'History versus the novelist'
James Bradley on Kate Grenville's new novel
James Bradley reviews Kate Grenville's new novel, The Lieutenant. While praising the flawless construction,
economy and grace of The Lieutenant, Bradley critiques the novel's relationship with historical and biographical sources. It remains mired, Bradley argues, in 'the same mess of historical pastiche that entraps Eleanor Dark's The Timeless Land (1941), neither history (with all the restrictions that implies) nor truly fiction in its own right, but some unsatisfying amalgam of the two.'

'The great nothingness'
Peter Pierce on The Penguin Book of the Road
'Roads are not places,' writers Peter Pierce, 'but ways to and from them.' This anthology includes contributions from
eminent Australian writers, including David Malouf, Robert Hughes, Dorothy Hewett and Clive James. Commending Delia Falconer's astute editorship, Pierce notes that in spite of the metaphor of divergence and flight, the characters from these stories are seeking ways to return home.

'Barefoot on sharp stones'
Chris Wallace-Crabbe on Robert Dessaix
'Who is, or rather who was, Andre Gide?' asks Chris Wallace-Crabbe in his review of Robert Dessaix's Arabesques,
a 'tale of double lives'. Cross-stiching autobiography with
reactions to exotic places and past writers, Dessaix takes his audience sightseeing through Algiers, Northern Italy and
France - much to Wallace-Crabbe's delight: 'Dessaix is never less than a writer of cunningly shaped, seductive narratives.'

'Missing from My Own Life'
Elisabeth Holdsworth - winner of 2007 Calibre Prize
Last year Elisabeth Holdsworth won the inaugural Calibre
Prize for her essay 'An die Nachgeborenen: For Those Who Come After'. Few ABR articles have generated such interest
and emotion. Now she has written a further instalment of her remarkable life story, and explains the reasons for depicting aspects of it in fiction.

Sharman, shaman, showman
Gay Bilson on Blood &Tinsel
The ever-popular Gay Bilson reviews Jim Sharman's memoirs.
Sharman has kept interesting company in his illustrious career as a theatre and opera director: Rudolf Nureyev's notorious sexual haunts are mentioned; there is an exchanged look with Andy Warhol. At the heart of the book, however, is Sharman's professional and personal relationship with Patrick White.