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Helen Garner has death on her mind. In recent decades, it has permeated her work in fascinating and unexpected ways. There is her novel The Spare Room (2008), which is about a woman’s struggles to care for a dying friend held hostage to dangerous delusions; This House of Grief (2014), a true-crime book about a devasting act of filicide; and, in her most recent volume of diaries, How to End a Story (2021), an account of the death of her marriage to the novelist Murray Bail.

How do we reconcile our ideals with the way we live our lives? What should we do when we discover that artists whom we revere turn out to be deeply flawed human beings? How do we continue to love and respect our mothers while acknowledging their shortcomings? Are desire and shame intrinsically linked? Which is the more powerful? These are some of the many issues Michelle de Kretser, twice winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award (in 2013 for Questions of Travel and in 2018 for The Life to Come) grapples with in her seventh novel, Theory & Practice.

No movement in the history of art is so beloved as that which we label ‘Impressionism’, and no artists’ names are as familiar as those of its stars: Manet and Monet, Pissarro and Morisot, Degas and Renoir. But why did Impressionism blossom at a particular moment in Paris and in that form? Sebastian Smee’s brilliant new book offers compelling answers.

On your way to work, you pass a small pond. On hot days, children sometimes play in the pond, which is only about knee deep. The weather’s cool today, though, and it’s early in the morning, so you are surprised to see a child splashing about in the pond. As you get closer you see that it is a very young child, just a toddler, who is flailing about, unable to stay upright or walk out of the pond ... If you don’t wade in and pull him out, he seems likely to drown. Wading in is easy and safe, but you will ruin the new shoes you bought only a few days ago, and get your suit wet and muddy ... What should you do?

Just how old is John Egan? In a letter to the Guinness Book of Records, he says he is eleven. But the narrative voice of this queer, tormented Irish lad is not that of other boy heroes on the cusp of puberty, the opinionated braggarts whose boasts and fears and primary-coloured perspectives propel their stories. Instead, John’s story lurches from the distractions of the very young to a kind of preternatural knowingness. No wonder John makes everyone around him uneasy. He makes the reader uncomfortable, too.

It is easy to understand two New York naturalists becoming fascinated with a thylacine. Margaret Mittelbach and Michael Crewdson discovered one, stuffed and mounted, in Manhattan’s American Museum of Natural History, and began to visit it with ‘something akin to amorous fervour’. It’s equally easy to understand how this rare specimen, with its ‘glorious Seussian stripes’ and tragically fascinating mythology, inspired the pair to travel to Tasmania to learn more about its origins. What is more difficult to understand is why, once Mittelbach and Crewdson had surveyed the existing literature on the thylacine, they pressed on to write and publish Carnivorous Nights: On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger instead of deciding that the story had been well and truly told. On my bookshelves are Tasmanian Tiger: A Lesson to Be Learnt by Eric Guiler and Philippe Godard (1998), and David Owen’s Thylacine (2003). Close by are two novels, Heather Rose’s White Heart (1999) and Julia Leigh’s The Hunter (1999), that pursue the tiger into fictional territory. Since these are just a fraction of the books already written on the subject, I would have thought that any new tiger book would have something significant to add to the story. Carnivorous Nights, unfortunately, does not.