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When I was seven, a teenage orphan called Katherine came to stay with us for the summer holidays. Katherine had short red hair, freckles and brown eyes. She loved play-fighting and running, and hated wearing dresses and skirts. The only skirt I ever saw her wear was the navy blue one that was part of her school uniform. When the school holidays ended, Katherine stayed and became our foster sister. The big back room became her bedroom. She decorated the sloping roof over her single bed with posters that promoted jobs in the police force: the armed offenders squad, the dog squad and the youth protection squad. When she turned fourteen, my parents bought Katherine some shelves and a desk. The latter was beautiful; I would have liked it myself. Katherine liked it, too. She spent most of her birthday on her own in the bedroom. I looked through the keyhole to see what she was doing. Katherine had her head on the desk and was crying. Mum said it was because she was happy. My foster sister left school when she was sixteen and found work in the taxation department. In her spare time, she trained for the police-force entrance tests. At nineteen, she got in and left home for good.

This crime novel is about as topical as it gets, starting with the killing of a Melbourne underworld figure. Tough yet tender Detective Rubens McCauley is framed for the hit. McCauley fights to save his life and restore his name to the former level of disrepute it once enjoyed. In the course of McCauley’s quest for the truth, he teams up with hottie Constable Cassie Withers. In the tradition of many crime stories, we wonder if they will connect in other ways. We are set up nicely for a sequel, and ‘Huzza!’ for that.

Vernon God Little (2003) was the striking first novel everyone said it was, and seemed to promise better things to come. D.B.C. Pierre had a preternatural way with language, even if it wasn’t always under his control. You could tolerate the sophomoric and tritely executed satire (America is full of fat, stupid, venal people; America is just a great big television show), as it seemed the flawed trying-out of someone who hadn’t found his way to the things he really wanted to write about.

In 1978 the French weekly L’Express published an interview that sent a shockwave through the French collective conscience. The subject was Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, the wartime Vichy government’s Commissioner for Jewish Affairs. Having escaped at the end of the war to the safe haven of Franco’s Spain, he was now an octogenarian, enjoying some prestige as the official translator of the Caudillo’s speeches. Darquier had been condemned to death in absentia by the Liberation courts, but never extradited. He was not the only Nazi collaborator to have escaped punishment, but what most profoundly perturbed the readers of L’Express was that his virulent anti-Semitism was still completely intact, as was his refusal to believe that the Shoah was anything other than a Jewish fabrication. In the late 1970s France was at the beginning of the long process of self-examination and self-remembering whereby it would seek to come to terms with one of its history’s darkest periods. For Charles de Gaulle, whose presence had dominated so much of the two decades after World War II, the Vichy government was an illegality, and its leaders traitors. After de Gaulle’s death in 1970 began the slow and painful process of acknowledgment that the experience and behaviour of the French during the Occupation was more complex than the Gaullian vision, and much more shameful.

These are both second novels by previously successful authors. Each has an atmospheric sense of place and a dominant female figure. In Beyond the Break, it is the flamboyant and dangerous Irene. In Out of Place, the matriarch Eve, a postwar Italian migrant, keeps her family together through her insistence upon the traditions and the healing rituals of the old world, including especially the cooking.

Arthur Tange joined the Commonwealth Public Service in 1942, at a point in time when it was undergoing ‘a permanent revolution at once in the size, the calibre, the philosophy and the significance’ of what it was and what it did. Most Australians now forget, if they ever knew, just how limited the function and reach of federal government was in the first decades of the Commonwealth. As in so many areas of national life, World War II wrought a profound transformation in virtually all aspects of central government and public administration, and the young Tange was in at the beginning of the process. As Sir Arthur Tange, Secretary of External/Foreign Affairs and Defence successively from the 1950s to the late 1970s, he did more in turn to shape the formulation and execution of policy in these two areas than any other official, and many ministers, of his time.

There is a scene in Kate Lyons’s The Corner of Your Eye in which the narrator, Lucy, watches her daughter, Flo, being comforted over the death of a bird by their kind but bumbling friend, Archie. As Archie soothes Flo, hugging her and talking to her about what they will do next, Lucy stands apart, not knowing how to act. She feels negligent and guilty: ‘I felt like a pretend mother,’ she says. ‘A bloodless cut out.’