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Ocean Road ruminates on the abrupt demise of a marriage. Narrated by the only child of the union, the account is detailed and poignant. Toby, now a young adult, attempts to settle his parents’ competing claims to his allegiance, and finds himself drawn into the world of their past. Striving to represent his parents impartially, he realises that much of their story is also his. The few years since the collapse of the marriage have brought Toby independence as well as the chance, if not the need, to revisit the events that propelled him into adulthood.

Kevin Gillam is director of music at Christ Church Grammar School, in Western Australia. The musician’s lexicon and mindset permeate Permitted to Fall, revealing a life lived through music, as in ‘Not Clockless’: ‘as a kid, from the back / seat, power lines were staves, sky unplayed.’ The acts of playing and performing music also feature thematically, as in the narrative poem ‘The Possibility of Silence’, in which the protagonist finds consolation and catharsis in the act of playing an instrument: ‘she wanted to be a musician, / took up the cello for its tactility, / warmth, its lacquered song.’ If music is often audible behind the poetry, then silence also features prominently. The book’s opening poem, ‘Veldt’, begins, ‘there are times when silence / is very very loud’. It is a weak start to a poem that builds to its own crescendo of sorts. In ‘Harbour’, music is the antidote to silence: ‘music answering the / silence of the stars.’

In the years before steamships gained supremacy of the oceans, sailing ships became faster and were able, for two decades, to outrun the primitive new technology. This book concentrates on the clippers built in North America and used on the run from Liverpool to Melbourne during this period.

Andrew Hutchinson’s Rohypnol, which won the 2006 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Best Unpublished Manuscript, follows a self-professed adolescent ‘monster’ as he dabbles in drugs, crime and violence while peddling ‘The New Punk’ philosophy. The pharmaceutical drug of the title is used by the narrator and his ‘rape squad’ to sedate and assault women.

William Willshire was Officer in Charge of the Native Police in Central Australia from 1884 to 1891, when he was charged with the murder of two Aborigines. He was acquitted, but was regarded by his superiors from then on as something of a liability, ending his career in an uneventful posting in Cowell on the Yorke Peninsula. He wrote three books about his life as an outback hero, glorifying himself as an anthropologist and sentimental champion of the people he had policed with ignorant brutality.

Of the many damning revelations contained in this book, the fact that Allan Dulles, the CIA’s longest serving director (1953–61), would assess the merits of intelligence briefings by their weight is among the most startling. Coming in at 700 pages, Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA is sufficiently hefty to have commanded Dulles’s attention. Were he alive today to read this searing indictment of the institution he did so much to construct, however, it is doubtful that Dulles would find much cause for cheer.

Zygmunt Bauman has a talent for metaphors. When, in the late 1980s, he entered the fray of the modernity/postmodernity debates, he suggested that, while premodernity had been presided over by ‘gamekeepers’ managing a disorderly nature and society, modernity was presided over by ‘gardeners’ obsessed with creating order out of messy reality. In his most recent work, beginning with Liquid Modernity (2000), Bauman uses the metaphor ‘liquidity’ to depict modernity’s contemporary phase, in the process leaving behind his previous flirtation with the concept of postmodernity.

This marvellous first novel may be historical fiction, but its themes and concerns are by no means limited to the past. Sara Knox interweaves questions of gender and identity, sexuality, class and the overarching issue of morality in times of war.