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The Australian landscape boils with lava and shudders with quakes; acid rain scars its parched surfaces. It provides little succour to human survivors; cockroaches outlive other animal species. Adapt or die, the story commands, though enforced adaptations (personified by the transfected Daughters of Moab) are considered the source of the apocalypse.

The narrative is haunted, riddled with nostalgia and regrets. It jumps between fascinating points of view: Assumpta’s human/dingo hybrid single-mindedness; Eustace’s calculating duplicity; Easter’s ex-sanguinated hallucinations; Angus’s longing for his unblemished homeland. Scenes change abruptly; the narrative transforms and folds in on itself unexpectedly, like a surrealist film. Readers must adapt or they will become lost in the plot, stuck in the molasses of Kim Westwood’s prose. She entices us with her unique treatment of the themes of loneliness, Stolen Generations, climate change, misplaced religious fervour, and searching for identity. Her world and her characters are attractive, but her dense prose can often be off-putting.

Serge Liberman’s new book contains a series of short stories and one novella, all narrated by Dr Raphael Bloom, a Melbourne physician who variously plays the roles of healer, confidant, confessor and counsellor to patients and their families. In doing so he explores existential and theological problems which often revolve around the Jewish memory of the Holocaust and the post-memory of second-generation migrants. For members of this traumatised community, brushes with illness and mortality raise the spectre of that terrible event and show how the past is not easily laid to rest.

In Making the Cut: How Cosmetic Surgery is Transforming our Lives, Anthony Elliott casts an unforgiving eye over the astonishing growth of ‘cosmetic surgical culture’. No longer the province of the rich and famous, Botox and skin peels, laser surgery and liposuction, face-lifts and breast augmentations have become part of the fabric of everyday life. Elliott’s analysis lays bare the culture of nip and tuck, and the era in which ‘many are calculating that a freshly purchased face-lift or suctioning of fat through liposuction is the best route to improved lives, careers and relationships’. Yet what compels people to act upon the desire for self-improvement in such drastic and sometimes life-threatening ways? Elliott identifies celebrity, consumerism and globalisation as fundamental to the increasing popularity of surgical solutions to social and personal dilemmas.

Scattered across Lake Ballard, a vast salt lake north of Kalgoorlie, are fifty-one androgynous abstracted cast-iron alloy figures created by British artist Antony Gormley in 2002, all based on scans of the inhabitants of a tiny goldfields settlement. Gormley described his figures as ‘strangers in a strange land’. It is not too wild a stretch of the imagination to see them as explorers or prospectors driven by powerful dreams to wander endlessly across a shimmering landscape. One of these figures provides an evocative cover image for Land of Vision and Mirage.

This life begins with a ritual its subject practised through the 1960s and 1970s. Manning Clark would visit St Christopher’s Cathedral, Canberra, kneel before its shrine of the Virgin, ask assistance in fighting his need for alcohol, and beg forgiveness and peace. While Clark’s funeral was a requiem mass at St Christopher’s, and a preoccupation with the Catholic faith became increasingly evident in his later years, this is not a beginning that those who read his history or became familiar with his public appearances would expect.

In relating these regular visits to the shrine, Brian Matthews signals the themes that run through this life of Clark. There is his susceptibility to alcohol and the way that it exacerbated his erratic behaviour. There is the fraught character of his most intimate relationships, and his persistent torment of anguish and guilt. There is his intellectual ambition, his need for reassurance and vulnerability to criticism. And there is his constant search for faith.

Curated by Tracey Lock-Weir, Misty Moderns: Australian Tonalists 1915–1950 at the Art Gallery of South Australia presented a re-evaluation of Max Meldrum (1875–1955) and the influential Australian tonalist phenomenon of the first half of the twentieth century. This recent exhibition was accompanied by an elegant publication in which Lock-Weir’s substantial essay (divided into readily digestible chapters) makes the claim that Meldrum and his tonalist doctrine had a more far-reaching impact than has previously been recognised. Accordingly, paintings by Meldrum and his followers – including Clarice Beckett, Colin Colahan, A.D. Colquhoun, John Farmer, Polly Hurry, Justus Jorgensen, Percy Leason, A.E. Newbury and Hayward Veal – were augmented by the work of artists more fleetingly influenced by his ideas, such as Roy de Maistre, Elioth Gruner, Lloyd Rees and Roland Wakelin. Although William Frater and Arnold Shore produced a number of tonalist paintings, Lock-Weir observes that by 1926 they had ‘broken away into colour and line’, later becoming the leading proponents of modernism in Melbourne.

Mother Land is a vibrant and charming yet sombre and brutal account of Dmetri Kakmi’s childhood on the Aegean island of Tenedos, now known by its Turkish name of Bozcaada. The book opens with the adult ‘Dimitri’, accompanied by his Turkish friend Sinan, standing on the mainland and surveying through binoculars places he has not seen for thirty years: ‘Three islets sit low on the water ... As a boy, I used to be captivated by their aloofness and solitude. When I’d had enough of people, I yearned to build a hut and live on one of them, alone, separate and untouched by a world that, even at that age, seemed capricious and delinquent beyond reckoning.’

‘Let’s get this death thing straight’, declares Julian Barnes in his recently published memoir-cum-meditation Nothing to Be Frightened Of. He sets out to confront mortality, the titular ‘nothing’, but manages only to peer at it through parted fingers. He takes short peeks, which calls to mind the title of his death-haunted novel Staring at the Sun (1986).

The koala is one of the most recognised animals in the world. Its beguiling, teddy-bear appearance, inoffensive nature and seeming indifference to the world around it have endeared it to adults and children worldwide. In Australia it is considered a national icon, due in no small part to two characters from popular children’s books: Bunyip Bluegum in Norman Lindsay’s evergreen The Magic Pudding, published in 1918 and never out of print since, and Blinky Bill from Dorothy Wall’s series of the same name, the first of which was published in 1933.

It is no easy task to write a good crime novel that features a youthful sleuth. Too young to drink, to drive, to wander the mean streets or to have a wasted past, young sleuths also have parents lurking in the background, ever ready to assert their authority about meals and bedtimes. Full credit, then, to Beth Montgomery for overcoming these obstacles and writing a gripping mystery. In Murderer’s Thumb, fourteen-year-old Adam Statkus and his mother have relocated from the city to the country in yet another effort to escape an abusive husband and father. Rosemary Statkus, jittery and terrified, is in no state to assert any authority over her son, beyond instilling in him the necessity of keeping a low profile. That becomes harder to maintain when Adam finds the decomposed body of a teenage girl buried in a silage pit. Then he stumbles upon a hidden diary that contains clues to the murder. Others would also like to get their hands on it. The diary is a McGuffin, and the climactic exposure of the murderer a bit hammy, but Adam is a tough, credible and appealing protagonist, and the evocation of a close-knit farming community and the build-up of tension are terrific.