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On a cold, grey day in February this year, economist Larry H. Summers announced his resignation as president of Harvard. Though some undergraduates gathered in Harvard Yard to wave signs saying ‘Stay Summers Stay’, the rift with faculty and the governing board proved too much. Summers issued a dignified letter to the Harvard community, shook hands with well-wishers, and disappeared.

A personal renaissance, with a raison d’ệtre of such significance that it shifts the reverie of the characters in this book into a dimension of former youthfulness and revitalises the possibilities that seem to vanish with age: On a Wing and a Prayer is about friendship, loyalty and respect in the lives of three ordinary people drawn together under extraordinary circumstances in a small country town in central New South Wales. It confounds the adage that once you have reached a certain stage in life there is no further use for you.

‘Black Widow’ is the name given to the female Chechen rebels, who were widows of insurgents killed by the Russian army in Chechnya. They went on to serve under Shamil Basayev, leader of the Beslan school siege in September 2004. Sandy McCutcheon has set his latest political thriller two years later, in a story of revenge orchestrated by six female teachers at Beslan, who take on the guise of black widows to turn the tables on the hostage-takers.

Sometimes, the middle ground is a good place to be. The Shifting Fog is classy commercial fiction that sits happily in the space between literary fiction and mass-market trash. It might occupy the middle ground, but it’s far from middle of the road. First-time author Kate Morton (recipient of the six-figure sums for deals in eleven countries that publisher Allen & Unwin is happily hyping) has skilfully and intelligently created a novel that is indeed, as the publicity has it, ‘compulsively readable’.

Perhaps only John Shaw Neilson and Judith Wright have brought an equal sense of place to Australian poetry: the sense of place as a fact of consciousness with geographic truth. But in his latest collection, Biplane Houses, Les Murray considers more airy habitations – flights, cliff roads and weather – and the collection has a matching airiness that is only sometimes lightness ...

Swallow the Air won the 2004 David Unaipon Award for Indigenous Writers. Judging by this slender volume of work, the choice was a judicious one. Thematically, Tara June Winch’s début effort travels along the well-worn path of fiction based on personal experiences, with the protagonist propelling the narrative through a journey of self-discovery. In this respect, Swallow the Air nestles snugly in the semi-autobiographical framework favoured by first novelists, but the sophistication and subtlety of the prose belie Winch’s age; she is twenty-two, but writes with the élan of those much more accomplished. Swallow the Air can either be read as a novel with short chapters or as a series of interlinked short stories.

One thing is certain: Mussolini would not like this book. Indeed, it is exactly the sort of writing that would rouse Il Duce’s ire. In the last disintegrating days before his ignominious end, when Mussolini realised that his erstwhile allies, the Germans, had outmanoeuvred him, that members of his inner circle were frantically making arrangements to flee Italy, and that partisan uprisings had set Lombardy and the Po Valley alight, the archbishop of Milan offered what was supposed to be a soothing observation: that Il Duce should take heart that he would be remembered by history. Enraged by this assurance, Mussolini declared: ‘History, don’t talk to me of history. I only believe in ancient history, in that which is written without passion and long afterwards.’