It’s 1954 and 13-year-old Frank Gold a refugee from Hungary is learning to walk again after cruelly contracting polio in Australia having escaped the Holocaust. In the Golden Age Convalescent Hospital he meets fellow patient Elsa and they form a passionate and forbidden bond. Their growing love story unlocks their journeys to this place, but also their innermost feelings and unique sense of self.

Joan London has long been my favourite Australian writer for her precision, humanity and total absence of artistic egotism. A deserving winner of many awards, her last novel ‘The Golden Age’ takes place in a Perth children’s polio hospital in the 1950s. Only London could give such seemingly vulnerable child protagonists inner lives of this power and agency, sophistication and ambition and remain so true to life. London’s writing is world class; this novel is just one of her masterpieces.

The deadman dance of the title was created by Bobby Wabalanginy, our funny, optimistic protagonist, a young Noongar man with a showman charisma who wants to welcome the newcomers. These white settlers have come to establish a colony, tilling the land, whaling, creating structure and rules. For Bobby the dance is all about life and working together. But not everyone embraces the new world order.

‘That Deadman Dance’, by Noongar (West Australian Aboriginal) novelist Kim Scott, centres on first contact between British invaders and Noongar people. With a lithely shifting point of view and a playful, optimistic lyricism, Scott challenges the myth that settler brutality towards Australia’s first inhabitants was historically inevitable; ‘just the way things were’. Meticulously researched, the novel brings alive the moment when a choice for respect and collaboration was entirely possible – and devastatingly rejected. Scott is truly one of our best.

In 1998 a seemingly ordinary Australian man is charged with a series of brutal murders. These overlapping short stories are all linked to the serial killer and author Fiona McFarlane’s Joe Biga is clearly inspired by real life backpacker murderer Ivan Milat. But while this horrific crime is the starting point for her atmospheric, thought-provoking stories, it is the aftermath of the act that the author explores, the impact on individuals, those directly involved and others.

How to write about a notorious serial killer without a flicker of sensationalism or banality? Impossible – and yet Fiona McFarlane does it with ‘Highway 13’, a commanding collection of stories exploring the heartbreaking aftermath of an infamous series of murders. One of Australia’s most talented writers whose work yet strangely flies under the radar, McFarlane here steps aside from horror to follow the ripple effect of violence across decades, countries, communities, individuals. Her prose dazzles with authority and complexity.