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A few years ago, I heard Michael Cathcart speak on ‘the myth of the inland sea’. It was one of the funniest takes on Australian history I have heard. He related how his initially confident search for statements of belief in an inland sea by early Australian colonists petered out in the face of lack of evidence. Certainly, the explorer Charles Sturt believed in an inland sea and in his divine mission to discover it, but by 1845 he knew better. Finding little other evidence of the inland sea as the impetus for exploration, Cathcart decided it must be a creation of historians from Ernest Giles in 1889 to Derek Parker in 2007, with the idea recycled uncritically from book to book. Cathcart intended his research to be an academic thesis in history. How hard it must have been to be his academic supervisor. Each session must have ended in laughter and a mounting sense of desperation. How could an increasing lack of evidence be turned to good thesis account?

Living in Berlin during the rise of the Nazis, Christopher Isherwood wrote the stories that first brought him fame and later became the basis for the musical Cabaret. This was the period that Isherwood mined for his ground-breaking memoir, Christopher and His Kind (1976).

Name a selection of your own most interesting and iconic Australians of the last century. My personal list would begin with John Monash, Donald Bradman, and W.K. Hancock.

According to the author’s note at the end of The Grand Hotel, this will probably be the last of his stories to be set in fictional Mangowak, a coastal town in south-western Victoria. The first, The Patron Saint of Eels (2005), won the 2006 Australian Literature Society Gold Medal. The second, Ron McCoy’s Sea of Diamonds (2007), was shortlisted for the 2008 New South Wales Premier’s Prize for Fiction.

In 1996–97, three young women were abducted from the nightclub area of Claremont in Perth, and murdered. One of them was a young lawyer, Ciara Glennon. Her mother, Una Glennon, has written a memoir of her passage from despair, anger and grief to a mature and rounded understanding of the complexity of the human condition. Her book is a wise and beautiful one – written sparingly, without unnecessary personal embellishment. ‘Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards,’ she says, quoting Kierkegaard.

While Americans squirmed or vented self-righteous outrage at the revelation of their president’s escapades with Monica Lewinsky, the rest of the world seemed bemused. Oxford history fellow, George Cawkwell, who knew William Jefferson Clinton in his 1960s Rhodes Scholar days, was worldly in defence of his former student: ‘I think the truth is that people behave in sex matters in a way they’d never behave in anything else.’ He counselled English discretion: ‘We don’t attack our monarchs all the time. It wouldn’t have been good for people to have known every bit about Henry the Eighth.’

The Book of Human Skin details the trials and tribulations of an innocent Venetian noblewoman named Marcella Fasan, a girl ‘so sinned agin tis like Job in a dress’, Gianni delle Boccole, loyal family servant and bad speller, explains. Marcella’s principal antagonist is her older brother Minguillo, who, out of filial jealousy and a desire to be the sole heir to the family’s New World fortune in silver, makes her a prisoner, a cripple, a madwoman, and a nun. Think Jacobean tragedy meets Gothic novel, then add some – namely a crazy Peruvian nun called Sor Loreta, who, in between fasting and self-flagellation marathons, terrorises the saner sisters at the convent of Santa Catalina in Arequipa. It is these four characters – Gianni, Marcella, Minguillo, Sor Loreta, plus the kindly Doctor Santo Aldobrandini, a specialist in skin and its maladies – who, unbeknown to one another, take turns narrating this novel.

Shirley Shackleton is well known to those acquainted with the story of the fight for justice by the families of the Balibo Five, the five reporters who were slaughtered in 1975 in a border town of what was then Portuguese Timor. Her husband, Greg Shackleton, and his colleagues, Gary Cunningham, Tony Stewart, Brian Peters and Malcolm Rennie – all in their twenties – were killed by Indonesian soldiers at dawn on 16 October, shortly after filming a major infantry, naval and air attack on the town of Balibo.