It’s been a sombre couple of weeks in the Australian book trade, with two tragic passings: the highly respected Melbourne novelist, critic and educator Liam Davison (on the ill-fated MH17); and Matt Richell, the widely admired CEO of Hachette Australia, whose passion for publishing, and commitment to emerging Australian talent in particular, was utterly infectious. This column is dedicated to their memory.

Perhaps fittingly, this month turns out to be a bountiful one across both fiction and non-fiction. Likely to grab a great deal of literary oxygen is the new novel from Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, a return to the more realist style exemplified by 1987’s Norwegian Wood. For our reviewer, it’s ‘his most tightly focused yet’. Also of note is Booker Prize-winner D.B.C. Pierre with a novella in the Hammer horror tradition: Breakfast with the Borgias.

Australian fiction, though, predominates, and the list is wonderfully diverse and enticing. We have a long-awaited Joan London novel, The Golden Age; second novels from Sofie Laguna (The Eye of the Sheep), Inga Simpson (Nest) and Jessie Cole (Deeper Water); as well as debuts from Nic Low (Arms Race: And Other Stories), Rebecca Jessen (Gap) and Omar Musa (Here Come the Dogs). Of the latter, expect to hear some considerable comment – for our reviewer, this verse novel ‘swaggers charmingly’ onto the literary scene, and ‘is beautiful … not preachy or didactic, and it’s ripe with disdain for swathes of its potential audience’.

Two novels strike me as particular achievements. Miriam Sved’s debut, Game Day, takes as its fictional quarry the game and culture of AFL, and does so winningly, even for those with no interest in the code whatsoever. As Robbie Egan notes in his review: ‘Whether you like the footy or not is irrelevant: these characters ring true and speak to us in many ways. Miriam Sved is a writer to watch.’ There is also a new novel from Wayne Macauley: Demons. I was asked recently whether I thought it was better than his three previous and all I could proffer was ‘just as good!’ Macauley really is our leading social satirist of the moment – and each book is a gem.

Finally, in non-fiction, Sophie Cunningham has written a fascinating account of Cyclone Tracy (Warning: The Story of Cyclone Tracy): it recounts not just the cataclysmic effect of the cyclone, but what this said about the Australia of the time, and how the country changed as a result thereafter. Meanwhile, memoirs from Bob Brown and Greg Combet may well herald a particular nostalgia for political leaders of conscience and integrity. Comradely Greetings – the prison letters of Pussy Riot’s Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek – promises to be a fascinating take on artistic subversion, political activism and the future of democracy.

Martin Shaw