Penguin

Nearly everyone in Australia has a story about bad airline service, and many of those stories involve Qantas, whose ‘mishandled bag rate’ recently doubled and flight cancellations tripled. The formerly smooth and efficient Sydney-Melbourne run is now a dispiriting ordeal.

A six-year-old in Canada memorises a poem written by Li Bai in the eighth century. She recites its twenty syllables perfectly in the Mandarin she studies at Saturday Chinese school, but beyond a mechanical conversion into English, makes little sense of it. Murmuring the poem’s words then holding her breath as though waiting, her mother tries to help.

Metempsychosis is the transmigration of a soul at death into the body of another being. The plot of this novel turns neatly on an incident of metempsychosis. I don’t wish to explain what happens, because one of the charms of the book lies in that moment, and readers must be free to enjoy it.

Where would the picture book industry be without animals? Talking or non-speaking, cute or obnoxious, mischievously alive or poignantly dying, animal characters can be utilised to teach life lessons, and to make complex issues accessible and less confronting for young children. Add humour, passion and strong original writing, and you have a winner.

When you bump into people who know Gideon Haigh – and that happens a lot in Geelong – they will tell you about his encyclopedic knowledge of cricket, his dedication to detail, and his casualness with money. I want to add to this list of his idiosyncrasies a delicious ability to turn the mundane into the magnificent. For this is exactly what The Vincibles is to we weekend warriors – a magnificent vindication of our very existence.

Awareness of the tension between fantasy and realism in fiction has been heightened in recent years by the trend in young adult novels towards gritty urban realism. The tension itself is not new, however: in America half a century ago it was known as the ‘milk bottle versus Grimm’ controversy. Although there is a clear distinction between extreme examples of fantasy and realism, the intervening grey area encompasses a great deal of fiction which successfully mingles the two. Thus Sparring with Shadows, though on the face of it another example of contemporary realism, is peopled with characters who are clearly shaped to serve the author’s intentions; they’re believable but they’re not as ‘real’ as hyper-realists might prefer. Black Ice, on the other hand, is built on elements of the fantastic – spirits, poltergeists, séances, and the like – but it sets those elements against a recognisable late twentieth-century background in which a teenage girl is struggling to understand the disintegration of her parents’ marriage.

It opens with an enigmatic statement – ‘It might take two hundred years’ – (what might?) – and then presents an enigmatic situation. Amidst Australian bush images and scraps of Aboriginal sounding stories, there is someone called Fox wandering around.

Fox, we soon learn, is a young chap called Jim Fox who is making a mysterious trip to Sydney from a farm he once lived on somewhere up the Murray.

He’d expected to be able to just go to places and remain anonymous, for people to just accept his presence as easily as he did theirs, with only the questions which could be answered by your own observations.

He was wrong, of course. People do ask him where he’s from and where he’s headed for and why he’s going there. Fox never says much, but no one minds; people only say affectionately ‘you’re a strange bugger, Fox’ and buy him beers, and give him rides, jobs, money, places to stay, and all the best advice they know.

In this first volume of autobiography, Ruth Park covers her New Zealand years – childhood, adolescence and early challenges of adult life. Episodic and frequently leapfrogging in its chronology, the book is firmly held together by a number of recurring and interweaving themes: the urge to write and the difficulty of acquiring an appropriate education; family relationships, at once close and hedged about with barriers; poverty and the Great Depression; and finally the problem of being ‘different’ combined with the joy of discovering kindred spirits.