In his conclusion to this book, Kevin Brophy states a key principle of creative composition: ‘to be responsive to what happens, what is thrown into the mind, what one comes upon.’ This is at once a statement of advice for an artist at work, and a theoretical proposition.

Through the course of the ten essays that make up the volume, Brophy develops a hypothesis about the kinds of brain function involved in creativity and, in particular, the role of consciousness in relation to other mental and sensory forms of intelligence. Without drawing the terms ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ into play – a great relief to those of us who have grown weary of that inevitable binary – he suggests that the work of an artist or writer may be facilitated by an exploratory interest in the operations of consciousness.

In August 1998 former ABC journalist Mary Delahunty won the by-election for the Victorian seat of Northcote. One year later, after Steve Bracks audaciously nabbed the premier’s crown from an unsuspecting Jeff Kennett, Delahunty found herself in charge of the education and arts portfolios. Her learning curve was steep. ‘If the chook shed was for parliamentary incubation then the dungeon provided sparse and smelly cells for the discipline of ministerial office,’ she writes in her new book, Public Life, Private Grief.

Three years after the Bracks government’s ascension, Delahunty’s husband of twenty-two years, former television executive Jock Rankin, died of cancer. In the months that followed, Delahunty juggled public office with the private role of rearing her two teenage children. Over time, the stress of managing their grief and her own took its toll; in 2005 Delahunty was diagnosed with depression.

It is an indication of the former education, planning and arts minister’s rekindled spirit that in 2010 she is ready to tell her story. Public Life, Private Grief is not a political memoir, although parliamentary anecdotes often feature. Delahunty also shines light on some of her eyebrow-raising public gaffes, ones which, at the time, left journalists, parliamentary colleagues and the public wondering whether this celebrity recruit was up to the task of managing various portfolios. With candour and eloquence, Delahunty relates a family’s story of dashed dreams, trauma, loss and emotional recovery.

Making News is Tony Wilson’s second novel for adults. It is a romp over the fertile ground of tabloid media, celebrity sports stars and family crisis. Lucas Dekker is the bookish teenage son of Charlie Dekker, a high-profile Australian soccer star who has just retired from the English Premier League. Lucas’s mother, Monica, has graduated from footballer’s wife to bestselling self-help writer, comfortably eclipsing her husband’s earning power in the process. When Lucas wins a young writer’s prize to become a columnist for tabloid daily The Globe, it seems as though he might follow in his mother’s literary footsteps.

But this family is unhappy in its own way. When Charlie is caught in a sleazy sex scandal with two call girls, it emerges that the incriminating footage was the work of a tabloid sting, by the very same tabloid that Lucas is now writing for. The set-up allows Wilson plenty of scope to wallow in the bathos of the British press. He enjoys himself immensely at the expense of football, celebrity and media figures, from Frank Lampard to Cory Hart.

We are in familiar stylistic territory here, somewhere between Hanif Kureishi’s Buddha of Suburbia (1990) and Steve Toltz’s recent A Fraction of the Whole (2008). However, while Wilson’s plot is bold and energetic, his prose lacks the sparkle or polish of Toltz’s book. Lucas is a sympathetic character, but his parents are two-dimensional, and it becomes in-creasingly difficult to stay engaged with the Dekker family as the book winds its way towards its climax. It may be unfair to compare Making News to a book as different as David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green (2006), but Mitchell’s beautifully drawn coming-of-age study shows the depth that can be rendered by a more patient and deliberate novelist.

Even so, I thoroughly enjoyed Making News. Like many a successful footballer, Wilson makes up for a lack of superlative talent with energy, commitment and brio. He can also be very funny.

The two narrators in this intense novel are the same person at different ages: the child of eight years who struggles against sibling displacement; and his twenty-eight-year-old self, scarred by his early years and obsessively revisiting them. The narrative documents these two periods of emotional turmoil in the unnamed protagonist’s alternating monologues. This anonymity may signify a lack of a more integrated self, and will not be a problem for the reader. As reviewer, I will simply use personal pronouns when referring to him.

This is no ordinary sibling rivalry; Robert, the boy his mother dotes on and cares for, is a foster child, the latest in a sequence of boys she looks after in her own home. But Robert is unlike the other boys: he is quiet and well-behaved, his needfulness deep but not neurotic. That particular condition is the narrator’s, a small boy who has always felt second-best in his own family. His great attachment is to his father, a tolerant and compassionate man, a bit of a character who enjoys the colourful phrase. Cleverly, the father is passively quoted by the son, whereas the mother is given active dialogue, increasing the sense of conflict he feels with her. The son is tormented by the withdrawal of his mother’s love, and the adult he becomes compulsively revisits this anguish. If this makes the novel sound like an obsessively closed circle, that’s because it is.