Some stories are very familiar to us, as a society, stories whose ugly truths we seem to have accepted, may even have, belatedly, apologised for, but the story of Joy Janaka Wiradjuri Williams, as told by Peter Read, reveals how much White Australia still has to learn about the complexity of our national past and the tragedy of its continuing legacy. Eileen Williams, three weeks after her birth in 1943, was sent to the United Aborigines Mission Home at Bomaderry, where she was renamed Joy. She grew up in state institutions and was later incarcerated in psychiatric hospitals, spending many years struggling with alcohol and drugs. As a young woman she had a baby taken from her, a repetition of the trauma inflicted on her mother and her grandmother. Joy, a poet and activist, mounted a long and unsuccessful lawsuit against the New South Wales state government. She died of cancer, alone, in 2006.

These biographical facts, sociologically common and personally catastrophic, are summarised in the introduction to Tripping over Feathers. The body of Read’s text then tells Joy’s story by imaginatively reconstructing key scenes in her life, working backwards chronologically from her funeral to the revelation of her unmarried mother’s pregnancy.

Read’s approach is refreshing. In the preface to Eminent Victorians, Lytton Strachey decried the tradition of the Standard Biography, ‘two fat volumes ... of undigested masses of material’. Yet many contemporary biographers continue to value detail above insight. Read’s use of specific scenes in place of a seamless narrative mirrors the process of individual self-construction, in which memory cordons off pivotal moments from the ceaseless stream of life. Stylistically, Tripping over Feathers echoes the shift from heavy nineteenth-century naturalism to the vivid succinctness of an impressionistic landscape.

In working backwards, Read says his intent was to give an immediate sense of ‘this difficult, traumatised, sad, funny, intelligent and loving personality’. He succeeds. The reader has the impression of being taken on an archaeological journey, progressively unearthing the layers of abuse and injustice that shaped a woman who feared at the end that if she started crying she would ‘never stop’.

A suitable motto for any prospective compiler of a large-scale history of a national literature might be ‘No Place for a Nervous Editor’ (to adapt the title of Lucy Frost’s study of nineteenth-century women’s journals). A few of the portentous questions for this imagined figure include: how is ‘literature’ to be conceptualised at the beginning of the twenty-first century (witness the Balkan culture war that followed the publication of the estimably inclusive Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature, 2009); how to balance the different needs and competencies of readers – students at tertiary and secondary level, academic specialists from various disciplines, a diverse non-Australian audience; how to choose contributors who combine scholarly authority with an ability to write jargon-free language for a diverse readership; how to construct a book that will satisfy both the searcher for information about a particular book or topic and the (probably rare) reader who wants to proceed from cover to cover?

Peter Pierce is to be congratulated on finding satisfactory answers to all of these questions. The Cambridge History is indeed a new kind of history of Australian literature, concerned as much with discussing specific books and periods as with placing its various subjects within appropriate cultural, political, and theoretical contexts. Pierce quotes Harry Heseltine’s witticism about Laurie Hergenhan’s Penguin New Literary History of Australia (1988) – ‘it was hard to see the trees for the wood’. His own volume is a commendable balancing act between the conceptual and the specific; the author-study and the cultural taxonomy.

The History has a thoughtful quadripartite structure, which invites the reader to move backwards and forwards between contributions. The first two sections (comprising half of the twenty-four chapters) are concerned with colonial literature and ideas of literature, and with developments from Federation to 1950. The fourth section explores writing and cultural history from 1950 to ‘nearly now’. A reader of, say, Dennis Haskell’s thought-provoking essay on post-1950 Australian poetry might well be drawn back to Peter Kirkpatrick’s examination of poetry and popular culture from 1890 to 1950, and from there to Vivian Smith’s well-informed but rather more conventional essay on colonial poetry, in the first section. This is a journey that might well be taken in the other direction, of course.

This highly ambitious first novel exists within a fine web of literary influences and allusions. The publisher invites comparisons to The Secret History, Donna Tartt’s novel set in a university Classics department. The novel’s narrator, Julia, a student enthralled by the glamorous, moneyed family of a classmate, echoes that of Brideshead Revisited. Self-conscious references to detective noir and nineteenth-century romance novels abound. All of these comparisons have some merit, but another takes precedence, not only flavouring the text, but providing a skeleton for the characters and plot.

First and foremost, The Legacy is a contemporary update of Henry James’s masterpiece The Portrait of a Lady, with the action shifting from a Europe beset by travelling Americans, to Sydney and New York. In a thoroughly contemporary twist, its unhappily married heroine disappears from the World Trade Centre site on 9/11.

Bright, beautiful Ingrid, informally adopted by her wealthy aunt after her mother’s death, is transplanted from distant Perth to Sydney. There, she is worshipped by her new family, particularly her doting uncle George and besotted invalid cousin, Ralph – who secretly convinces his ailing father to leave her a fortune. ‘With this inheritance, [George] really had bought a role for himself as the executive producer of whatever she chose to do next.’ And Ralph is ‘instrumental in achieving it’. What she chooses, to the disquiet of all onlookers, is to marry Gilbert Grey, a man of exquisite taste but no warmth or compassion, whose lack of affection for her she misconstrues as admirable restraint. The match is carefully engineered by a family friend, Maeve, who is strangely close to both Gil and his daughter, Fleur, a child prodigy painter. (‘It was just as though Maeve had handed Grey a gift.’)

A purveyor of second-hand literature-cum-reluctant sleuth is an attractive proposition. We first met Jack Susko in Lenny Bartulin’s first novel, A Deadly Business (2008). Susko, a one-time employee of the notorious Ziggy Brandt, had finally established a legitimate (albeit struggling) business, Susko Books. Rarely troubled by customers, Susko was entertained by the music of Miles Davis and Muddy Waters, and alcohol.

One day, tempted by an easy buck, Susko began hunting for the works of an award-winning poet and was soon dragged into a puzzling family saga, with the usual suspects: jealous husbands, disinherited siblings, unfaithful spouses, vengeful children. Toss in a crooked detective and a couple of murders, and Susko wished he had never opened the shop that morning.

Bartulin’s narrative, though compelling, is nothing like the genre fiction of, say, Peter Temple, who tackles so exceptionally well larger issues such as police and political corruption, indigenous politics, and the overdevelopment of coastal regions. There is not much lyricism in Bartulin’s prose, either, though he is a published poet. In fact, with all the hard-boiled tough-talking (imitative of Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain), you begin to wonder if Bartulin’s bent is more towards parody. Outside the milieux of the police force and the private detective bureau, this vernacular at times reads hilariously – Susko, in the new novel, is ‘sweating like a drycleaner at the steam press during Business Shirt Week’.

While there isn’t much self-awareness to this prose, there is something absorbing about The Black Russian, as there was, to a greater extent, to A Deadly Business. Part of this magnetism lies in the portrayal of Susko, a clueless and susceptible hero who somehow manages to be charismatic.