The latest winner of the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript award hopes to follow in the footsteps of his successful predecessors.

It doesn't take much to provoke US President Donald Trump into blocking a follower on Twitter - anything from an insult to an unflattering gif to a mild "covfefe" joke seems enough to do the trick.

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is a novel of aftermath and of the reparative and connective tissue of the loyalty, love and kindness that abut torture, betrayal and despair.

The Cows is clever, lively and accessible, mostly a romp, but it addresses the lives of contemporary women.

It's the counter-intuitive findings that make Sam Walker's The Captain Class so fascinating and insightful.

Divided We Stand is the account of the struggle between left and right over women's rights and family values in the US that still rages today.

Cassandra Wigheard of the US Army, not quite yet out of her teens, is fighting in Iraq in 2003. When she and two fellow soldiers find themselves under fire, all three are taken prisoner.

James Runcie's hero, Sidney Chambers, combines his priestly status with a gift for amateur detection to become a kind of latter-day Father Brown.

For all the daily cruelties she was subject to, Maude Julien's memoir of life with her dictatorial father is never self-pitying.

The letters between Wayne Flynt and Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, show she was warm, chatty and self-deprecating.

This debut novel by a writer not yet out of her 20s is a brave attempt to come to grips with an intractable state.

Steve Toltz was a child when he first started writing funny stories.

Literary news and events in Canberra

John Grisham collects first editions of great books and that hobby is at the core of his new novel.

The importance of a good metaphor should never be underestimated.

John Kinsella is one of the finest and most versatile of Australian authors – poet, editor, critic, author of fiction besides being a principled champion of ecological causes

Graham Greene's classic novella, The Third Man, motivated Roland Perry to become an author.

• Review

Marija Pericic won the Vogel Award for her debut novel on the crucial friendship between Max Brod and and the doomed Franz Kafka.

• Biography

Ned Kelly's mother was not a woman who meekly submitted to the expectations and demands of respectable folk.

The great distinction of the American writer's work is that it is both truthful and confected.

As human beings, some writers disappoint us. In extreme cases, they disgust and horrify us, to the point where we can barely bring ourselves to read their books.

The story of the shipwrecked James Morrill is one of survival and sanctuary with the Aboriginal people of far north Queensland.

• Review

Kim Stanley Robinson's novel is a slow-burn political thriller that reads like a futuristic version of 19th-century realism.

In Dominic Smith's reimagining of 19th-century bohemian Paris, Louis Daguerre is obsessed with capturing 10 images before he dies.