Katharine England

Publicists obviously rack their brains for innovative ways to promote their books: new novels have come equipped with bookmarks, balloons, and boxes of matches (Rosie Scott’s Lives on Fire), and six pages of variegated hype is not uncommon for a book targeted as a future best-seller. Random House, however, have recently come up with a format that is genuinely useful to reviewers: a neat, double-sided fold that incorporates – instead of the insistent ‘marketing points’ and the publicist’s puff picking out all the best quotes and rendering them instantly second-hand – a summary of the plot, a couple of style-bytes, and an interview in which the author discusses the genesis of the novel.

Reading a handful of primary-school-age historical novels in swift succession underlines the commonality of stratagems for encouraging young readers to engage with the past. First, there is the need to find a credible child role to focus on. Then, since adventure in historical times fell largely to the lot of boys, a female interest has to be introduced, or, with some contrivance and loss of credibility, the main role handed over to a girl in disguise.

Leonardo Da Vinci, Elvis Presley, the Tarot, unsettled weather, love, ducks and a megasupermarket: they’re not subjects that one would often be moved to mention in the same breath, but it is on just this unlikely affiliation that Julie Capaldo’s cunningly plotted second novel is based.

Figuratively speaking Shark reminds me of a pencil-and-paper game: change FOX into SHARK a letter at a time, so that the stepping-stones of words like the one to the other. For Fox is back, back from the independence struggle in West Papua and retired to Australia and the evocatively named coastal town of Tired Sailor, and by the end of the book Fox has become Shark, elegiacally linked by some of Bruce Pascoe’s most lyrical prose.

Catherine Jinks’ new novel reminds us that humans are great pigeonholers: we like to know where everything (everyone) fits, to be able to pop them in the right slot, slap the right label on the front and relax, secure in the knowledge that our future reactions are safely prescribed by the parameters of the pigeonhole to which we have consigned them.

Mark Twain did Australian literature a service when he remarked that Australian history ‘does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies’. It is an observation with which Australians are happy to identify, for it stimulates the imagination, accommodates the larrikin we like to see in ourselves, and has the effect of sanctioning the revision of a past that is not all that we might, from the vantage of hindsight, have wished. At least three writers have adopted it as an epigraph, including Peter Carey, who wove Illywhacker around the notion, and now David Astle, personalising a possible past for a corner of country Victoria.

Lilith Norman’s exquisite novella was first published in 1978 and was an IBBY Honour Book in 1980. Set in a lovingly realised Bondi, the archetypal seaside suburb, the book packs a huge amount into its seventy-eight pages: life, death, love, grief; a question of focus; and, drawn in spare and beautifully controlled strokes, the disparate two worlds that touch at the shoreline.