Of all the book titles I’ve ever come across, Janet Frame’s You Are Now Entering the Human Heart remains one of my all-time favourites. It’s wonderful news then that the Text series of generally overlooked Australian and New Zealand classics now includes Frame’s debut novel, Owls Do Cry. Evocatively, Angela Meyer in her review writes: ‘At the end, you are lying down, there is weight on your chest, but your mind is lit up.’

Turning to an Australian contemporary master, Gerald Murnane seems to be in a particularly fecund period of his career, with a succession of inimitable novels appearing in the last few years. The latest, A Million Windows, is reviewed on this page by an author who counts Murnane as a seminal influence: Wayne Macauley. He writes of having some reservations of Murnane’s latest work, but that ‘he is an artist of such rare and single-minded originality – as well as being the greatest sentence-maker Australia has ever seen – that you almost always forgive him.’

Amid the local fiction offerings is a book I would like to champion, simply because it’s the funniest tale I’ve read in many a year – and we need those from time to time among the sometimes overly earnest contemporary literature. Chris Flynn’s The Glass Kingdom is best described, I think, as Alex Garland’s The Beach meets the bush, and will have you marvelling at Flynn’s extraordinary ear for the vernacular and wicked eye for small-town country Australia.

International fiction ranges from the sublime American short-story practitioner Lydia Davis (Can’t and Won’t), to the last work, sadly, of the great Peter Matthiessen (In Paradise). Not to be overlooked are two particularly ambitious debuts: Smith Henderson’s Fourth of July Creek and Zia Haider Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know, which is ‘a polyphonic novel whose scope pays tribute to Melville, George Eliot and David Foster Wallace’, according to our reviewer.

It’s also a bountiful month for non-fiction: Shy, the much-anticipated memoir from broadcaster Sian Prior; nothing less than The Feel-Good Hit of the Year from Liam Pieper, which our reviewer rates as one of the best local memoirs in recent years; and, ironically (as we slowly pick ourselves up from the federal budget), Justin Heazlewood’s Funemployed. The political tragics are well catered for, with a memoir from Hillary Clinton, Hard Choices, which no doubt will be interpreted as some sort of signal of intent in terms of her presidential ambitions; and Rob Oakeshott looks back on his tumultuous time in politics in The Independent Member for Lyne.

Finally, for multiple generations of Melbourne literary folk, academic and poet Chris Wallace-Crabbe has been a beacon and an inspiration. To mark his eightieth birthday, MUP has commissioned a wonderful celebratory volume edited by Cassandra Atherton: Travelling Without Gods: A Chris Wallace-Crabbe Companion. Not that Chris is showing any signs of slowing down: his new collection, My Feet Are Hungry, also appears this month.

Martin Shaw