This novel is classified YA by the publisher, with a recommended reading age of 16+, which is a useful guide when trying to work out its intended readership. It’s narrated by adolescents but not simplified, and the reader must navigate this futuristic, dystopian, somewhat magical-realist and highly metaphorical book with care. Summer and Winter are identical twins, which is in itself a puzzle of logic, and they are the survivors of an apocalyptic global event in which their father played a key part. They live in solitude, consuming their rapidly dwindling store of supplies and living from day to day until the arrival of a mysterious stranger who changes everything. Davina Bell uses the increasingly familiar post-apocalyptic scenario to explore ideas about families, sisters, identity and love. It’s a strange but impressive novel that should resonate with young adult readers.

The Question of Love
Hugh Mackay, Macmillan, $32.99

Richard the architect, now 54, and Freya the professional musician, now 39, have been happily married for 12 years. They have accrued a substantial history as a couple, but this novel uses the account of a single evening in their married life as a way of exploring their back-stories and the things in their marriage that remain unsaid. Psychologist and public intellectual Hugh Mackay has been publishing fiction since 1996 and this is his eighth novel, in which he uses the musical idea of ‘‘variations on a theme’’ to explore a single scene from this marriage again and again, each time with a new level of depth and complexity. It’s an intriguing way to structure a narrative and, while it sounds rather gimmicky, it actually works very well, as more and more back-story and nuance fill in the gaps and silences, bit by bit.

Dreams They Forgot
Emma Ashmere, Wakefield Press, $24.95

The stories in this strong and varied collection range across urban and rural Australia and beyond, to such touchstones of Australian travel as Bali and London, and to more exotic settings such as Borneo and regional France. Emma Ashmere’s stories are often impressionistic, never laboriously chewing on their material and trusting the intelligence of the reader to join the dots and grasp the underlying feeling. There are some excellent stories about family life, especially those told from the point of view of a semi-comprehending and bemused child or adolescent. But Ashmere’s greatest strength is in her stories of the historical past, especially in Australia. These stories acknowledge the limits of what is knowable to contemporary readers, evoking instead the unrecoverable strangeness and mystery of the past.