Set against the milieu of India’s recent emancipation from British rule and the indelible scars left by the country’s 1947 partition with Pakistan, Black British subverts the classic migrant tale. Instead of detailing a middling family uprooting their lives in search of economic opportunities on foreign shores, it features an affluent Goan family at its centre. They are looking to leave India because their wealth, language, and British-led traditions have grown incongruous with that of the larger population. This sense of privilege is acknowledged throughout the novel, with occasionally heavy-handed passages dedicated to contextualising the discrepancy between the Indians consigned to occupy the lower strata of society and the ‘black British’ with vestiges of the colonial rulers stamped on their beliefs and values system.

The cover of Sean Rabin’s first novel, Wood Green, depicts a foggy eucalypt forest at dawn (or dusk), and a ghostly figure in the glow of torchlight. With the added element of the story’s setting – a secluded town nestled in the shadows of Mount Wellington, Tasmania – one could be forgiven for assuming that Wood Green is ‘yet another bush gothic’, instead of a modern and humorous discourse on small town life and writing itself.

Michael Pollard, a thirty-something academic from Sydney, arrives in Wood Green to work as secretary to the ageing, reclusive author Lucian Clarke, the subject of his PhD thesis. Their affiliation is interspersed with frequent pot-smoking sessions, musical and culinary interludes, and ponderings on writerly life, but is often strained by the demands of the cantankerous Lucian, who gives Michael the task of sorting through a lifetime of notes and books, whilst concealing a hidden agenda.

On the Blue Train is Kristel Thornell’s reimagining of Agatha Christie’s mysterious disappearance in 1926. Thornell might have let her imagination fly, given that both Dorothy L. Sayers and Arthur Conan Doyle involved themselves in the nationwide search for the missing woman, but instead she has stuck close to the established facts: Agatha was grieving over her beloved mother’s recent death when her husband Archibald asked for a divorce; there was a fracas; Agatha’s car was found abandoned; she vanished and was discovered ten days later, using the surname of Archibald’s lover, at a spa hotel in Harrogate.

Edward sits on Sydney Harbour Bridge, considering jumping. It is 1948, and he has written several times to George VI about building a new naval base in the waters below, and not hearing back, begun to build it himself. Edward was manic depressive, suffering from what is now called bipolar disorder. Greg de Moore and Ann Westmore begin their book Finding Sanity: John Cade, lithium and the taming of bipolar disorder with Edward; they end it with the patient upon whom lithium was pioneered in the early 1950s, Bill Brand. Where Edward came down from the bridge and returned to the peaks and troughs of bipolar life, Bill entered a tortuous triangle of treatment and suffering with the Australian psychiatrist John Cade and that soft, white, lightest of metals, lithium, before finally dying of lithium poisoning.

Finding Sanity, the story of the discovery of lithium as a treatment for bipolar, is told with mild triumphalism, despite lithium’s sometimes crooked path. It takes the form of a biography of its discoverer, John Cade, an Australian doctor. The narrative of discovery becomes something still more profound: Cade, argue his biographers, revolutionised twentieth-century psychiatry by supposing a physiological basis for a mental illness and identifying an element that would treat it.