Hachette

The claim of this well-intentioned book is to give an account of the Second Battle of Krithia, which was fought on the Gallipoli Peninsula between 6 and 8 May 1915. However, we do not reach the beginning of the battle until page 187, and it ends on page 257. Thus, we have seventy pages out of 320 on the titular topic of this book.

Stories about women from disparate times and places leading parallel lives are almost a genre unto themselves. In Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, a well-known literary example, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, connects the lives of three twentieth- century women (one of them Woolf herself) in an intergenerational portrait of queerness and mental illness. In Evie Wyld’s The Bass Rock, a trio on the Scottish coast are linked over several centuries through themes of violence against women. In Tracey Chevalier’s The Virgin Blue, an American woman living in France noses out the story of a persecuted ancestor.

Nick Drake’s ‘Fruit Tree’, one of his best-known songs, addresses the idea that even if an artist is ignored in their lifetime, their legacy can be secured, and their work imortalised, with an early death. The song, as we learn from Richard Morton Jack’s exhaustive biography of the English singer-songwriter, was partly inspired by the precocious English boy poet Thomas Chatterton, who committed suicide at the age of seventeen, in 1770.

The migrant’s story is defined by a push and pull between homelands left and new ones found – past and present, tradition and modernity, family and fragmentation are constantly at odds with each other. The migrant’s child’s story enters a new space of liminality, belonging to two cultures, yet being outside both, creating a potential crisis of identity as profound as a crisis of home. The migrant’s grandchild continues the narrative, unearthing intergenerational fractures.

In April 1952, during the long voyage from Portsmouth around the Cape to the Montebello Islands off the coast of Western Australia, HMS Narvik and HMS Zeebrugge anchored at the Cocos Islands in the Indian Ocean. After a slow, lurching trip, the palmy islands and their azure seas were a tonic. There, the crew of the British ships met for the first time with the legendary RAAF No. 2 Airfield Construction Squadron that had built the Woomera rocket range in South Australia and was then building a civil airport on the islands. Five British crew decided, against an explicit order from the Australian Commander, to take a swim. In the treacherous reef waters, they quickly got into trouble and RAAF servicemen went to rescue them. The Prologue to Operation Hurricane gives a harrowing account of how three men drowned: one of the Brits and two of the Australian rescuers.

There is no denying the power of poetry as thoughtful story-telling, a form of expression free from rules, conventions. It allows a safe environment for experimentation, free from the confines of traditionalism. Portraits in words, detailing the ride of life and thoughts of the mind are painted onto the canvas, where the placement of verses on a page can matter as much as the choices of words themselves.

When Justice Anthony Besanko released his judgment on the Ben Roberts-Smith versus Fairfax defamation case on 1 June, there was a lot more riding on his decision than the reputation of the principal parties and who would be landed with the eye-watering legal bills. Had the verdict gone against Fairfax, its reporters, Nick McKenzie, Chris Masters, and, to a lesser extent, Dan Oakes, would have struggled to return to or resurrect their careers. Defeat would have had a chilling effect on genuinely probing investigative reporting. In the face of such a decision, media organisations and editors around the country would have thought long and hard about letting their journalists pursue well-connected and well-resourced public figures, let alone defend their findings in court. But there was more at stake than that. The ‘defamation trial of the century’ was also widely, if inaccurately, regarded as a war crimes trial by proxy. While Roberts-Smith was not on trial for any of the crimes McKenzie and Masters alleged that he had committed or facilitated, had Justice Besanko found that the reporters had defamed him it would have made the pursuit of war crimes charges against Roberts-Smith more unlikely, or more difficult. The sense of relief at Besanko’s judgment was near universal. It not only emboldened the nation’s investigative reporters and their editors but also opened the way for the full and free pursuit of those members of Australia’s Special Forces credibly identified by the Brereton Report (2020) as having committed war crimes in Afghanistan.

Melbourne author Aisling Smith’s début begins with a question that snakes the whole way through her novel: ‘What has happened to Benjamin?’

Pip Finkemeyer’s Sad Girl Novel (Ultimo, $34.99 pb, 304 pp) is likely to divide readers, based on its title alone. For this reader, the immediate response was cynicism: another début about a young woman adrift and feeling sorry for herself? While unhappy women have populated art – and created it – for centuries, in 2023 the ‘sad girl’ is an aesthetic shorthand that conjures images of Ultraviolence-era Lana Del Rey, pale Tumblr girls with dripping makeup, Daisy Edgar-Jones in Normal People. Female pain, flattened into a marketable package.

Stephanie Bishop’s The Anniversary is an example of both deft literary craft and an engrossing read – a feat rarer than it should be. Billed as a ‘novel about writing and desire’, this is more a work interrogating the nexus between art, celebrity, and commerce, while unpicking the ways in which gender informs all three.