Dennis Altman

It is always tempting to use this opportunity to draw attention to books that may have been somewhat neglected, and looking back over 2012 three books stand out: Russell Banks’s Lost Memory of Skin (Ecco), Kim Westwood’s The Courier’s New Bicycle (Harper Voyager), and Frank Bongiorno’s The Sex Lives of Australians (Black Inc., 9/12).

Banks is one of the most interesting contemporary US novelists, and Lost Memory of Skin is a tough book, built around the lives of men estranged and outlawed from society, and struggling to survive in the interstices of urban Miami.

My two Australian books are very different: Westwood’s is a queer science fiction romp through a believable future Melbourne, while Bongiorno has written a major synthesis of an aspect too often forgotten in our historical memories. Together they illuminate the ambiguities of sexuality in ways that are important in the context of current debates.