Histories of classical music of whatever epoch – medieval, baroque, twentieth-century – tend to be written by university professors writing for a university readership. That being the case, they are issued by academic textbook publishers and are unlikely to pop up in your local bookstore. Chances are they won’t appear on best-seller and ‘pick of the critics’ lists.

The Spare Room marks Helen Garner’s return to fiction after a long interval. Since Cosmo Cosmolino (1992), she has concentrated on non-fiction and journalism: newspaper columns and feature articles. She has speculated in public about her distance from fiction, while giving us The First Stone (1995) – an account of an incident at a Melbourne university and its bizarre aftermath – and the lancing, forensic Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2004).

Why this new work is presented as fiction is not immediately obvious. Read as a long essay in a magazine, it would be convincing, perhaps more so than this novella. The subject, the sensibility, are very familiar by now. The narrator’s name is Helen (‘Hel’ to her friends); she is a writer and a journalist, in her mid-sixties; she lives in an inner suburb of Melbourne and rides a bicycle; she has a friend called Rosalba in Newcastle; her daughter lives next door; a ukulele is always at the ready; her marriages she describes as ‘train wrecks’.

The Good Parents, Joan London’s second novel, begins with the seduction and disappearance of Maya de Jong, an eighteen-year-old who has recently moved to Melbourne from a small Western Australian town. Maya’s worried parents, Jacob and Toni, travel to Melbourne, set themselves up in her Richmond share house, and begin to search for clues to explain her absence. We know that Maya’s affair with her middle-aged boss, Maynard Flynn, began when his wife was dying of cancer; what is less evident is Maya’s true motivation. She is detached: her observations and insights into the relationship are delivered from a million miles away. She accepts his petulance, his condescension and his lechery, comforting herself with well-worn adolescent sentiments. She wonders if she will ‘ever be able to have a “normal” relationship’ and if ‘secrets and rules were part of its kick’; she wishes they could ‘spend a whole night together’; but she also cringes with self-consciousness and vulnerability at the thought of herself, ‘on that mattress, like a creature without a shell’. Her fluctuating emotions and misguided romanticism allow Maynard to whisk her away to a dingy hotel in another city, where she languishes without telling anyone where she is.

One of the intriguing things about Breath, Tim Winton’s first novel in seven years, is that it has a number of affinities with his very first book, An Open Swimmer (1982). Both are coming-of-age novels that attempt to capture some of the confusion and melancholy of youth. Both feature boyhood friendships which the characters outgrow. In both, the main protagonist, whose parents are emotionally distant, is drawn to a mystically inclined father-figure. And both novels have scenes in which an older woman makes sexual advances toward the young hero, with threatening overtones, although An Open Swimmer is coy on this point.

There are also, as you would expect, significant differences between Winton’s precocious but rough-hewn début and the mature, polished work that is Breath. In An Open Swimmer, Jerra Nilsam and his friend Sean are facing the choices and responsibilities of early adulthood; the narrator of Breath, Bruce ‘Pikelet’ Pike and his mate Loonie are in their mid-teens. The father-figure is not a grizzled hermit who smokes pages from his Bible, but a former professional surfer named Sando, who instructs the boys on the finer points of his sport and is given to lecturing them about its deeper meaning.