In November 2002 Paul Collins fulfilled ‘that dream of the urban middle class’ and bought a bush block and a shack in the Snowy Mountains ‘where I could be close to the environment’. In late January 2003 his block was scorched by probably the most widespread bushfire since European settlement, and certainly the worst one since the horrific bushfires of 1939. Those two archetypal fires – Black Friday 1939 and the alpine fires of 2002–03 – are the events around which the author has shaped a narrative of bushfire over two hundred years. His strong account of the Canberra fires of 2003 reminds us that they were the outer edge of a massive alpine event.

A Poet’s Life is a selection of Marjorie Pizer’s poetry that covers forty-two years of writing and the filaments of love, grief and quotidian beauty that are emblems of her work. Drawing together poems from fifteen previous volumes, A Poet’s Life merges this Sydney poet’s characteristic themes and styles, fulfilling its promise to be the ‘definitive collection’. Throughout her career, Pizer writes of hidden worlds where ‘invisible rays’ bind microcosm to macrocosm, and where individuals are gently fused in an interdependent unity. However, she frequently returns to hidden disunities: wars, stolen children, environmental calamities and emotional wounds. Pizer offers up poetry as the keeper of the dead; the keeper of those questions and answers bequeathed to us by our ancestors and our descendants.

Activist Wisdom is the latest addition to the field of studies about Australian social movements. The authors, Sarah Maddison and Sean Scalmer, are academics who aim to take ‘knowledge from the streets back into the academy’. They try to do this by considering how ‘practical knowledge’ (that is, the knowledge that activists have gained ‘from experience’) has contributed to the survival of different movements.

Cardigan Press’s third offering, Allnighter, promises to keep its reader’s attention all night long, with ‘fiction that burns at both ends’. With forty-four short pieces in this beautifully designed book, the challenge is not to devour the book all at once, but to give each story the time and consideration it deserves.

One of the joys of this anthology is that the stories are of varying length, ranging from two to eleven pages. This allows the writers to demonstrate a feel for their story and characters. Another advantage is that many of the writers are unknown and not constrained by theme, number of words, or the weight of expectations. Their stories are vivid, playful and unusual.

Expulsion from Syria on suspicion of terrorism; an encounter with someone who might be Osama bin Laden in a Tehran bazaar; expulsion from the Hungarian parliament in hand-cuffs; an interview with the editor-in-chief of al-Jazeera: this gripping sequence of events reads more like a synopsis of a John le Carré novel than Ken Haley’s two-year journey, as detailed in Emails from the Edge. In this extraordinary collection of reminiscences by the Walkley Award-winning journalist, Haley exhibits courage and gusto in travelling through the Middle East, Asia and Europe in a wheelchair.

Australian novels about World War I are typically tales of youth sacrificed and innocence destroyed in foreign lands for the Commonwealth. A good example is David Malouf’s coming-of-age novella, Fly Away Peter (1981). Nation and character matured simultaneously in the necessary baptism of fire. From the outset, John Charalambous’s second novel, Silent Parts, proves itself to be atypical and complex, with a forty-something anti-hero caught up in the not-so-Great War.

Aldous Huxley often prioritised the expression of themes and ideas over the development of character and plot in his fiction. Ape and Essence (1948), one of his less well-known novellas, was no exception, but it was also funny and thought-provoking. The Island of Four Rivers, by Christopher Morgan, has none of these redeeming features.

'Ours is a time when monstrous book-merchandising conglomerates ... are into readers like humpbacks into plankton.’ So thunders James Grieve in the third of fifteen essays in the slim but satisfying When Books Die. All respond to the title, the ‘subordinate clause premising a prediction’. The consensus here is that the book is unkillable, but Grieve looks on the dark side. Swatting a mosquito will never eradicate the fever, he writes. ‘The lethal virus nourished in the putrid medium of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion continues to flourish and kill ...’ If he could, Grieve would eradicate the works of Nostradamus, Gibran and David Irving. He mounts a powerful case for the crime of ‘perverting the course of truth’ to be entered into our statutes.

This novel by New Zealand-born Martin Edmond is difficult to pin down. As I read it, I wondered which genre it belongs to. The narrative moves among various genres, blurring memoir, travelogue, conventional history, reflections upon the internal journeys offered by personal reading, anthropological record, meta-textual fiction as postmodern mystery, even hoax. The unnamed narrator is a professional writer and researcher, thus suggesting an autobiographical element, and his considered reflection on the ‘Ern Malley’ hoax is perhaps the clue to the ‘fiction’ that ultimately engages him; that is, the mysterious document he receives that describes a Portuguese settlement near Darwin in the early seventeenth century.

Adrian Hyland spent many years living and working among indigenous people in the Northern Territory. His affection for and affinity with the people and the country are immediately evident. But whatever possessed him, in his first novel, to write in the voice of a young, half-Aboriginal woman? It is a testament to his skill and finely balanced writing that more has not been made of this fact, and that the reception to his novel has been mostly positive.