Grief, depression, and trauma do terrible things to the human body and spirit. The brain rebels callously against its vessel, leaving the wounded mind to wallow in the deepest pits of despair, perpetually refreshing pain and obsessively seeking out the recesses of scarred memories.

Located on Yawuru Country in Rubibi (Broome), Magabala Books is one of the most remote publishers in the world. This First Nations publishing house has helped redefine Australian publishing since the 1980s by continually ensuring that Aboriginal stories and voices are in print. Since its formal establishment in 1987 – following a landmark desert meeting in 1984 and with funding from the Australian Bicentenary Authority’s National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Program and the Kimberley Aboriginal Law and Cultural Centre – Magabala has published more than 250 authors from across Australia. The press emerged in direct response to the widespread appropriation of Indigenous stories by Settler people and publishing houses and continues to define how publishing can best serve Aboriginal authors, artists, and illustrators.

In literary careers, straightforward narrative arcs are less the rule than the exception. A writer can begin with a resounding debut, only to stumble at what in the music business is called the ‘difficult second album’. Authors can change genres and audiences; fail at achieving significant sales figures; succumb to hostile reviews, or simple indifference. Miles Franklin expressed it best in her novel title My Career Goes Bung (1946).

I came to this book with a question: how will the author select the dozen or so artists upon whom he focuses? Of all the artists in Australia and beyond, why these few? One answer is pragmatic: What Artists See is based, in part, on previously published essays, several from The Monthly, others in exhibition catalogues. Sprague’s book might be understood, then, as an assemblage of previously dispersed parts, a drawing together of discrete pieces under one title. But it is also far more than this.

The subject of this fine biography was my Doktorvater or postgraduate supervisor. He hailed from York, ancient capital of England’s northern counties. So did my biological father, Wilfred Prest (1907-1985). Both won university scholarships to study history. But their family backgrounds and life trajectories were very different.

Every now and then, a truly profound book appears on a profoundly important subject. Mark Lilla’s Ignorance and Bliss is one such book.

New Zealand/Aotearoa is a small country, with a population of roughly five million people, but as former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern enthuses in her memoir A Different Kind of Power, it regularly punches above its weight. Not that she is one to toot her own horn, at least in an obvious fashion, but let’s take her prime ministership as a vivid case in point.

Just after midnight on 6 August 1945, twelve United States military personnel on Tinian Island in the north-western Pacific Ocean had an early breakfast of eggs, sausages, and pineapple fritters. After prayers with a Lutheran chaplain, they boarded a Boeing B-29 Superfortress heavy bomber for a six-hour flight to Japan. Each carried a pistol, and their commander secretly carried a metal box holding twelve cyanide capsules, for use in case of capture. Their aircraft carried a nuclear bomb which would soon be dropped on Hiroshima, a city in the west of Honshu, Japan’s largest island. Accompanying them was a second bomber carrying instrumentation to measure the blast effects, and a third carrying photography equipment. Weather reconnaissance aircraft had departed earlier, to ensure conditions were suitable for the attack.

It is common today for historians to describe what they do as telling stories about the lives and events of the past, using the narrative techniques that they share with fiction writers: describing place, weather, clothes, the set of a leading character’s chin, and so on. But as a disciplined, evidence-based enquiry, history writing is also about argument and interpretation.

The War Within Me is the second book in Tracy Ryan’s trilogy on the Queens of Navarre, a kingdom precariously sandwiched between the powerful monarchies of France and Spain. In 1512 Navarre had lost much of its territory to Spain; its continued survival thereafter depended upon a complicated diplomatic dance with the French court. The first book in Ryan’s series followed the life of Marguerite of Angoulême, sister of François I of France, who married Henri II of Navarre in 1526. Now Ryan turns attention to their only daughter, Jeanne d’Albret, who succeeded to the throne after her father’s death in 1555.