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Relatively few Australians possess a criminal record, but virtually everyone in this country leads a vicarious life of crime. The greater part of our popular culture is pervaded by crime in inverse proportion to the rate of actual offending. Law and order is a sensitive political topic right now, yet at the same time never has the criminal world held such sway over the popular imagination. The bulk of television drama across all channels is crime-based, and crime is the raison d’être of endless documentaries, news reports and current affairs stories. Not even the most pedestrian soap opera is free from criminality; the rules dictate that sexual relationships must entail a period of stalking, and business cannot be transacted without skulduggery. The Hollywood dream factory, needless to say, could not operate on such an immense scale without the heavy consumption of the raw material of crime.

The Book Thief marks a departure for Markus Zusak. It is his first novel for adults, has broader concerns than his earlier work, and makes clearer his ambitions to be considered a serious writer. His first three novels, for young adults, were primarily focused on the masculinity of the boys in a working-class Sydney family ...

These are hostile times for literary fiction in Australia. New novels are well advised to don flak, not flap, jackets. And it’s not just a simple case of critics sniping from the sidelines, wanting their piece of the action. This is a full-blown civil war involving all the vested interests – publishers, editors, journalists, publicists and booksellers – not just writers and readers. The smarting adjectival arrows continue to find their targets. Current fiction is too dreamy, starchy, inconsequential, ingrown, belletristic, portentous. While our non-fiction writers have been doing time in South American jails and running the gauntlet of spy networks, our best novelists have been tending the lily-livered genres of historical fiction and fable. Many of them have been accused of skedaddling off to the library at a time when a confrontation with the forces of xenophobia, philistinism, fogeyism and greed is more than ever required. Novel-writing, in a word (and it’s one that has been flung around with a degree of passion recently), has become ‘gutless’ storytelling.

Comedy isn’t the only art that requires good timing. Poetry also requires it. Indeed, poetry might be partly defined as the art of giving things away at the right moment. Illustrating this we have The Best Australian Poetry 2005. In this elegant anthology, we find Peter Goldsworthy’s inspired description of our planet: ‘Our earthen dish is seven parts water / one part china, and a tiny bit japanned.’ We also find Brett Dionysius on the 175-year-old tortoise Harriet, which, having outlived Charles Darwin, thinks: ‘Now I’m with Steve Irwin at Australia Zoo. / I Harriet, time-lord tortoise: outlive him too.’ We find Jennifer Harrison’s arresting description of ‘grammar’s lovely utterly cold snow’. We find Keith Harrison’s ‘kind of stretched villanelle’ (as he describes it), which begins: ‘The summer night is dangerous and deep.’ We find the unsettling climax of Aileen Kelly’s ‘His Visitors’, in which ‘fetid ivies’ ‘reach up and suck out the light’. We find Anthony Lawrence’s poem about the Wandering Albatross, with its reference to ‘the compass glass of its eye’. And we find the terrible, uncomic climax of Judith Beveridge’s powerful poem ‘The Shark’.

Slow Man begins with an accident. Paul Rayment is cycling along an Adelaide street when he is struck by a car. When he emerges from a daze of doctors and painkillers, he discovers his life has been transformed by this random event. His crushed leg is amputated above the knee. From now on, he will ...

In Brenda Niall’s biography of Judy Cassab, the art forms of the subject and the author – life story and portraiture – are nested one in the other. As the story builds, one comes to accept that certain unsparing reflections on the subject’s personality and behaviour have as their authority Judy Cassab herself. She emerges as a heroine in a decidedly modern mode.

The fears and tensions in the aftermath of September 11 created an unusual political climate in the US, in which it became possible for the government to lead an invasion without having to explain precisely why. Nobody seemed to quite know who or what was guiding the administration as it led the charge for war: was it utopian neo-conservatives trying to reshape the world in America’s image? Was it isolationist hawks trying to wipe out an old foreign foe? Was it oil-hungry Texans? Was it paranoid security advisers, regretful of their failures and with a new bent for pre-emption, no matter how distant the threat?