of self. It is also an incursion into the shadowy borderlands that lie between history and fiction, and the way in which, for every individual, the past has a different face ...

The inner-suburban dinginess of Cosmo Cosmolino could place Helen Gamer within an honourable tradition stretching at least from Dickens (Charles) to Dickins (Barry). It is a tradition that, observing the mundane and the domestic (not to be confused with each other), has produced works of pathos and wit, of great emotional intensity and sparkling humour. It is a tradition within which great writers have managed to invest dull lives, mean-spirited characters, and tawdry events with charm and universal significance, with an appeal reaching beyond the local and the specific. It is also a tradition within which great novelists ensure that their readers’ sympathy and curiosity are aroused to the extent that they will keep turning the pages well beyond bedtime and care about what comes next.

The chapter explores the influence of William Wales on the young Coleridge when he was a student at Christ’s Hospital, London, Wales, the scientist-navigator who travelled with Cook on the Resolution, was appointed Master of Mathematics at Christ’s Hospital in 1775 and Smith, in this engaging essay, argues that the young Coleridge would have heard the stories of their momentous journey in search of the great South Land. For not only was Wales a teacher of mathematics but his job also included drumming up midshipmen recruits from the Lower School for the Royal Navy. He was ideally suited for this – a man of great stature and intellect who could deliver an exhilarating first-hand account of what it was like to be pushing to the very frontiers of knowledge through maritime exploration.