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Judi Farr – one of the fourteen interviewees who appear in Terence Crawford’s Trade Secrets: Australian Actors and Their Craft – reflects on the unpredictable nature of performance, and on the way in which an actor can become so immersed in a role and so apparently truthful to the emotion of the moment that, contrary to what we might expect, the connection with the audience is broken rather than reinforced. ‘Sometimes,’ she says, ‘you can do a play where tears will be pouring down your face, but you haven’t really affected anyone.’ Wendy Hughes makes a similar point: she recalls having to cry for a scene in a Paul Cox film, and how she prepared herself by getting deeply into the mood beforehand. During the first take, the tears flowed, and everything ‘felt so real’. Then she went through the scene again, but this time she ‘didn’t feel it the same and didn’t cry as much’. When the takes were compared afterwards, Hughes was struck by the fact that the one in which it all felt ‘really real’ was not the best. ‘The other one where I was in control was better.’

In the last couple of decades, the disciplines of philosophy, psychology and neuroscience (and perhaps others, such as law) have witnessed intensified interest in the emotions. In cognitive psychology and neuroscience, several developments, especially advances in computational modelling and new brain-imaging techniques, brought early successes in understanding important aspects of perceptual and cognitive processes. Partly because it became clear that these processes were not as independent of the affective, volitional and appetitive faculties as the classical division of mind suggested, it wasn’t long before scientific researchers turned to the emotions (and the other peskier faculties). Most readers will be familiar with some of the recent popular works on emotion by distinguished neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio and J. LeDoux.

The Grave at Thu Le explores a young French woman’s visit to Vietnam to research her ancestry, and to locate the cemetery in which members of her family were interred. Catherine D’anyers’s great-great-grandfather Claude was an engineer who lived in the colonial community in Hanoi at the turn of the last century. Past and present strands of the novel interweave as old, childhood stories of yester-year are overlaid with contemporary realities of Vietnam.

The Singing is the inaugural publication in the Varuna Firsts series, a collaboration between the Varuna Writers’ House and Brandl & Schlesinger. Both should be applauded for bringing a distinctive new voice into Australian writing; not to mention the honour due to the prodigious talent of Stephanie Bishop herself. Bishop has written a haunting novel with a seemingly simple story: love gone awry. A woman runs into an ex-lover on the street (neither protagonist is named), and this meeting throws her back into the story of their past. The two narratives – her solitary life now and the tale, mainly, of the relationship’s end – run in parallel. The novel’s energy, however, is ruminative rather than linear, circling around the nature of their love, pressing at the bruises left by its collapse.

Kate Grenville is a brave woman. For some years now, the representation of Aboriginal people by white writers has been hedged about by a thicket of post­colonial anxieties, profoundly problematic and important but too often manifested as hostile, holier-than-thou critique, indulging, at its most inept ..

The scope of this novel could hardly be more ambitious. It ranges from the landing ten thousand years ago of prehistoric men in primitive rafts on the shores of what would one day be known as the Kimberley, to the apparition of a young asylum seeker off a leaky, sinking boat in roughly the same locality during the present inhospitable times. In other words, it meets the challenge of major issues both immemorial and contemporary.