HarperCollins Publishers Australia

‘I wanted to give a sense of the people of the book, the different hands that had made it, used it, protected it. I wanted it to be a gripping narrative, even suspenseful.’ So says Hanna Heath, protagonist of Geraldine Brooks’s latest novel, about her search through time and place for the history of ‘the Sarajevo Haggadah’, the ‘Book’ of the title ...

This book made me laugh, especially during the love scenes. I doubt this was the author’s intention. Short, gnarled, gritty Italian cop meets posh British beanpole and they spend the first half of the book being crisply offhand, the last part sounding like canoodling dorks. Katie Hepburn and Spencer Tracey it isn’t – but it should be. Whenever they meet, I have an indelible image of the cop looking laconically at her belt buckle. He is Carmine; she, would you believe, is Desdemona.

Ugh: today I realised Colleen McCullough’s latest book (her fifteenth), Angel Puss, which ABR sent to me several weeks ago, needs to be read, reviewed and dispatched by January 3. The dust jacket précis reveals that this novel is ‘exhilarating’ and ‘takes us back to 1960 and Sydney’s Kings Cross – and the story of a young woman determined to defy convention’ ...

According to some bright spark at HarperCollins, Tears of the Maasai is ‘a novel as big as Africa’, while Far Horizon, in the words of a creative Pan Macmillan employee, is apparently ‘driven by an emotion stronger than love, lust or fear: Revenge’. After such fanfare, what can the reader expect? Well, the usual ingredients of putative blockbusters set in Africa (and here I mean southern Africa): a nicely digestible Manichean view of the world, unredeemable villains, brawny, good-hearted heroes, feisty, long-legged heroines and plenty of fearsome wild animals. Rider Haggard forged the tradition in 1886 with the hugely popular King Solomon’s Mines, and Stuart Cloete and Wilbur Smith, among others, have also made good use of the exotic and seemingly anarchic qualities of Africa’s people, fauna and flora. One memorable scene in a Cloete novel featured an enraged buffalo licking the skin and flesh off the lower leg of a hapless man stuck not quite high enough in a tree. Where else but in Africa could you find such abundant and exquisite contrasts of harshness and beauty along with legends of buried treasure and the possibilities of antediluvian experience? It was perhaps, in Haggard’s day, an ur-land, where clichés sprouted and were happily swallowed by a goggle-eyed imperial audience back home.

In an era when so many young people seem to be cosseted and protected from anything harsh or dangerous, there are still good books to show them the darkness and complexity of real life. These three new titles are all emotionally and intellectually confronting, and none pulls any punches. In James Roy’s Ichabod Hart and the Lighthouse Mystery, convicts are deliberately mutilated to make them more efficient in the mines; in Peter Jean’s Stoker’s Bay, one character is flogged almost to death as a punishment for rape, and another is drowned with his hands bound; and in Jackie French’s Tom Appleby, Convict Boy, an otherwise light-hearted offering, there is a graphic hanging scene.

The cover of David Tacey’s earlier book on Australian spirituality, Edge of the Sacred, showed a few parched branches sticking out of the sand. The cover of this one is quite different: billowing clouds, rocks, water, lilac sunset colours. You might think that a certain blossoming had taken place; that Tacey’s project – the spiritualising of ‘secular’ Australia – had been wonderfully realised. On the other hand, the luscious hues of ReEnchantment’s cover may place the book more firmly still in the realms of fantasy – a genre that also happens to be popular with Tacey’s publisher, HarperCollins.

Let us start with the similarities: two thrillers, set mainly in Sydney, each with a would-be snappy but jaded one word tide. On each a stiletto-heeled shoe is part of the cover design. There the ways seem to part. Dilemma is Jon Cleary’s forty-ninth novel in a career of six decades and marks the sixteenth appearance of Detective Scobie Malone. For Canadian-born, former model Tara Moss, Fetish is her first novel. HarperCollins is loyal to the old, supportive of the new. Or supportive up to a point. Both books needed much stricter editing, not only for typos (‘eluded’ for ‘alluded’ in Fetish, for instance: one hopes that is a typo), but to tighten structures that let suspense amble away.

If Antonella Gambotto hadn’t been sued by Cliff Richard early on in her career, would she have later described Kylie Minogue as ‘a charmlessly robotic dwarf’ under the impression of being an ‘incandescent, gifted and alluring siren’? Perhaps not. It seems it was Cliff, the 50,000 pounds and the resulting barrow-loads of letters that convinced Gambotto of the value of opinion pieces: people react.