Heather Rose’s mesmerising new novel, A Great Act of Love, draws together themes and settings that have animated her previous work, including an abiding attachment to the landscape of Tasmania, questions of how individuals reckon with the past, meditations on the nature of love, and a fascination with the life of the soul.

In a recent interview published in ABR (November 2025), Melissa Lucashenko was asked what qualities she looks for in critics and editors. ‘Language that I can understand without needing a thesaurus,’ she responded. ‘Some points of connection, regardless of how far apart our cultures of origin might be.’ This collection of twenty non-fiction pieces written over two decades draws together a selection of keynote addresses, feature articles, radio presentations, speeches, and reviews, many previously unpublished. These pieces reflect on her career as a writer, a public intellectual, and the author of celebrated novels; Too Much Lip won the Miles Franklin Award in 2019 and her historical novel Edenglassie has won a series of prestigious awards since its publication in 2023. The pieces in this collection are also ‘personal’. The heron that features on the hardcover design of this collection gestures to Lucashenko’s totem, and we follow its tracks across the page.

I was weaned on Blackadder. It was a series that hit its comedy straps when Ben Elton came on board for the 1986 second season to begin his immensely fruitful collaboration with Richard Curtis. Blackadder played a similar role in my childhood to Horrible Histories in the next generation. Its third season should probably take at least partial blame for the decades I spent studying Britain’s Georgian decades.

Simone Young is Chief Conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. She has held the posts of General Manager and Music Director of the Hamburg State Opera, Music Director of the Philharmonic State Orchestra Hamburg and of Opera Australia, Chief Conductor of the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra and Principal Guest Conductor of the Gulbenkian Orchestra and the Lausanne Chamber Orchestra. She has conducted complete cycles of Der Ring des Nibelungen at the Vienna, Berlin, and Hamburg State Operas and at the Bayreuth Festival. Young is a regular guest conductor at the world’s leading opera houses and orchestras, including The Metropolitan Opera New York, the Vienna, Berlin and Bavarian State Operas, Zurich Opera, Opera Nationale de Paris, the Bayreuth Festival, and the New York, Los Angeles, Berlin, Vienna, Munich, BBC and Dresden Philharmonic Orchestras. Her many accolades include Honorary Member (Vienna State Opera), Professorship (Musikhochschule, Hamburg), Honorary Doctorate (University of Sydney), and Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, France.

This is not really a book about Australian foreign policy in the Trump era. It is, however, an attempt to chart the coordinates of President Trump’s approach to the world in his second term. It depicts Australia, not unlike most other US allies in Europe and Asia, scrambling to remain relevant to Washington as the fond and the familiar in the international system are tossed to and fro by the latest Trump hurricane. Clinton Fernandes, a former intelligence officer in the Australian army and now Professor of International and Political Studies at UNSW, is damning of the inability of successive Australian governments to explain to the Parliament or the Australian people why Australia has become, in his words, a ‘US sentinel state’, alongside the Republic of Korea and Japan. The strongest parts of the book are those which ask precisely how this state of affairs has eventuated. The questions are vital, but Fernandes knows that they are unlikely to be answered by this government.

Mariana Enríquez is deep in the catacombs beneath Montparnasse, the dead arranged in obedient rows. She has a plan. All she needs is a distraction, and one arrives in the form of a fainting tourist, a convenient wuss. The man falls hard – his skull thwacks the stone floor – and Enríquez seizes her moment. She slips into an alcove, works a slim bone loose, and slides it into her jacket sleeve ‘like a knife’. She strolls out past the exit guard and into the Paris daylight. ‘Is it a serious crime to steal a bone?’ she asks. ‘The catacombs are a museum, after all. But I feel so innocent!’

She brings a bag of bundled shades of wool
which overflows beside her corner table
and from it draws a choice of yarn, a range
of needles, lays them out as a surgeon might,
as a thief would, surveying a challenging vault.

The Karratha Gas Plant sits on the Burrup Peninsula, a short drive from Dampier in the remote north-west of Western Australia. From a visitors centre perched on a hill above it, you get a spectacular view of the giant facility: stretching over two square kilometres, it is bound by the blue waters of Withnell Bay and the red rock hills of the Murujuga National Park. The first time she took in this vista, author and journalist Marian Wilkinson was stunned. ‘No image’, she writes, ‘quite captures its breathtaking size and scale.’