Allen & Unwin

When Miranda Ophelia Sinclair, ‘Moss’ to her friends, discovers a document featuring the name of her heretofore unknown father, she sets out to find him and to discover her genetic roots. Her complicated family history is gradually exposed when she finds her father, Finn, living as a near-recluse in a town called Opportunity. Finn’s next-door neighbour is Lily Pargetter: aged, lonely, haunted by memories and ghosts. Her nephew, Sandy, is a middle-aged man-child, ineffectual but harmless. This eccentric cast of characters could easily hold its own against Alexander McCall Smith’s creations; however, Evans sets her protagonists on a predictable and fairly scripted path, resulting in a message-driven narrative.

'What’s in a name?’ as C.J. Dennis and Shakespeare asked. Maybe much, as in nomen: omen – maybe naught, as in the case of the narrator Michael Meehan’s fourth novel, Below the Styx. For this chap’s name is Martin Frobisher, a distinctive name that rings several bells. Sir Martin Frobisher (c.1535–94) was an English navigator who made three attempts from 1576 to 1578 to discover the North-West Passage, giving his name to a bay on Baffin Island and bringing back to England ‘black earth’, which was mistakenly thought to contain gold. He later served against the Spanish Armada and raided Spanish treasure ships.

Meehan’s protagonist would appear to have nothing whatsoever in common with his Tudor namesake, and his name may be a subspecies of that great Australian comic trope, the furphy. From the first page of the book, it is all but impossible to shake the conviction that ‘Martin Frobisher’ has a weighty significance, while it may in fact be empty, a linguistic terra nullius. It may be a Shaggy Dog, happily at home in this benignly witty and whimsical novel, which is also a murder mystery.

The press release for David Owen’s latest book describes it as a ‘thoroughly researched’ work by a shark ‘outsider’ that aims to ‘comprehensively overturn our negative and damaging perceptions of sharks’. I cannot claim expert knowledge of sharks, but personal experience makes me a suitable subject on which to measure the author’s effectiveness. When I was a child, one of my sisters was bitten in shallow water by a shark that had breached a netted beach in North Queensland. Although her injuries were not life-threatening, the resulting panic had a lasting effect: I rarely swim in the ocean, and have a healthy respect for sharks.

Alex Miller has been named as a finalist in the 2009 Melbourne Prize for Literature, a rich award given triennially to a Victorian author for a body of work. It is hardly surprising that a writer who has twice won the Miles Franklin Award and frequently been the recipient of, or short-listed for, other prizes should be among ...

Jacob Rosenberg completed the manuscript of The Hollow Tree shortly before his death in October 2008. Born in Lodz in 1922, he lived there until he was deported to Auschwitz, where he lost his entire immediate family. He was later a prisoner in the Woflsburg and Ebensee concentration camps. In 1948 he and his wife, Esther, emigrated to Australia, where they raised a family and built a successful clothing business.

In the shadow of the famous romance of Ann and Matthew Flinders lies another, even sadder love story, between Flinders’s partner in exploration George Bass and his wife, Elizabeth. Bass and Flinders are so firmly bracketed in the Australian historical imagination that it comes as a surprise to find that the only references to Flinders in this collection of the Bass letters come from Elizabeth. Flinders does not even merit an entry in the biographical notes at the beginning of the book.

Two new young adult novels explore the complexities of family. While Maureen McCarthy’s Somebody’s Crying details a daughter’s painful loss of her mother, Alyssa Brugman’s Girl Next Door negotiates the hardships of teenage life while coming to terms with family bankruptcy.

According to Peter Rees’s introduction to The Other Anzacs, ‘at least 2498 nurses’ served overseas with the Australian Army Nursing Service during World War I, with about 720 in other units raised in Britain or privately sponsored. There were ‘at least 610 nurses’ in the New Zealand Army Nursing Service, and perhaps another 100 overseas. The criteria for acceptance were high. Nurses were required to have completed at least three years’ training in an approved hospital, to be aged between twenty-one and forty, and either single or widowed. The rules about marriage, however, were not always strictly observed, and as men sometimes fudged their age and other circumstances to get into the army, occasionally a woman may have disguised her marital status. But once in the Army Nursing Service, marriage usually meant resignation. If a nurse wished to keep working after she married, she had to join one of the private medical or hospital services that had come into being.

Glowing reviews of an author one is not familiar with can inspire scepticism, but in the case of David Francis these tributes are justified. Stray Dog Winter – an impressive political thriller – is set mostly in Moscow in 1984, with occasional flashbacks to Melbourne during the 1970s.

The Great Arch has considerable if unlikely charm. It is a history of the building of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in a novel about real and imagined people living near its construction site. Hastrich brings to life (potentially dry) detail about huge steel plates, creeping cranes, rivets and cables. We see this mostly in the writings and photographs of her central character, an Anglican vicar who records the progress of the bridge-building in his parish paper and also writes a two-volume book about it. The Reverend Ralph Anderson Cage, rector at St Christopher’s at Lavender Bay (based on a real person, Frank Cash), is an endearingly hapless yet decent man who becomes obsessed with the unfolding engineering marvel that reshapes the population and topography of his once-thriving parish.