Why do you write?

To work out what I think, which requires digging through the received ideas and lazy generalisations that clutter the surface of my mind, and crafting the language to describe what I’ve found. I also have a strong desire to communicate certain things.

Are you a vivid dreamer?

Yes, I have vivid dreams full of ridiculously obvious symbolism.

Where are you happiest?

In my studio.

What is your favourite film?

There’s no single film I could claim as favourite – among the films I’ve loved are The Royal Tenenbaums, Lost in Translation, Beetlejuice, Birdman, Blue Velvet, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Apocalypse Now, Doctor Strangelove, and All About Eve.

This book is likely to anger many readers. Saltwater is about Cathy McLennan’s time as a barrister for the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Service on Palm Island and in Townsville in the 1990s. Aged twenty-two and faced with a heavy workload, she was confronted with heartbreaking cases of violence, trauma, and neglect. Other lawyers in the office came and went, but the Aboriginal field officers remained constant. Throughout, there are reminders that Palm Island is a beautiful place with forests and crystalline water, despite its being referred to as ‘the most violent place on earth outside a war zone’.

McLennan focuses on the murder of a white man named Peter Lewis that occurred on Palm Island. She introduces the reader to the four young Indigenous people accused of the crime: Albert, eighteen, possibly brain-damaged; Dillon, seventeen; Malachi, sixteen, described as having a ‘snake-eye look’; and the youngest boy, Kevie, thirteen. The mother of Malachi and aunt of Dillon is Tanya Butler, a tragic figure violently abused and assaulted by her white husband, who also abused his three sons from the time they were babies. He is in prison for domestic violence. We follow their fates over the course of the book, and learn how difficult Tanya’s life is, holding on to the hope that her youngest son won’t go the way of his two brothers.

For more than half a century, Richie Benaud (1930–2015) graced the game of cricket around the world. A dashing batsman and fierce leg-spinner, Benaud was the first player to score 2,000 runs and take 200 wickets in Test cricket. As Australian captain, he never lost a series and championed an attractive, attacking brand of cricket. As a television commentator for Channel Nine in Australia and Channel Four in England, Benaud became the gold standard for insight, economy, and dry wit. Throughout a long career, he was stylish, charming, and profoundly influential.

In Benaud: An appreciation, Brian Matthews – an award-winning writer and literary scholar – eschews conventional biography and embarks on a trickier endeavour: a celebration. The book is composed of a series of cameos – key moments in Benaud’s career – intermingled with the author’s personal reflections and with extensive quotations from cricketers and journalists. The result is a pleasant, if idiosyncratic, book that is perhaps best enjoyed on a summer afternoon, or a few chapters at a time during lunch or tea breaks.

One of the highlights of the book is Matthews’s account of the Tied Test between Australia and the West Indies in 1960. In the lead-up to this series, Test cricket was in trouble. Attendances had dwindled as a result of stodgy batting, slow over rates, and negative captaincy.

Catherine de Saint Phalle’s memoir brings us the developing consciousness of a star-struck but lonely child as she struggles to understand and negotiate parents who appear to her mythic, godlike. There is her Spanish-born mother, Marie-Antoinette or Poum, whose main occupation seems to be reeling off The Odyssey and whose sudden appearances and disappearances are ‘like the goddess Minerva’s’, and her father, Alexandre, who sweeps Catherine along on glamorous excursions and regales her with stories – here Napoleon or Caesar, there his childhood dog, Touts – before unceremoniously disappearing for days on end. Catherine is captivated as much by Poum’s whimsical moods, fears, and obsession with death as by Alexandre’s grandiose tales, but as parents they scarcely appear to see her as a child who needs their care.