The deadline for this review was 15 August, India’s Independence Day, freedom at midnight in 1947 for India and Pakistan (whose independence is celebrated on 14 August). The British euphemistically called it a ‘transfer of power’. The subsequent division was termed Partition, an anodyne definition of the act of severing. Centuries of surrender and snatching of the Koh-i-Noor saw many transfers of power. Graphic descriptions of torture and murder in this absorbing and timely book are an early mirror for the bloodshed and horror of Partition.

When Svetlana Alexievich won the Nobel Prize in 2015, the response in the Anglophone world was general bewilderment. Who was she? The response in Russia was the opposite: intense, personal, targeted. Alexievich wasn’t a real writer, detractors said; she had only won the Nobel because the West loves critics of Putin.

Alexievich is kind of a journalist, kind of a social historian. What makes her work different, and important, is that she collects the voices of real people, collates them, and redistributes them, without imposing narrative or explanation. Even biographical information is scant. There is enough to give the speaker authority, but not enough to construe character or personality.

Watching Out belongs to a rare class of book. Written by a lawyer, concerned largely with law, and touching upon such legal esoterica as interim injunctions, it defies all odds in still being eminently accessible to a lay audience. It has, predictably, set off a frisson of excitement in legal Australia, where each new Burnside title is eagerly received and much discussed. Yet even strangers to the law will find it an edifying, rewarding examination of what it means to secure justice.

Like Burnside’s Watching Brief (2008), Watching Out is ambitious in scope. Its avowed aim is ‘to explore the reasons we have a legal system at all, to look at the way it operates in practice, and to point out some ways in which its operation does (or does not) run true to its ultimate purposes’. This grand design is made grander still by Burnside’s wide-ranging method: much of the book is devoted to traversing a diverse range of case studies, from petrol-price-fixing investigations to the landmark stolen-generation case of Bruce Trevorrow. Yet for all the risks involved in such an approach, Burnside succeeds in keeping his overarching theme in focus, and in building to a sophisticated assessment of the limitations of the legal system.

Thea Astley had a way with words. Her novels are studded with arresting metaphors, atrocious puns, hilarious one-liners, arcane words, technical terms from music, geometry and logic, religious and literary allusions. Her verbal pyrotechnics can be dazzling and infuriating, in equal measure: as Helen Garner once wrote, it is a style that can drive you crazy. So it’s no surprise to learn that Astley served her writerly apprenticeship in poetry, in the arts of verbal play and condensation of meaning.

As a young woman she wrote a good deal of poetry, some of it appearing in school and university magazines, and in newspapers, but much of it never published. In this intriguing volume, editor Cheryl Taylor has selected 116 poems, representing about half the extant range to be found in the Astley archives. The earliest was published in the Courier-Mail when she was eight years old, the latest while she was teaching at Macquarie University in the 1970s.