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Connoisseurs of lapidary prose and the fine art of understated narrative are unlikely to enjoy this risky passionate novel. Nor will they enthuse over sentences such as, ‘The agony was so extreme I was numb with it, as if I had fallen into a vat of molten steel and could not immediately feel the enormity of the burn’, or, ‘Flooded with embarrassment, desire, delight, I thought stupidly, no wonder men go so wild over women, no wonder they dream continually of being lapped in that heavenly softness as they go about the hard world.’ However, Rosie Scott has made her own priorities clear in a 1991 essay called ‘Come and see the blood in the streets’.

After twenty-five years of political exile, Doris Lessing returns to her homeland – once Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe – following the 1980 Marxist revolution. African Laughter documents four visits spanning the first decade of black majority rule, providing an intimate view of the birth, progress, and growing pains of a comparatively successful modern African nation. African Laughter also chronicles Lessing’s personal journey, a search for the landmarks of her memories.

As part of his quest to gather information about the ‘famous Dr Warson Holmes Jackamara’ – a Detective Inspector of police, a government official, and the holder of a doctorate in criminology – an Aboriginal oral historian interviews an erstwhile Queensland real estate broker and aspiring politician, for whom Jackamara once worked as a ‘minder’. The transcripts of the resulting thirteen monologues comprise the substance of a novella which presents the reader with an object lesson about the dangers inherent in the greed for power – in hubris – and in white Australian’s failure to recognise the strength of the Aboriginal spirit beings. As such, despite what some might see as its overstrained mythicism, this work has a compelling, and uniquely Australian, quality.

Originally published in French in 1939, Coup de Grâce is a subtle book, ‘a human, not political, document’ written with absolute assurance and remarkable skill. That the book is filled with a disturbing inhumanity portrayed (without irony) as nobility, makes it a disturbing experience for the contemporary reader.

Martin Flanagan, well-known contributor to The Age newspaper in Melbourne, has written a peregrinatory first novel in which the narrator, Stephen, is hoping to find the connection he feels he doesn’t have with his own land, and consequently with himself.

‘Somewhere’, Stephen says, ‘there had to be a combination of words that could slow down the world long enough for me to get a look inside, to prove that I existed.’

This book opens with the pregnancy of an Irish actress in 1789 and concludes with the death of her grandson in 1888. There is mystery at both ends of the story, relating in the first case to paternity and in the second to the source of a substantial estate. In between comes a drama of marital dissonance and economic survival played out against the great crisis brought upon the musical profession in England by the collapse of its family-based guild traditions.

It is a gripping read and would make a wonderful mini-series; but it is equally a very welcome contribution to the social history of musical performance over the period when the art was first establishing itself in Australia.