HarperCollins Publishers Australia

Hayden: An autobiography is a fine book – one of the best political memoirs written by an Australian. It’s also a valuable historical work by a former politician who, thank God, doesn’t take himself too seriously.

Bill Hayden clearly made good use of his time as governor–general (1989–96) to undertake extensive research. In the acknowledgments section, the author gives generous thanks to librarians and archivists who assisted his endeavours. But it is clear that much of the detailed work was undertaken by Hayden himself.

We have been blessed in this country with an oversupply of spiritual writers – analysts of and speculators about the spiritual dimensions of our life and culture. We have had a certain amount of history and pop sociology about the Australian temperament and character and much cultural cringing and self-laceration, but not much about the Australian ‘soul’. This is an odd situation since much of our recent literature – Patrick White, Rodney Hall, A.D. Hope, Judith Wright, Les Murray, Vincent Buckley, Kevin Hart, the later Helen Garner – is deeply concerned with affairs of the spirit and not just with manners and affairs of the heart. Again, there is a large interest in spiritual issues in Australia, no doubt some of it rather dotty or flaky in a Californian mystical kind of way, but a good deal of it real and serious, though disenchanted with what the ‘institutional’ churches have on offer.

After twenty-five years of political exile, Doris Lessing returns to her homeland – once Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe – following the 1980 Marxist revolution. African Laughter documents four visits spanning the first decade of black majority rule, providing an intimate view of the birth, progress, and growing pains of a comparatively successful modern African nation. African Laughter also chronicles Lessing’s personal journey, a search for the landmarks of her memories.