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Patrick Allington’s fable of a world in which perpetual war is staged to fuel compassion is too straightforward for its ambitions
‘The Rain Heron’ by Robbie Arnott
An unsettling near-future tale of soldiers hunting a mythic bird by “the Tasmanian Wordsworth”
‘Minor Detail’ by Adania Shibli (trans. Elisabeth Jaquette)
The Palestinian author’s haunting novel about an atrocity committed by Israeli soldiers in 1949
Tender trapped: ‘Smart Ovens for Lonely People’
In Elizabeth Tan’s ebullient story collection, frustrated characters yearn for a grand cataclysm
Cold was the ground: ‘Sorry for Your Trouble’
Richard Ford delivers an elegant collection of stories of timeworn men and women contemplating the end
‘The End of October’ by Lawrence Wright
A ‘New Yorker’ journalist’s eerily prescient novel about public-health officials fighting a runaway pandemic
‘The Trials of Portnoy’ by Patrick Mullins
The finely detailed story of the legal fight in Australia against the censorship of Philip Roth’s ‘Portnoy’s Complaint’
Surrounded by pygmies: Malcolm Turnbull’s ‘A Bigger Picture’
The former PM’s memoir fails to reckon with his fatal belief that all Australians shared his vision
For Robyn Davidson, her acclaimed memoir ‘Tracks’ was an act of freedom whose reception hemmed her in
Into the slippery unknown: ‘The Gospel of the Eels’
Patrik Svensson’s eloquent debut is a hymn to the elusiveness of eels and an ode to family