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Nikki Gemmell’s third novel, Love Song, set in both Australia and England, is a striking and memorable work. The style is sharp, jagged even, but so energetic that it sucked me in. I had to read it twice to know more than the fact that I had thoroughly enjoyed it.

This is a story written to an unborn child by a mother who seems, at first, both old and young, something which proves to be the case. She is Lillie, a girl who has survived the eccentric, cult-like community that incarcerated her, and who has survived the loss of her lover, the child’s father. She has survived a short life dogged by false accusation. She is also a young woman who, at the point of writing that old person’s document, her memoirs, is scarcely into her adulthood and is still inexperienced in the ways of the world. Her voice is fresh, young and oddly wise.

On the front cover of Wendy Orr’s new novel, we are advised: ‘This [book] is a treat for fans of Tyler, Wesley and Trollope.’ Apart from any predisposed posed feelings you may have for the work of Anne Tyler, Mary Wesley and Joanna Trollope, this small sentence is a useful positioning statement for the potential reader.

In Australia, despite having Indonesian as one of the languages commonly available to students in primary and secondary school, and despite having departments of Indonesian Studies in all the major universities, the literature of the world’s third most populous country and ‘our closest neighbour’ is not well known. It is mostly the province of academic specialists, not general readers. The reason for this is partly cultural in that Australian readers, particularly readers of poetry, tend to be more interested in American, European or British poetry, and partly a consequence of the poor support given to the art of translation. Yet two of the best-regarded translators of Indonesian literature, Harry Aveling and Max Lane, reside in Australia.

Clare Bradford is an Associate Professor in Literary and Communication Studies at Deakin University. She writes from within her discipline, and addresses other academics. Reading Race, despite its broad title, is principally a discussion of forms of racism that the author identifies in books published in colonial times, compared with contemporary examples.

These two new collections are obverses in contemporary Australian poetry and show the opposing, but often interlocked, tensions between modernism and postmodernism. The poems in both books concern themselves with art’s capacity to create or suggest other worlds. Both use painting and the visual arts in dramatically different ways as metaphors and motifs. Both collections fragment and project the perceiving self into alternative ficto-autobiographies, but with different expectations of resolution. Both conjure up real worlds of political and institutional corruption on an international scale and pit moments of fragile subjectivity and domestic harmony against grubby injustice. Both register their authors’ age at around fifty. Caesar hankers after an ethical response; Boyle juxtaposes aesthetic possibilities. Caesar’s poetry is restrained, measured, spare; Boyle’s is crowded, insistent, histrionic.

In 1969,’ says Venero Armanno in the letter to the reader that prefaces his new novel, ‘my parents took me to Sicily for the first time, and we lived for six months in the tiny village of their birth. What I remember most clearly … is the presence of the volcano, and just how absolutely it dominates life. It’s there smoking silently in the day, and at night … you can see the fiery glow in the mouth of cratere centrale – that fire which can never be put out.’

Talk about unlikely associations. My first response to the opening chapter of Tim Winton’s latest novel was how its sense of a life at a standstill, awaiting some new impulse, reminded me of Jane Austen’s Emma. Winton’s protagonist, Georgie Jutland, with a string of unsatisfactory relationships behind her ...

This is the tale of a quest driven by an obsession. At its heart are the Krakouers, an Australian family of five generations. The author is a descendant of the first Krakouers to settle in Western Australia. Terri-Ann White’s project is to record the gaps and silences, to piece together fragments, and ‘rescue’ family members ‘from obscurity’.