Judges for the $60,000 Miles Franklin award have unveiled a shortlist of five novels in line for Australia's most significant literary prize.

'On Tyranny' is not alarmist. The decline of democracy is unfolding around us.

June 18: Join political journalist Karen Middleton at 2pm for conversation and afternoon tea in the Conference Room, Level 4, National Library of Australia. In association with the Australian Women's Archive Project.$15. 

Every word matters in this supreme example of the writer's craft, says judge.

The latest winner of the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript award hopes to follow in the footsteps of his successful predecessors.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

Hungarian-born author is inspired by the simple wisdom of Paulo Coelho's The Alcehmist.

In the post-literate world of the Oval Office, language is the new chew toy.

• BOOKS

There's nothing unlucky about the 13th Lincoln Rhyme novel.

Tracy Chvalier's Othello is set in a Washington DC school in the mid-1970s: Othello is a Ghanaian boy called Osei; Desdemona becomes Dee, who dares befriend him; and Ian is the bully who seeks to destroy their love.

Japan's attack on Pearl Harbour, John Curtin's "call to America", and the fall of Singapore finally convinced us that as well as needing to maintain allies, we should be engaging with Asia.

• Review

Wildly divergent plots and grand vision in a celebration of resilience and recovery.

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

• Crime fiction

Quite unlike anything Dennis Lehane has written before - a psychological thriller with a female protagonist.

• Turning Pages

Australians are still reading, and defying predictions of doom for the printed word.

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.

• Review

In a moving memoir about his parents, Richard Ford reveals death surrendered back almost as much as it took away.

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

• Review

Compelling, well-researched and finely written book on the Sydney underworld from 1966 to 1972. Good times to be a crim, apparently.

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