Shortly after you read this column, the shortlist for the Man Booker Prize 2014 will be announced. Due to a quirk in the prize’s eligibility criteria (namely, to allow not-yet-published works), several of the longlistees are only just now being published. We’ve reviewed two that are released in September (with more to come in October) – Joseph O’Neill’s The Dog and David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks – and, if the quality of these are any indication, it’s clearly going to be an unenviable task for the judging panel to prune the longlist from 13 to six.

Attracting some comment, of course, were a few of the absences on the list, such as the new Martin Amis and Ian McEwan. Not much can be read into that, though: our reviewer calls Amis’s The Zone of Interest ‘an ambitious project’ and a ‘culmination of a life’s reading’ on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust; while McEwan’s The Children Act is ‘a small book bursting with big ideas’, with the central character a Family Court judge who is regularly confronted with some particularly thorny ethical dilemmas.

Talking of prizes, the 2013 recipient of the David Unaipon Award for unpublished Indigenous writing was Ellen van Neerven, and her short stories seem set to become one of the literary debuts of the year. For our reviewer, Tony Birch, it is ‘certain Heat and Light is just the first of many books from this remarkable young talent’. Meanwhile, we also have second books from Catherine Harris with an AFL-themed novel, The Family Men, ‘a starkly brilliant and uniquely Australian novel that stays with you long after reading’; and from Favel Parrett, much-loved author of Past the Shallows, with When the Night Comes, a novel that shifts between Tasmania and the Antarctic via the cargo ship the Nella Dan.

Non-fiction, meanwhile, likewise presents a surfeit of important books. Paul Kelly brings his trilogy on Australian political history to a close with Triumph and Demise: The Broken Promise of a Labor Generation; Gareth Evans reveals his cabinet diary in Inside the Hawke–Keating Government; Naomi Klein is back with This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate; and Maxine McKew offers an insight into our education system and its prospects in Class Act. Catching our eye too is Sam Vincent’s Blood and Guts, a fascinating account of the global whaling industry; Lorelei Vashti’s Dress, Memory, a coming-of-age memoir; and a great new music history from Greil Marcus (The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll in Ten Songs).

But the month belongs to the incomparable Helen Garner and her new non-fiction, This House of Grief. An account of the awful Farquharson murder trial, it is just the sort of bravura performance we’ve come to expect from one of the country’s great writers.

Martin Shaw