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What’s the use,’ asks Alice before wandering away from her uncommunicative sister, ‘of a book without pictures or conversations?’ Grown-up readers can probably manage without the former, but it is unusual to find a novel with as little dialogue in it as Andrea Goldsmith’s Reunion, or one that so deliberately ignores the common injunction ‘Show, don’t tell.’

Yet Goldsmith has several books to her credit, including The Prosperous Thief, which was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2002, and for several years taught creative writing at Deakin University. Presumably she knows what she is doing. In point of fact, not only does this flouting of conventional rules come over as quite refreshing, it is in any case justified by the demands of the narrative.

When Donald ‘Donny’ Pinelli’s mother dies, he returns to Glasgow and confronts his past. Donny has been scarred by a dysfunctional family: mad clairvoyant mother; absent gangster father; shallow brother; belligerent sister. As a set-up, this is not particularly original, but Gary Bryson’s novel, Turtle, is full of surprises.

The Book of Emmett, Melbourne journalist Deborah Forster’s first novel, offers a relentlessly grim but nonetheless engagingly written and often quite moving look at a distinctly dysfunctional family.

Red Dress Walking is the promising début of Western Australian author S.A. Jones. A revealing look at friendships and love affairs, and the cumulative minutiae that make and break them, the novel consists of the alternating narratives of Will and Emily as they reflect upon their relationship and trace it from its unlikely origins to the coup de grâce.