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Much science and fantasy fiction is written in a predominantly realist mode. This is the most economical means of signifying the internal truth of its fictional worlds, no matter how strange its aliens, or how superhuman the powers of its heroes. So, for example, Tolkien writes, ‘Holding the hobbits gently but firmly, one in the crook of each arm, Treebeard lifted up first one large foot and then the other; and moved them to the edge of the shelf.’ Whatever his nature – half-Ent, half-tree – Treebeard comfortably occupies the grammatical subject position.

Amanda Laugesen’s Convict Words is a dictionary of the characteristic or salient words of early colonial discourse, the lexis of the convict system and transportation, which survived until 1840 in New South Wales, 1852 in Van Diemen’s Land, and 1868 in Western Australia. It is not immediately clear what sort of readership is envisaged for the book. It would not occur to many people interested in Australian colonial history to address the subject through the words the actors in that history used, and the book does not directly answer most of the questions the enquirer might have in mind, unless of course it were convictism itself. As for word-buffs, the limited range of the target lexis – convict words in this narrow sense, and not necessarily Australianisms – may not have suggested itself as an engrossing topic.

The word ‘mahjar’, Eva Sallis informs us, ‘refers collectively to all the lands of Arab, most often Lebanese, migration’. Her third book of fiction is a slight volume composed of fifteen stories, divided into three sections. In deceptively simple prose and syntax, Sallis surveys the gamut of experiences affecting the displaced migrant. As in her previous novels, Hiam and The City of Sealions, a beguiling mixture of fantasy, fact, and fable make up the fabric of the book. With a PhD in comparative literature (Arabic and English), Sallis is well placed to oscillate between two cultures, and Mahjar is a perfect vehicle to showcase cross-cultural interactions.

Most of us were taught at school to understand the difference between discovery and invention. Both words imply finding, but discovery meant finding something that already existed ‘out there’ in the concrete world; inventions were found in the imagination. Explorers discovered; scientists invented.

Big business is a kind of communism. Employees in their vertical villages banter this truth, checking over their shoulders for fear an office spy is eavesdropping. It is a communism that aims for the inequitable distribution of wealth, just as traditional communism aims for the inequitable distribution of poverty. It is the People’s Republic of Capitalism (PRC). Its languages are Bluff and Spin and Acronym. It is always ‘strong and growing’; always ‘resilient and facing up to new challenges’, with the CEO pursuing higher EBIT and better KPIs before the all-important IPO. It is active in funding charities and the arts.

Reading Swan Bay, one is quickly struck by a sense of the familiar. A damaged, misanthropic man meets a damaged, unbalanced woman. He attempts to penetrate her almost mystical reserve and, in the book’s central flashback sequence, she recounts the past that has almost destroyed her. Back in the present, the truth of her account seems uncertain. The two achieve some sort of equilibrium. This narrative outline could equally be applied to almost any of the novels of Rod Jones.

According to my dictionary, a handbook is ‘a short manual or guide-book’. Somebody ought to inform the ornithological world of this, because ‘handbook’ has come to be applied to huge, multi-volume compendia about the bird faunas of particular regions. These books aim to present clearly and concisely all available knowledge about each species, drawing together observations and data from innumerable scientific journals, books, museum specimens, and field notes of scientists and bird watchers. Inevitably, they are massive compilations, running to thousands of pages. They certainly cannot be carried easily. However, they have developed a tradition of fine scholarship and precise writing and illustration, building on the high standards set by the first such work, the four-volume Handbook of British Birds (Witherby et al. 1938–41). Their contribution to bird research and conservation has been immense.