In early March 2023, Tanya Plibersek fronted an audience at the Australian National University to question historian Chris Wallace about her newly released account of twentieth-century prime ministers and their biographers. Coming shortly before the publication of Margaret Simons’s biography of her, Plibersek’s interest in the dynamics of writing about a living, breathing, vote-seeking politician seemed prompted by more than mere professional courtesy. ‘It’s like building a golem, in the shape of a person, in a way, isn’t it?’ she remarked. ‘And then you’re putting magic into it and animating it. It comes out of the mud.’

first went to New York City in January 1975. It was wonderfully dilapidated. There was a blizzard of sorts, but I had the light jacket I had bought in Athens. If it was cold, I didn’t notice. The morning I arrived, there was a particularly gory pack murder on the subway. I read about it in the Times. So I avoided the subway and walked everywhere, through the sludge. We all knew what happened if you strayed into Central Park. Folks in Columbus, Ohio, where I had been staying with friends, had implored me not to visit New York. They couldn’t imagine why a nice young boy from somewhere called Melbourne – anarchically long hair and freakish wardrobe notwithstanding – wanted to visit that sinful city. (Still missing Nixon, they spoke of sin and sodomy.) I stayed in Midtown, in a grungy hotel soon to be demolished. The old black-and-white TV was on a constant loop, but I followed The Dick Cavett Show as best I could. The louvred door to my room cast terrifying shadows over my bed whenever anyone passed my room. Each night I dreamt that an ogre was on his way from Wall Street to stab me to death. In the morning I had breakfast for 99 cents – or, if I was hungry, $1.99. Then I didn’t eat for the rest of the day. I haunted the grand old bookshops that lined Fifth Avenue in those days. I visited the Metropolitan Museum for the warmth, but I didn’t know about the Frick. Velvet Underground wasn’t playing at the Metropolitan Opera, so I skipped that. During my stay in New York I didn’t speak to a soul, which suited me fine. It was the purpose of my visit.

When a book takes its title from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, you can expect the shock of something supernatural. But although Paul Dalgarno’s A Country of Eternal Light is narrated by a dead woman, there is little here to horrify. 

Orhan Pamuk’s latest novel, Nights of Plague, is set on a fictitious island called Mingheria, the twenty-ninth state of the Ottoman Empire, located in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea. In 1901, following the order of Sultan Abdul Hamid II, a steamer carrying an eminent Ottoman delegation consisting of various Ottoman officials entrusted with mitigating political animosity between China’s Muslims and European powers sets sail for China. 

Shirley Hazzard challenged Auden’s line that poetry makes nothing happen. In her case, she said, poetry made everything happen. It was because she learned Italian as a teenager in order to read Leopardi in the original that she was sent, aged twenty-six, by the United Nations, to Italy, where she wrote ‘Harold’, the story about the awkward young poet that was published in the New Yorker in 1960, after which ‘everything changed’.

In Unmaking Angas Downs, researcher and writer Shannyn Palmer seeks to understand why a derelict pastoral station in Central Australia, once a hub for First Nations people and a popular tourist destination en route to Watarrka Kings Canyon, was abandoned. Established by white pastoralist Bill Liddle in the late 1920s, Angas Downs is 300 kilometres south-west of Mparntwe Alice Springs at a place known as Walara to Anangu. Curious about the shifting fortunes of Angas Downs, Palmer travels to Walara to uncover the ‘histories that are obscured by the single, fixed idea of the pastoral station’.

Salman Rushdie has long inspired ambivalence among readers. His talent has never been seriously in question – witness the swift canonisation and enduring affection accorded his second novel, Midnight’s Children (1981) – nor have his bona fides as a public intellectual who has stood against intolerance and cant, even under the threat of death. Yet his body of work has been marked by fictions that run the gamut from interestingly flawed to merely self-indulgent.

A hunter discovers a woman’s body in the woods on Christmas day, ‘hung among the bare gray poles of the winter trees’, a red sash tied around her dress to make her body visible in the snow. The strong implication is that she has taken her own life. The series of events that led to her decision is one of many mysteries in The Passenger, the first of two connected and long-awaited novels by Cormac McCarthy.

Luck has always been a potent force in politics, good and bad, but for Scott Morrison, Australia’s thirtieth prime minister, it almost single-handedly drove his unheralded ascent.