Carol Middleton

This début novel by poet and author Robyn Cadwallader has its genesis in her PhD thesis on attitudes to virginity in the Middle Ages. Set in England in 1255, it is the story of Sarah, an anchoress or religious recluse, who chooses to be shut into a stone cell, measuring seven by nine paces, for life. She is seventeen.

Susan Mitchell’s fifteenth book is a biography of the Whitlams, published shortly before Gough’s death in November. As a broadcaster, journalist, and author who has examined the lives of prominent Australian women, Mitchell tells the story mainly from Margaret’s perspective. This is not surprising: Mitchell had already amassed a huge body of research for her book Margaret Whitlam: A Biography (2006), and had known her since the late 1970s. And, compared to his frank and affable wife, Gough was less willing to share his personal recollections.

Inga Simpson’s second novel is set in the lush subtropical hinterland of Australia’s east coast. Jen, a reclusive artist, goes back to where she grew up and where her father was a timber-cutter, to find peace among the birds and trees. But mysteries and disappearances trouble her idyllic life.

Like her artist protagonist, Simpson has acute powers of observation and an ability to capture nature on the page. The vivid colours of rainforest birds and the intricate growth of forests, set to a soundtrack of birdsong, lulls the reader. However, the nesting theme threads together a narrative more fragile than compelling.

Silvia Kwon’s début novel explores the legacy of war on an Australian family, seen mainly through the eyes of the wife of a returned soldier. The prologue comprises a vivid and disturbing flashback to Burma in 1944, where Merna’s husband Frank spent time ‘on the line’.

Although narrated in the third person, this is Merna’s story, told from the point of view of a wife torn between the conflicting needs of husband and son. Back on the farm in the 1960s in the Wimmera, against a backdrop of endless drought, Frank struggles to keep afloat, while his son sets his sights on a distant land of opportunity, Japan. Merna takes on the role of peacemaker in a battle between the two men, whose opposing outlooks provide the novel’s source of conflict.