Random House Australia

‘I’m sitting in my tower, cogitating.’ Well, Dessaix admits, it’s not a real tower, though he likes to think of it that way. Actually, it is an elevated writing room in his house in Hobart, with a view of the mountains to the west. He is cogitating, not meditating – he’s particular about this – and the thoughts he proceeds to capture on the page are those of a mind given to rambling. As he sits there, the train of thought moves off to connect him with other writers in other towers, widely distant in place and time: Vita Sackville-West at Sissinghurst in Kent, Michel de Montaigne in rural France, W.B. Yeats in County Galway, Rainer Maria Rilke at the Château de Muzot in Switzerland.

The sticker on the cover assured me that if I had enjoyed The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society I would ‘love’ Stillwater Creek. Had I been browsing the bookshop shelves, this would have been fair warning not to part with my money. Myriad readers obviously did love Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows’s international bestseller. Alexander McCall Smith certainly did: he chaired the committee that recently voted it The Times WHSmith Paperback of the Year. TGLAPPPS bored me so much that I failed to finish it, but I can see why McCall Smith, who writes novels in a similar vein and with similarly whimsical titles, championed it.

Suspenseful, heartrending, and transcontinental, Come Back to Me’s dynamic scenes extend from debauchery at an office part to a shocking outback crime. A complex psychological tale, Sara Foster’s début novel – forged from her years as an editor and a life lived in Britain and Australia – throws us head first into marital distress.

Drift is a complex and ambitious piece of young adult fiction that attempts, and partially achieves, an exploration of myriad existential themes. Through the tale of Undine, the adolescent daughter of an idiosyncratic family, claustrophobically trapped between magical realms and reality, Penni Russon embarks on a sometimes baffling journey through parallel universes, string theory and the physics of chaotic coexistence.

Inspector Anders, the one-legged anti-terrorist expert, is back. In Marshall Browne’s new novel, he returns to Italy after being sent to the safety of a Europol desk, away from the southern Italian mafia, who had sworn, and attempted, to kill him. Outspoken right-wing politicians are being murdered, and all the signs point to serial killings with deep-seated motives.

Putting together a collection or anthology is not as easy as it looks. There are decisions to be made about theme, order and intent, which are often based on the intended audience. Three recent anthologies for children show that, in children’s literature at least, originality and diversity are achievable.

Why is it that Indonesia’s northernmost province has received so much less Australian attention than East Timor? Aceh is of course further away, and no claims are made about local people supposedly helping our soldiers during World War II. Another reason is the uniquely emotive issue of the deaths of the five Australian journalists in Timor in 1975. A suspicion arises that the main reason is that the East Timorese are Catholics while the Acehnese are Muslims. Many Australians, especially church activists, could feel something in common with oppressed fellow-Christians in a nearby territory.

Here is what veteran war correspondent and Pulitzer Prize-winner Peter Arnett has to say about American political deliberation in the information age: ‘Government decisions are made by an inside group of Congress and the American public largely doesn’t give a damn. When they vote they don’t vote in terms of international policies; they vote in terms of local issues.’ New Zealand-born Arnett first worked in Vietnam for Associated Press, then in 1981 joined and subsequently became the voice and face of CNN. He has interviewed both Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. How does he explain the US myopia he diagnoses? By looking at the news sources most Americans use: ‘They get talkback radio, which is skewed to the right usually; they look at a bit of television and maybe some magazine shows, and that is it. They don’t give a shit.’ But does he blame them? No. The controversial journalist (CNN, under pressure from government, dismissed him when he fronted a programme that accused the US of using sarin gas on American defectors in Laos) blames his own profession, or at least that part of the profession with corporate clout. ‘All this is the media’s fault. It is the newspapers’ fault for not including a page or two of international news every day so that people, like it or not, are going to see it.’ Nor does Amell spare the television networks: ‘CNN should be doing more, even though it has limited viewership; it should be doing more than covering celebrity stuff now, which it does domestically. Fox is a joke. There is an ignorance that is growing in America and it is frightening.’

I must confess I picked up this celebrity autobiography, complete with embossed cover and a price suggestive of a huge print run, without anticipation. I could not have been more wrong. Mike Munro’s excoriating and frank account of his abused childhood and early years in journalism chronicles a survival story that is Dickensian in scope and impact. Like Dickens, Munro managed to overcome poverty, cruelty and emotional deprivation to reach the top of a demanding profession. Remarkably, considering his scarifying experiences as a child and adolescent, he fell in love and married a partner with whom he has created the kind of loving family life that he never knew as a child. But I am jumping ahead.