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Books+Publishing’s latest Reviews newsletter contains 14 reviews of books publishing in October and November 2016.

Julia Baird’s ‘thoroughly contemporary biography’ Victoria the Queen (HarperCollins, November) is one of three books to receive 4.5 stars. Reviewer Jo Case writes, ‘Baird brings the figure of Victoria richly to life, with all her contradictions. Artistic and enquiring, passionate in her loves (and hates) […] she comes across as something like a royal version of Jo March.’

Queens Counsel barrister Mark Tedeschi explores the history and legal ramifications of one of Australia’s worst mass murders in Murder at Myall Creek (S&S, November), which also doubles as a ‘sympathetic biography’ of the prosecutor of the case John Hubert Plunkett. Reviewer Chris Saliba calls it a ‘considered and elegant work’.

The third book to receive 4.5 stars is Avan Judd Stallard’s Antipodes: In Search of the Southern Continent (Monash University Press), a history of the development of Terra Australis Incognita in the Western imagination. ‘This is an informative and entertaining mixture of geography, history and epistemology, at once academically rigorous and approachable,’ writes Dave Martus, who calls it a ‘visual and intellectual feast’.

Also reviewed are:

Fiction:

The Art of Keeping Secrets (Rachael Johns, Harlequin, October); Extinctions (Josephine Wilson, UWA Publishing, November); and The Good People (Hannah Kent, Picador, October).

Nonfiction:

All is Given: A Memoir in Songs (Linda Neil, UQP, November); The Answer (Allan & Barbara Pease, Harlequin, November); Anything is Possible (Cosentino, HarperCollins, November); Cynthia Nolan: A Biography (M E McGuire, Melbourne Books, October); The End of the Patriarchy (Robert Jensen, Spinifex Press, November); Kiffy Rubbo: Curating the 1970s (ed by Janine Burke & Helen Hughes, Scribe, November); Grog: A Bottled History of Australia’s First 30 Years (Tom Gilling, Hachette, October); and Poum and Alexandre: A Paris Memoir (Catherine de Saint Phalle, Transit Lounge, November).

This month also features interviews with Julia Baird and Mark Tedeschi, and Q&As with international authors Justin Cronin, Molly Crabapple and A C Grayling in advance of their writers’ festival appearances.

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Category: Recently published by B+P