Isabel Allende’s My Name is Emilia del Valle begins in the Mission District of San Francisco in the late nineteenth century and vividly evokes life among ‘that multicolored, polyglot multitude of emigrants’.

Readers grow faithful to their favourite authors – to their style, their literary landscapes, and the moods their books create. Readers of Deborah Levy’s work have come to know and love her idiosyncratic voice. Her texts plunge readers into quotidian worlds made surreal and her narrators point out the humour and strangeness of everyday life.

An unknown woman – traumatised, amnesiac, unable to speak – is found just north of Broken Hill in western New South Wales. Who she is and what happened to her is the question that drives Gail Jones’s twelfth novel, The Name of the Sister.

The first six months of the second Trump administration have left American allies worldwide, including Australia, in a state of shock and sullen resignation. Shock at the resumption of Trump’s global trade and tariff war, following threats to Canada, Greenland and Mexico, not to mention the harm being done to American institutions and soft power; resignation that US protectionism and the rising demands of Washington on allies to pay more for their own defence are here to stay.

Imagine having a performance review conducted by your employer while you were in a coma and on maternity leave and being told on your return to work that your responsiveness was found wanting. This anecdote is related straight-faced by Sarah Wynn-Williams in her whistleblowing account of the multinational technology giant Facebook. Based on the author’s seven-year tenure as Facebook’s Director of Global Public Policy, which ended in 2017, Careless People provides new insights into Facebook’s treatment of employees and users alike. As Wynn-Williams recalls: ‘A quick google search confirm[ed] my suspicions that you are not supposed to be given a performance review on your maternity leave. In fact, I understand that pushing someone to work during their maternity leave is against the law.’ A chilling picture is constructed of the human cost of the company’s lawless commitment to power, profit, and a galactic technocracy, the Metaverse.

The enduring legacies of Covid-19 have been linked to a post- or new-normal era defined by everything from chronic debt to the rise of Big Data and the lingering unease any of us might feel in a crowd. Those transformations are placed in fresh perspective by Sheilagh Ogilvie’s reminder that humanity has experienced a severe pandemic roughly every five generations since the Black Death scythed across Europe for nearly a decade from 1346. ‘History seethes with epidemics,’ Ogilivie writes. Her interest is in how societies have responded across that long time span. What resources have been mobilised to ‘control contagion’? What changed with, and can be learnt from, those cycles in humanity’s extreme if episodic vulnerability to microbes?

Of all the revolutionary regimes of the modern era, few sought to remake society as radically as Communist  China during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Launched by Mao Zedong in 1966 to purge ‘class enemies’ and revitalise socialist ideals, the movement quickly spiralled into widespread upheaval that slipped beyond the Party’s control. Amid mass campaigns and brutal struggles, waves of political activism surged from below, jolting the very foundations of the Communist state and reshaping the country’s cultural and political landscape.

The First Cold War is an account of 300 years of British-Russian relations, from mutual incomprehension to the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907, which reached an accommodation between the great powers. This proved remarkably stable and provided the basis for resisting German aggression in the twentieth century. It only ended in 1949 when the next cold war began.

For the past year, I’ve thought deeply and often about rivers, one in particular. The Maribyrnong River is 160 km long and runs from Mount Macedon to Port Phillip Bay. The name, adapted from the languages of the Wurundjeri, Woi Wurrung and Bunurong, who called it Mirring-gnay-bir-nong, purportedly means ‘I can hear a ringtail possum’. Initially known by British settlers as the Saltwater River because it is tidal, the Maribyrnong has a gritty history. In Footscray it served as a drain for the noxious industries that lined its banks for decades. The Maribyrnong appears every now and then in the news when it floods, as a place from which stolen cars are dredged, or when bodies wash up.

Australia is a weird place. A backwater colonial outpost settled by racist squatters and their indentured convict servants, it is a country forever defined by its isolation, in every sense, from the rest of the world. Faster than Barron Field could say ‘kangaroo’, an Empire crashed onto the shores of the First Peoples who had been cultivating a narrative tradition since time immemorial, and set about writing a (manifest) destiny of its own.