That doctors aren’t supposed to become incurably ill is something their patients might say, and about as useless as declaring that dentists are forbidden from contracting toothache or that undertakers should live forever – seeing other people out, not themselves.

Louise Berta Mosson Dyer (née Smith; later Hanson-Dyer; hereafter, Louise) lived several lives. An eccentric Melbourne socialite, married into the money of Linoleum King, Jimmy Dyer, she moved on from the expectations of provincial charitable good works in her mid-forties to found a ground-breaking new publishing house in Paris. Les Éditions de l’Oiseau-Lyre, or the Lyrebird Press, pioneered innovative, daring editions – of music, books, and later, recordings – sometimes at the cutting edge of technology.

There’s a poem that begins

But that other wreck, where the crew tumbles out of a bad dream

and into a worldwide storm of interpretation.

Life is inhearsed, everything’s on affective hold for an hour

as the heavens pause. A melancholy playlist is blinking its lights.

It was the time when the awful narrative of their journey

was lost at sea, the violence of the weather and the politics

of humans and demi-gods all cast into the deep.

Murray Middleton’s début novel, No Church in the Wild, opens beneath Flemington’s public housing towers in inner-city Melbourne. Residents of the towers flood the street to witness the police arrest a group of children ‘pinned on the concrete, knees digging into their spines’. One of these observers is Ali, a grade six primary school student. Ali recognises a Somali friend of his, Walid, as one of the boys under arrest. From Ali’s perspective, it is the latest provocation in a months-long campaign of police harassment against the local African migrant community. When things escalate and police direct the observers to leave, Ali responds: ‘Why should we? ... We live here.’ As the first of five parts, this opening scene is prologue to the action of the novel, which takes place five years later as Ali and Walid embark on their final years of schooling amid a community still suffering from problematic police interactions.

Even in his first publication, the seven short stories of the rightly celebrated The Boat (2008), Nam Le was perhaps always most interested in creating an aura of violent unpredictability. He withheld consistency, offered cruxes, hit the reader with a blizzard of bold plots in settings so varied as to be practically contradictory – Hiroshima, Medellin, New York City, a fishing town on the Queensland coast. Where, as in the title story, Nam Le appears to relent and writes about what may have been his own experience (he was ferried to Australia as an infant), the baby dies. He is like a package determined not to contain what it says on the disclosure form; a letter that won’t be delivered to the stated address.

When Georgia Blain died at the age of fifty-one in 2016, the reading public was robbed of a superb prose writer in her prime. Her final and, some consider, best novel, Between a Wolf and a Dog (2016), achieved wide critical acclaim. Shortly after Blain succumbed to brain cancer, that novel went on to win or be shortlisted in a slew of national prizes.

This volume brings together two highly credentialled thinkers about moral and ethical matters: Peter Singer, the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, and Venerable Shih Chao-Hwei, a Taiwanese Buddhist nun, founder of the animal welfare organisation the Life Conservation Association and the Buddhist Hong-Shi College, as well as a lecturer at Hsuan Chuang University.

In the year of my birth, trichotillomania did not exist,’ writes Adele Dumont. Hair-pulling has been depicted in human culture for millennia: in Greek myth, in the Bible, in painting and sculpture, and, most commonly, in vernacular expression (‘I’m tearing my hair out’). But hair-pulling as a compulsive, recurring behaviour – trichotillomania – was only named in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1987. Formal psychiatric diagnosis has become the dominant means by which we understand emotional distress, but this has happened very recently, and diagnosis can leave the sufferer, as Dumont writes, feeling ‘categorised’ and struggling to articulate those aspects of their illness that may seem, in spite of everything, like comfort.

In February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. Remarkably, Ukraine fought an effective, close-run defensive campaign and the war turned into a quagmire for Vladimir Putin’s regime. As early as the following month, with the appalling revelations from Bucha of Russian atrocities, it was clear that this was – as they all are – a very dirty war. At the time of writing, the frontline exists in precarious stalemate and serious questions loom about the reliability of ongoing US-led material support, which is necessary for Ukraine to continue the resistance.

Reading for this review I came across some apposite words by Jacqueline Rose, biographer of Sylvia Plath, cultural analyst and explorer of the lives and roles of women: