There is a video clip somewhere of Dennis Altman on the ABC’s Monday Conference program, a forerunner to the late (and unlamented) Q+A. The year is 1972 and Altman is defending his book Homosexual (1971) against a Methodist minister whose name escapes me and the conservative politician and journalist Peter Coleman. The minister is the more strident of the two, suggesting that homosexuality is the consequence of disordered sexual development and citing some specious research to that effect. Coleman takes a more nuanced line. One of the best things about the book, he suggests, is that it confirms one of the right’s main objections to ‘gay lib’: the movement, he says, is aimed as much at the transformation of society as it is at the liberation of gays. Smiling slightly mischievously, Altman is more than happy to agree.

In 1997, a first-time writer came out of small-town Kerala, God’s own country, and wrote a novel exploring the nature of maternal love and the constrictions placed upon who can love whom and how. Narrated through the perspective of dizygotic twins – with their ordinary words capitalised and scattered across the pages to symbolise children encountering an adult world with equal parts awe and apprehension – this work went on to win the 1997 Booker Prize. Those of us whose minds were forevermore imprinted with Arundhati Roy’s sheer idiomatic chutzpah and semantic cosmopolitanism in The God of Small Things will find the writer in fine fettle in her latest work, Mother Mary Comes to Me.

Aboriginal poetry has the ability to hold love and rage simultaneously. Luke Patterson’s début A Savage Turn does this masterfully, constructing pieces full of fire and defiance ‘amongst the love / poems’. In this collection, Patterson - a Gamilaroi poet, educator, and musician – unpacks colonial myth and legacy, subverts reader expectations, and teases out a tenderness that nourishes this collection.

I got hurt in New Jersey.com. That is the opaque, existential message currently featured on billboards on the New Jersey turnpike. When you go online to find what it means, it turns out to be a personal injury lawyer touting for business. But on the day I saw the ad, shortly after the gubernatorial elections of November 5, it read like a cri de cœur from the famously over-sharing forty-seventh president himself. Trump did get hurt in New Jersey, in the judgement of most political commentators, by Democratic woman Mikie Sherrill’s win in the state governor’s race, which, along with a similar result in neighbouring Virginia, signalled a big swing against the Republicans in states where they had made major gains in last year’s presidential elections.

As the January-February issue of Australian Book Review went to print, a horrifying event was unfolding: the largest terrorist attack on Australian soil and one unambiguously targeting Jews who were celebrating Hanukkah at ‘Chanukah by the Sea’, on Bondi Beach. There is time for examining the deep-seated, long-standing, global factors which led to this – as well as, perhaps, the human-scale, emotional, even banal ones – but, at ABR, we decided now is a time for personal reflection, listening, and grace, as Waleed Aly recently put it. 

Else is not your average climate change novel; it is too rich and strange and visionary. Civilisation is collapsing, though we see very little of that. We follow the exodus of a woman and her teenage daughter from Melbourne to a future Mornington Peninsula over several seasons, across a territory alternately submerged in floods and blasted by fire.

I also went to the Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s production of Siegfried, as reviewed by Peter Rose (ABR Arts, 11/25), but to the Sunday performance. The performance had gone up quite a few notches. The singers seemed to let it all out; it was outstanding. In Tuscany, where I lived for many years, the state classical station would broadcast Bayreuth live. Growing up in Melbourne in the 1960s, my mainstay for classical music was the ABC. This was when John Charger was introducing us to Mahler and Bruckner, so difficult out of a tinny radio. I feel that the younger generation and the taxpayers are being sorely treated.

Zadie Smith’s essay collections have an uncanny habit of arriving precisely when the culture shifts. Changing My Mind (2009) appeared as the iPhone began transforming daily life; Feel Free (2018) followed Donald Trump’s first inauguration; Intimations (2020) captured the disorientation of the pandemic’s early months; and now Dead and Alive appears in the wake of Trump’s return to office. Comprising essays written between 2016 and 2025, most of them first published elsewhere, the collection gains an unexpected coherence in retrospect.

Writing about her mother, who is a presence in many of the essays in Attention, Anne Enright recalls the two reciting poetry together. Despite her mother steadily declining into dementia, Enright adjudges the lines of poetry, as well as the books her mother continues to read, as bulwarks against the withering of her mind. ‘It seems’, Enright writes, ‘as though her mind is not putting the words together so much as the other way around.’

At first blush, the subject of Carmel Bird’s twelfth novel, the seventeenth-century court of Versailles, might come across as a surprise. Bird was born in Launceston and lives in Victoria, and she has traditionally focused on Australian subjects in her extensive body of fiction. Cape Grimm (2004) and The Bluebird Café (1990) engage with Tasmania’s Gothic past, from the horrors of colonialism to the Martin Bryant massacre. Red Shoes (1998) was inspired by the Melbourne cult known as ‘The Family’, while The White Garden (1995) was based on the controversial deep-sleep therapy and sexual abuse that occurred at Sydney’s Chelmsford Psychiatric Hospital in the 1960s.