‘I wanted to give a sense of the people of the book, the different hands that had made it, used it, protected it. I wanted it to be a gripping narrative, even suspenseful.’ So says Hanna Heath, protagonist of Geraldine Brooks’s latest novel, about her search through time and place for the history of ‘the Sarajevo Haggadah’, the ‘Book’ of the title. She is accustomed to writing scholarly essays that derive from her function as a rare books conservator, full of ‘riveting stuff like how many quires there are and how many leaves per quire… and so on’. She wants this one to be different.

Hanna’s search for the exact provenance of the Haggadah takes her from her home in Sydney, in 1996, to war-ravaged Sarajevo, and thence, having sighted the manuscript, which is ‘small … convenient for use at the Passover dinner table’, to Vienna to see her old mentor Werner Heinrich. She then travels to Boston where, by chance, her mother is also lecturing; then to London, back to Sarajevo; to Sydney via Arnhem Land; and then back to Sarajevo again. The peripatetic requirements of her esoteric profession are tracked through alternating chapters of the novel, which eventually bring her up to 2002.

While Hanna is engaged in travelling halfway round the world in pursuit of her intellectual goals, the alternate chapters chronicle the history of the precious book in reverse chronology. An expert in ancient manuscripts, Serif, and other Jews, including Lola who has lost all her family to the Nazis, join the partisans during World War II, having contrived to save ‘one of the museum’s greatest treasures’, the Haggadah. In successively interleaved chapters, the book’s ownership is traced to Vienna, rife with anti-Semitism in 1894; then to Venice, 1609, where a wealthy Jewess passes the book to a rabbi with a dangerous gambling compulsion and an uneasy friendship with a Catholic priest; to Tarragena, Spain, 1492, when a Jewish diaspora begins; and to Seville, 1480, where Muslim, Catholic and Jewish imprints make themselves felt on the book’s biography. As Hanna comments on this reverse history, we are invited to see the Haggadah at times when it ‘was still just some family’s book, a thing to be used, before it became an exhibit’.

Shakespeare the Thinker is the final and posthumously published book of the Oxford critic A.D. Nuttall, who died unexpectedly in January 2007. Pitched at a wider readership than most of his earlier writings, the book is the culmination of Nuttall’s lifetime thinking about Shakespeare, and the work by which his remarkable originality as a critic will no doubt be most widely recognised.

When G.B. Barton presented his two works concerning the literary history of New South Wales to the Paris Exhibition of 1866, he hoped that they would enable readers ‘to form an exact idea of the progress, extent and prospects of literary enterprise among us’. The words are succinct, unobjectionable, and their sentiments influenced much of the literary history of the next century, much as the productions of that time were usually annals rather than analysis. Barton’s civic-minded project linked the maturing of Australian literature with its political culture. Implicit in his endeavour, though numerous others would use the metaphor outright, was the notion of ‘coming-of-age’. This chimera had as long a life as the search for the Great Australian Novel.