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.

On a fatherhood weekend, the men drag
a dead manna gum, chained to a ute, into camp.
They’re talking innocence. Is it inborn, or clad
layer by layer by behaviour? Around the grey stump
the men start chainsaws and crack beers, open
a phone (there’s reception), search innocence definition.
Blamelessness. Chastity. Childhood. But also
integrity, which means innocence. The confusion
– that integrity means wholeness too –
heats up when one man says he heard children
arrive with sin. Then two-stroke fumes
drown the twilight bush’s scat-and-pepper scents.
They cut it. Some of the men scream, some don’t,
when spiders erupt from the warm hollow.

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.

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.

Novelists and historians alike must choose how to tell their story. They may prefer a traditional authoritative voice, recounting the story in chronological order. Events surprise or shock as they unfold on the page, arriving at an apparently inevitable conclusion. This familiar organising principle holds our attention, but comes with constraints. Material must make sense within the timeline, or the narrative stalls. Think of Tolstoy’s long digression on farming in Anna Karenina or Hugo on constructing the sewers of Paris in Les Misérables, as we wait impatiently for Jean Valjean to flee the barricades.

In August 1943, John F. Kennedy, then aged twenty-six, was rescued from the threat of Japanese captivity – or worse – by a few brave Solomon Islanders, in an operation coordinated by the Australian naval officer Reg Evans. Evans was one of the Royal Australian Navy’s ‘Coastwatchers’, intelligence collectors based perilously behind Japanese lines.

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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.

In the title piece of this posthumous selection of reviews, criticism, essays, and journalism, Hilary Mantel describes how she once visited an irritating psychic she nicknamed ‘Twerp’ in order to guide her back to her former self: ‘I didn’t necessarily think I had a past life, but I wanted to know how it would feel if I did.’ Her former self turns out to have been a ‘miserable illegitimate infant’ called Sara, born to a family of millworkers in the north of England. Sara isn’t an unlikely candidate: Mantel’s mother worked in a cotton mill from the age of fourteen, as did her maternal grandmother, who left school aged twelve; Mantel’s great-grandmother had been illiterate. Mantel comes from ‘a long line of nobodies’. All that ‘Twerp’ wants to ask Sara is whether or not she is courting, when the real love of Sara’s life is Billy, her white bull terrier. ‘If Sara had slapped him,’ Mantel wonders, ‘what sort of a defence would I have had to a charge of assault?’

An anthology dedicated to the transnational history of psychedelic drugs and culture seems a timely enterprise. We are twenty or so years into what has become known as the ‘psychedelic renaissance’, the global revival of interest in compounds such as LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin centring on their use alongside psychotherapy as treatments for a growing number of mental health disorders.