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Chinese poetry has long been lost in translation. You only have to look at a line in an ancient Chinese poem and its inscrutability is plain to see: four or five characters across the page, each with several venerable meanings and without markers of tense, speaker, conjunctions or prepositions. Every translator becomes an adventurer, one who can only haul the poem onto the shores of difference.

Clive Hamilton’s meticulously researched book Requiem for a Species is to climate change what Jonathan Schell’s book The Fate of the Earth (1982) was to the nuclear menace: an advance eulogy for the human race, not for the faint-hearted. Hamilton’s predicament is captured in the opening statement: ‘sometimes facing up to the truth is just too hard.’ Yet there is a solution, the author states: ‘We don’t have to take it lying down ... Only by acting, and acting ethically, can we redeem our humanity.’

During 2007 I became enamoured of podcasting. The Canadian Broadcasting Commission’s Big Ideas and Elaine Wachtel’s Writers and Company were among my favourite programs and I would podcast these each week, irrespective of the topic or the interviewee. Thus I heard Alberto Manguel’s CBC Massey Lectures, a series of five wonderful presentations collectively titled ‘The City of Words’. It was not simply the content of these lectures; Manguel’s delivery is lyrical, intimate, andante and almost shockingly seductive. These lectures worked on me as reading does, drawing me in and then spinning me out to numerous other readings. Some of the books prompted by the lectures were rereadings, such as Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz and Borges’s stories others were new to me, and some, including Gilgamesh, had long been on my must-read list. Manguel provided the necessary nudge.

Kate Veitch’s first novel, Listen (2006), was a richly detailed examination of family and the repercussions of a single, fateful decision. Her second, Trust, continues her exploration of these themes and also focuses on feminism, forgiveness, religion, sexuality and the importance of recognising the truth about one’s own character and motivations. Divided into two sections (‘Before’ and ‘After’), the new novel follows the lives of Susanna Greenfield and her family in the lead up to, and aftermath of, an unexpected and tragic event.

Martin Westley takes a walk one day and accidentally triggers a series of events, transforming the walk into a tragicomic life-changing expedition. While strolling along the coastal path between the beaches at Bronte and Clovelly, Martin is struck on the temple and loses consciousness. On waking he gradually realises that he doesn’t know his name, has lost his memories and has no idea who he is. He meets his wife, Alex, who is indifferent to, indeed contemptuous of, him and just as mysterious as before to Martin. The family home is unnervingly free of any intimate traces of his existence. His son ignores him. Only his daughter Emily shows any concern for his well-being.

Colin McLaren has already published two books drawing on his own remarkable experiences as an undercover policeman – On the Run (2009) and Infiltration: The True Story of the Man Who Cracked the Mafia (2009) – the former a work of fiction, the other autobiographical. In this latest work he merges the two forms to create a biographical novel of his beloved grandfather George Bingham, who, with a few mates, was among the first to enlist, in an Anzac battalion filled from rural Victoria within a fortnight of war being declared.

Is the exercise of judgment the reason for a book review? I hate the idea of that. I would rather experiment with the genre by asking if it can add something to the book, like a mole or a prosthesis. In the process, could one also say something about how the book works, as it moves through its various environments, collecting other growths? I think John Kinsella would appreciate this eco-critical move, for what it ultimately wants to interrogate is the way the book sustains its life. And then, having confessed to that vitalist position, may I go on to ask what the book has to say about Life? Why not tackle the big issue, the writer’s vision?

There are three ways to read this delightful book. The first – your reviewer’s method – is to romp through it picking places to linger and relish. The second way is to take a few months off and study every page, taking notes. Students and specialists will do this and be rewarded. The third way is to have it handy on the shelf to return to when a topic turns up needing clarification.

This is an important book that should be read by as wide a range of historians as possible. Some will find it totally agreeable, others will find it very disagreeable, while others will agree with some parts of the book but not all. It is a book not just about the ‘militarisation of Australian history’, but, perhaps more importantly, about how Australians see themselves in the world.