Ruth Rothwax is back. The star of Lily Brett’s Too Many Men (2000) is still running a successful letter-writing business in New York City, but she’s branched out into greeting cards. Her father, Edek, with whom she made the trip to Poland in the earlier novel, has moved from Melbourne to New York to be near her. At the heart of the novel is the fraught, yet fond, relationship between them.

The Book Thief marks a departure for Markus Zusak. It is his first novel for adults, has broader concerns than his earlier work, and makes clearer his ambitions to be considered a serious writer. His first three novels, for young adults, were primarily focused on the masculinity of the boys in a working-class Sydney family ...

The Vogel Prize shares a reputation with the rest of the company’s products: nutritious, worthy, a little dull. But the prize’s earnest image is unfair. Any glance at the roll-call of winners over the last twenty-five years would show that the makers of soggy bread and soya cereals have done more than anyone to introduce fresh literary DNA into Australia’s tiny gene pool of published novelists. But reviewers, mostly, and the public, generally, don’t get excited when the new Vogel is published. This year they should. Julienne van Loon’s desperate joyride, Road Story, is the best Vogel winner to come along since 1990, when Gillian Mears’s The Mint Lawn, equally confident but very different, won first place.

The Grave at Thu Le explores a young French woman’s visit to Vietnam to research her ancestry, and to locate the cemetery in which members of her family were interred. Catherine D’anyers’s great-great-grandfather Claude was an engineer who lived in the colonial community in Hanoi at the turn of the last century. Past and present strands of the novel interweave as old, childhood stories of yester-year are overlaid with contemporary realities of Vietnam.

The Singing is the inaugural publication in the Varuna Firsts series, a collaboration between the Varuna Writers’ House and Brandl & Schlesinger. Both should be applauded for bringing a distinctive new voice into Australian writing; not to mention the honour due to the prodigious talent of Stephanie Bishop herself. Bishop has written a haunting novel with a seemingly simple story: love gone awry. A woman runs into an ex-lover on the street (neither protagonist is named), and this meeting throws her back into the story of their past. The two narratives – her solitary life now and the tale, mainly, of the relationship’s end – run in parallel. The novel’s energy, however, is ruminative rather than linear, circling around the nature of their love, pressing at the bruises left by its collapse.

Adolf Gustav Plate (1874–1913) was a German artist, photographer and writer who spent much of his youth on merchant vessels in the South Pacific, eventually settling (or trying to settle) in Australia. Cassi Plate, his granddaughter, researched his life for a higher degree at the University of Sydney; her thesis has now been revised for publication (the first of six such volumes to be published by Picador in association with the University of Sydney, as reported in ‘Advances’ last month).

In October 1843 the Russian writer Turgenev heard the opera singer Pauline Viardot perform in The Barber of Seville in St Petersburg; for the rest of his life, he remained in thrall to her in an apparently chaste relationship sustained within the framework of her existing marriage. The story of this devotion, and the view that such a love is impossible in the twenty-first century, are the pivots of Robert Dessaix’s new book, Twilight of Love: Travels with Turgenev. Dessaix never loses sight of his central argument. But he is not a linear thinker, nor a simple writer. He swoops and dives, deft and sharp as a wattlebird, over a range that is spiritual and intellectual as well as geographic and temporal. His book concerns itself with much beside the significance of the relationship between Turgenev and Viardot: a distinctively Australian apprehension of Europe; the experience of travel; the ways in which loving relationships can bring depth to travel and vice versa; the links between history, tourism and imagination; economic and social upheavals in Russia; and the nature of civilisation, to mention only a few.

Since a new book by Peter Porter is, though precious, also a complex phenomenon, one is stuck with the question of where to begin. The title poem, ‘Afterburner’, is perhaps as good a place as any. It is one of those poems (‘Clear Air Turbulence’ is another in this book) that speculates autobiographically and revisits youth looking for patterns and understandings:

These two quite different historical novels, both by first-time novelists, reveal once again the many difficulties of that genre, no matter how much information the author has gathered. The publisher of Temple of the Grail has provided ample publicity material. Along with the usual media release, there is a two-page puff piece couched in the first person about how Adriana Koulias came to write and publish the book. Koulias is Brazilian by birth, from a Catholic family that moved to Australia when she was nine: ‘By the time I was eighteen I had come into contact with a cornucopia of religion and philosophy.’ Much of this lore has been fed into Temple of the Grail, which sets out, she says, ‘to show how religious zeal, carried to extremes, eventually leads to error’. In addition to this promotional material, the book itself contains a foreword by David Wansbrough praising the book to the skies: