Allen & Unwin

Where is the pleasure in reading a book as part of a series? A long acquaintance with known and trusted characters rewards the reader with the chance to share their growth and development through multiple challenges and adversities. For teenage readers, following protagonists their own age on this journey has particular rewards. All this, and cliffhangers, too.

Barry Jonsberg’s latest novel, Pandora Jones: Admission, is the first in a series. Jonsberg is a versatile and assured writer. His gift with character is the portrayal of young people who narrate their lives with humour and self-assurance. Dreamrider (2006) was a departure for him, depicting a character who was in psychological torment from dreams, which may or may not have been real.

In Negotiating with the Dead (2002), Margaret Atwood proposes that all writing ‘is motivated, deep down, by a fear of, and fascination with, mortality – by a desire to make the risky trip to the Underworld, and to bring something or someone back from the dead’. Certainly writers often use their craft both to preserve the memory of times, places, and people lost to them, and, consciously or unconsciously, to create a vivid, unique voice that will outlast their own earthly existence. Is this fixation with mortality also a reason for the frequent presence of ghosts in narratives? From Hamlet’s father through to Heathcliff’s Catherine, and on to the otherworldly characters in The One and Only Jack Chant and The Haunting of Lily Frost, many stories pose the question as to whether these eerie spectres are ghosts or imagination, as well as what the living can learn from them – and, as Lily Frost questions, ‘What do ghosts want?’

Infamy comes packaged with a blurb declaring it to be an Australian western, and a testimonial from Malcolm Knox, who compares this evocation of the hellish convict colony of Van Diemen’s Land in the 1830s with the imaginative achievements of Martin Scorsese. Neither claim is quite right. Bartulin’s narrative style does have affinities with a certain sort of action movie: the reader is wrenched from short take to short take, with one clutch of characters momentarily left in peril while the plight of others is unveiled. This builds suspense and mostly works, but the relentless violence is more reminiscent of Peckinpah than Scorsese. And, although that does put Infamy in the realm of the western, the tale keeps drifting towards the mood and conventions of an earlier Hollywood genre, the swashbuckling adventure movies of the 1930s. This is The Wild Bunch meets Captain Blood.

If you read only one book about Australia’s experience of World War I, as the deluge of commemorative publications marking the outbreak of the war becomes a veritable tsunami, make it Broken Nation, an account that joins the history of the war to the home front, and that details the barbarism of the battlefields as well as the desolation, despair, and bitter divisions that devastated the communities left behind.

With a stepmother she hates and a father who’s barely there, sixteen-year-old Danby Armstrong knew Christmas Day would be bad, but she wasn’t expecting the apocalypse. While families tear the wrapping off the latest iGadgets and share excited status updates, something strange happens. Suddenly, people are not just reading each other’s thoughts in their news feeds; they’re actually in each other’s heads. Everything from a neighbour’s affair to a planned terrorist attack is suddenly known; ‘the elephants in every room had been set loose to stampede’. Sydney erupts in violence as people seek revenge or just a place to shut out all those voices. But while Danby can hear them, they can’t hear her, and that makes her almost invisible.

In The Baby Farmers, legal scholar Annie Cossins revisits a bizarre episode in Australian criminal history. Her text focuses on a pair of baby killers who operated in Sydney during the nineteenth century. In October 1892, Sarah and John Makin were arrested after a baby’s corpse was found buried on their farm. An investigation revealed the bodies of twelve more babies, all buried in properties that had been inhabited by the Makins. The couple’s crimes stemmed largely from their poverty. Purchasing babies provided them with an (albeit limited) income. These babies had often been born out of wedlock, and their mothers relinquished them to avoid the stigma surrounding ‘illegitimate’ children.

Floodline is the fifth novel by Kathryn Heyman, course director at Allen & Unwin’s Faber Academy. Set in an unspecified area of the United States, it follows a proselytising family, which is on a mission to save the godless inhabitants of Horneville on the eve of their annual gay mardi gras, Hornefest, when the city is devastated by floods.

In A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), novelist Dave Eggers recounts the horror of losing both his parents within one year, leaving him and his sister as sole carers of their young brother. Eggers recalls the intense pain of being orphaned at the age of twenty-one, but also the frustration and acute resentment at having to grow up too fast.

With James Packer and Lachlan Murdoch grinning smugly on its cover, Killing Fairfax: Packer, Murdoch and the Ultimate Revenge projects a strong message that they are indeed the company’s smiling assassins. Pamela Williams mounts a case that these scions of Australia’s traditional media families ...