I had just walked out of the reeds at the confluence
of two rivers. Brown frogs stuck in my hair like gouts
of flung mud, my skin was whip-stitched, lacerated
with leeches. I was walking a path hazardous

There’s a sleechy smell here, grey frogs on the bank
like slurried earth, rotund toads hopping across lily pads,
grunting like sultans trying out cushions. Fish mouth
the surface with so many unsinkable O’s, and the larval

The mouth of a little fish had just sipped away a star
from the river, and a lyrebird was opening the day,
volunteering to be a bell. We were watching an egret

This is the time of day when the light runs down the sky
like bluing and meets the bay, when whip-birds set acoustic
flares along the trees, when I’ll stand and listen to the yachts –
a sound as if cutlery were being replenished on table-tops;

Dennis Altman

In any given year we will read but a tiny handful of potential ‘best books’, so this is no more than a personal selection. Here are two novels that stand out: Stephen Eldred-Grigg’s Shanghai Boy (Vintage) and Hari Kunzru’s Tranmission (Penguin). Both speak of the confusion of identity and emotions caused by rapid displacement across the world. The first is the account of a middle-aged New Zealand teacher who falls disastrously in love while teaching in Shanghai. Transmission takes a naïve young Indian computer programmer to the United States, with remarkable consequences. From a number of political books, let me select two, both from my own publisher, Scribe, which offers, I regret, no kickbacks. One is George Megalogenis’s The Longest Decade; the other, James Carroll’s House of War. Together they provide a depressing but challenging backdrop to understanding the current impasse of the Bush–Howard administrations in Iraq.

Grennan takes another corded strand between his fingers,

moves it through a plane, then interlaces it to add dimension,

utility, beauty; then he takes a swig from his bottle,