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.

Things can turn very quickly, my mother says. Be careful who you associate with. Με όλους και με κανέναν. With everyone and with no one. Watch what you do and what you say because they’re always watching – then, one day, they’ll write your name on ‘the list’ and we’ll never see you again.

A curious feature of the creamy new edition of Helen Garner’s diaries: it carries only one blurb, and it is not by some literary heavyweight but by Nigella Lawson. At first, I found this confounding, but I soon began to see parallels between the two. Both are funny, spontaneous sensualists; both have been subjected to harsh public scrutiny and experienced a certain degree of messiness in their personal lives; and both are magnificent women. In the words of Anne Enright, they are, in their various ways, ‘acclaimed celebrator[s] of the poetic quotidian’.

The Greek diaspora featured strongly in Andrew Pippos’s first novel, Lucky’s (2020), which traced the life of Chicago-born Vasilis ‘Lucky’ Mallios, who develops a chain of eponymous franchise restaurants often run by Greek Australians that mimic mid-twentieth-century American diners. The fortunes, and misfortunes, of Lucky and his restaurants in turn become the subject of a planned New Yorker article by journalist Emily Main.

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.

Troy Bramston is fast becoming the Peter FitzSimons of Australian political biography. Every few years a door-stopping volume on a prime minister appears, brandishing the same formula of ‘never before seen’ documents and ‘fresh revelations’. In the Acknowledgements to this latest biography of Gough Whitlam, Bramston virtually pleads with readers to render homage to the ‘hundreds’ of interviews he conducted, the ‘thousands’ of pages turned in archives, the miles clocked in libraries visited. There is a diligent busyness to the enterprise. But Bramston’s relentless emphasis on the quantitative smothers his underlying inability to master the material. The result, sadly, is an incomplete picture of Whitlam: a workman-like chronicle of the life, but not a deep exploration of the political and intellectual dimensions of the man.

I learnt about the Erin Patterson verdict from Allen & Unwin. They broke the news with a PR blast for Greg Haddrick’s The Mushroom Murders: ‘A family lunch. Three deaths. What really happened?’ (a tagline designed to fit any outcome). I checked the timestamps. The jury had been discharged from the Morwell courthouse at 2:28 pm; the marketing email landed in my inbox at 3:28 pm. It takes longer to wrap and roast a beef wellington.

In her ambitious and skilful examination of childhood and play, Emily Gallagher has carefully foregrounded the voices and thoughts of children, situating them as sources as well as historical actors. This is no easy task. Histories of childhood are mostly told from the viewpoint of adults: they are about children, rather than by children. In colonial Australia, the daily existence of children was harnessed to the circumstances of the adults – mostly parents – who cared for them, and who made key decisions about their education, work, and aspirations. Wider social commentary about young people, either sparked by moral panic or casting the next generation as the embodiment of a hopeful future, was proclaimed by adult authority figures.

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.

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.’