Hamish Hamilton

One of the intriguing things about Breath, Tim Winton’s first novel in seven years, is that it has a number of affinities with his very first book, An Open Swimmer (1982). Both are coming-of-age novels that attempt to capture some of the confusion and melancholy of youth ...

Occasionally after you have read a book that pleased, baffled, irritated, or bored you, someone points out all the subtleties, virtues, and faults you have missed. This could perhaps happen to readers of The Rose Crossing.

We know from Anna Russell that in opera it doesn’t matter what the characters do so long as they sing it; the same could be said of novels, providing the author can convince us. On the surface The Rose Crossing is a tall story set in the seventeenth century, in which, as in a fairy tale, people you don’t believe in behave in an unreal way and get into preposterous situations. They make stagy ‘period’ speeches, they don’t engage our sympathies, they sometimes creak when they move.

Every adventurous reader of fiction ought to have a private hoard of novelists, preferably from a non-English writing background, who have escaped the appalling nonsense of Booker-style PR hype. Luckily, publishers like Collins Harvill set about promoting such writers; unluckily for Australia, though, our major literary pages often neglect to review the bulk of such output. You will have your favourites in such a category, but let this reviewer recommend the following: Jose Donoso, Etienne Leroux, Jose Saramago, Eduardo Mendoza, Saiichi Maruya, and Haruki Murakami.

There are few people on earth I would rather read than Germaine Greer, mad or sane. Whatever reservations I might want to express about Daddy We Hardly Knew You, it is some testament to its compelling power that I read most of it strung-out with fatigue from checking proofs some time towards dawn and I still found it difficult to stop reading.