The Morals of the Market confronts the modern high priests of economic theology with the ruin wrought under the banners of their speculation.

Leonora’s surreal, moving, and satirical novel The Hearing Trumpet was published as a Virago Modern Classic in 1991, which was when I first read it. It was a revelation, moving as it does from a repulsive facility for old women to apocalyptic scenes from a post-atomic New Ice Age. And this year, the New York Review of Books has republished it.

Truganini was the last First Nations Tasmanian with no European ancestry to die. It is a terrible reason to be famous, and Pybus argues that ‘Australians should know about how she lived, not simply that she died.’ How Truganini lived tells us a great deal about the transactions, trades and outright thefts through which British settlers took possession of the territory they called Australia.

There is a peculiar practice in immigrant Sydney that I know well thanks to being born to a pair of Lebanese settlers. It is when a set of beliefs that parents hold true about other ethnicities (usually groups of people who migrated earlier than they did) are told to their children as a kind of forewarning.

But Latour’s version of politics means not treating non-human agents as mere externalities, as in, we used to think that the weather had nothing to do with politics. But now the changing weather, reacting to what we have done with carbon, is a revolutionary agent. It is arguably the most important political actor of the last few decades, in that we can’t afford not to calculate its effects: bringing down national leaders, changing voting patterns, defunding scientific expertise and the arts, everything.

Amid the detours and the fragments, the sky-blue grip of life holds its own against the centrifugal force of illness and death. Which is why I describe these books, in some odd, indefinable way, as invigorating.

The Animals in that Country was published in March 2020. It might be tempting to see the timing of publication as serendipitous, or portentous, depending on your perspective. A novel about a ‘zoanthropathic’ super-flu precipitating wholesale social breakdown, published in the panicked first months of a zooanotic global pandemic. But Laura McKay’s novel, despite its timeliness, is not so intimately tied to the current moment – its vision is broader, and far more interesting. In this particular apocalypse, the foundational threat to human social structures is the emergence of unprecedented insight into the non-human world.

The Sydney Review of Books invites applications for the 2021 CA-SRB Emerging Critics Fellowships. Each Fellow will receive a stipend of $3000 to write three 2000-word essays on new Australian books over an eight-month period for publication in the SRB. Fellows will work closely with SRB editorial staff and receive mentoring and editorial support as they write their essays.

We’ve just released five episodes of the SRB podcast into the wild. Find them wherever you get your podcasts – all the info you need to get started is here on our podcast page.

The appearance of Evie Wyld’s novel in Anne Brontë’s bicentennial year prompts thoughts about the relation between the writings of these two angry women. The continuities are striking. Deeply religious, Anne used the back of her prayer book to record, in tiny letters, her response to all she had witnessed: ‘sick of mankind | And their disgusting ways’. We can’t know for certain whether, when she wrote ‘mankind’, she had the human species or the male sex in mind, but I lean towards the latter. Now, reading The Bass Rock, I feel as if Wyld had written boldly underneath Anne’s words: ‘Me Too’.

In her debut novel, A Lonely Girl is a Dangerous Thing, Jessie Tu paints a portrait of an artist on the brink. The neurotic protagonist, Jena Lin, was a child prodigy violinist who toured the world before her public breakdown at the age of 15. Now 22, she is rebuilding her career after detouring through a literature degree, although this time as an orchestra violinist, not a soloist.

When the Night Comes is a more modernist project than Past the Shallows. It focuses on the small but significant moments in life that pass almost unnoticed, even by the protagonists, yet have major consequences. Rather than regional Tasmania, the world of fishers, Hobart is the focus: its suburbs, Friends School, and particularly its harbour are deftly drawn.

It has at times been distressing to witness the media coverage of Kate and Rozanna Lilley’s story, as the intelligence, courage and nuance of their own accounts are temporarily obscured by blunt angles and agendas, by media interest driven in part by celebrity and the tropes of news, in part by various investments held in culture wars positions. But Kate Lilley writes poetry, and poetry offers a space for subjectivity that is not bound to the implied causality of narrative. Poetry can disrupt, evade, and effloresce.

Awoken by his insomnia after a performance by Grinderman in 2011, Nick ends up sending me an email that wrestles with his complicated sense of who his father was.