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This is, of course, a much-awaited biography. Its subject, the commercial broadcaster Alan Jones, has long been a contentious figure. While some believe his influence over his audience has actually determined the outcomes of certain state and federal elections, others believe that this influence is a self-perpetuated myth that Sydney-siders should repudiate. Chris Masters, the author, is something of a local icon; one of the most respected and fearless of Australian television journalists, whose professional integrity is widely acknowledged.

The Australian soap Neighbours maintains its popularity overseas. Busloads of UK tourists bound for Vermont South attest to this. The soap’s popularity lies in its reflection of the domestic and the mundane. It provides a safe means for overseas viewers to explore the exotic: the trials of the Ramsay Street clan are not so different from their own. Soon, thanks to author Célestine Hitiura Vaite, Tahiti may have its own busloads of tourists, searching for the petrol station in Faa´a PK55, location and setting for the domestic, everyday dramas of Breadfruit, Frangipani and Tiare.

Desperate Housewives, eat your heart out. This warm slice of smalltown gothic simmers with barely disguised marital discord, traumatic childhoods, eating disorders, bed-hopping and maternal angst – all centred around a playgroup in the South Australian town of Port Lincoln. Bitchy Madelaine, insecure Danica, sniffy Pauline, downtrodden Jo and earth-mother Nell have little in common but their children and geographical proximity. It is enough to form a friendship of sorts, albeit one spiked with deliberately provocative conversational lures, needling one-liners, sharp character assessments and sly jabs at the fleshy parts of one another’s self-esteem. As the cracks deepen in the veneer of their exterior lives, this precarious network becomes increasingly important – and fragile.

David Suzuki is perhaps the best-known scientist living today. After developing an international reputation as a leading geneticist, he moved into science broadcasting and environmental activism. Why did he do this, and how did he become so successful? Now aged seventy, Suzuki explores these questions in his latest book, David Suzuki:The Autobiography. Suzuki’s previous auto-biographical work, now out of print, was aptly titled Metamorphosis: Stages in a Life (1986). Evolving from a collection of essays, it also charted his transformation from laboratory scientist to public educator of science and environmentalist. However, much has happened in the intervening twenty years. The new book mostly focuses on his environmental work in Canada and the Amazon, leading to the establishment of the David Suzuki Foundation in 1991, and his subsequent involvement in the Rio Earth Summit (1992) and the Kyoto Agreement on climate change (1997). In his preface, Suzuki writes that his story has been ‘created by selectively dredging up bits and pieces from the detritus of seventy years of life’. It is neither a story of the inner machinations of science nor the intrigues of a public personality in the media. Rather, Suzuki takes the position of an ‘elder’ in society, with the hope that his reflections on life may stir the reader to reconsider his or her own life.

Death of a Whaler considers the grand themes of death, grief, the quest for meaning and the potential for reawakening. Just days before the Byron Bay whalers are made redundant in 1962, lopsided Flinch is involved in an accident and literally frozen. It is not only when he meets Karma, himself troubled by the past, that Flinch reluctantly begins the trial of healing.

Appalling as it sounds, many of us never out-grow our childhood personae. Although people become adept at concealing their petulance and insecurities behind adult façades, among siblings and parents they revert to type, unable to resist lifelong family roles and patterns.

Kate Veitch’s first novel, Listen, is a vivid dissection of a fractured family. Forty years after a young mother of four – the unexpectedly likeable Rosemarie – has abandoned her children and husband one Christmas Eve to escape Melbourne suburbia for Swinging London, the anguish of her flight still reverberates for her children, manifesting itself in different ways. Rosemarie’s eldest daughter was effectively thrust into premature motherhood at the age of thirteen, due partly to her father’s benign neglect. Deborah resents the injustices and sacrifices of her adolescence, when she was consumed with raising her siblings. She is constantly irritable with her husband, and unable to comprehend her teenage daughter Olivia’s preference for animals to humans. Her anger drives a wedge between herself and her family.