Boxes of books are popping up on front lawns, in parks and on streets all over Australia. They're getting communities reading, fostering friendships and even sparking romances.

What's on in the Canberra literary scene, June 24, 2017

Grace Helbig is an internet superstar. She is a doyenne of YouTube, host of a celebrity interview podcast, star of a superhero web series, author of two lifestyle guidebooks and – in one obscure corner of the web – protagonist of pages upon pages of fan-written stories that recast her persona into seemingly endless fictional scenarios.

Lily Woodhouse was astonished by Coonardoo when she read first Katherine Susannah Pritchard's novel.

Pre-war dictionaries lodged data between dastard and date. Their follow-up volumes have conceded whole pages to the plague, listing databanks and data havens, data files and market data.

• Books

Gabrielle Williams' fifth novel, "My Life as a Hashtag", serves a cautionary tale, bringing to light the darker aspects of social media.

• Interview

The turnback of the Tampa marked a sea change in national politics and inspired the writer's new work of fiction.

A tapestry designed and made with the help of 200 refugees tells a different tale to the one we hear.

Ben Hobson throws his hero, 13-year-old Sam, into the nightmarish world of a whaling station where at his father's bidding he has to learn to become a man.

Two books consider issues of being a Catholic today, spirituality, and what that entails.

Neuroscientist Joseph Jebelli has devoted himself to unravelling the mysteries of Alzheimer's disease since his grandfather succumbed to it.

The Barrier uses action-packed, tech-savvy speculative fiction to examine intractable problems from the world today.

Cold Vein is a frank, detailed account of how Chloe, Anne Tonner and her husband fought for their daughter's life.

Kelly Chandler's The Other Mother, and Chloe Shorten's Take Heart are both about the trials and tribulations of being a step-parent – albeit from very different perspectives.

According to Kate Cole-Adams, anaesthesia is as much a mystery to the specialists who pump in the drugs as it is to philosophers and thinkers.

A Forger's Tale is an excellent introduction to the seething underworld of the art trade. What's more, its publication was championed by one of the author's better-known victims.

Laura Barnett's latest novel offers romance as retrospective. It has enough emotional heft to draw her many fans in.

This Trumpian version of Gulliver's Travels has lashings of ridicule and scorn, it just doesn't get the complex politics behind Trump's rise.

See You in September is a creepy portrayal of an ordinary young woman, feeling the lure of total belonging.

• Turning Pages

The Clumber Bible, a monster medieval tome circa 1395, weighs 23 kilograms.

On her birthday, Manal al-Sharif posted a YouTube video of her in the radical act of driving a car. It was a hit and got her arrested. This is her story.

Haruki Murakami provides access to what is unique and what is universal about Japan.

The women in The Husband Hunters had money, but they also had an attractive flirtatiousness, assertiveness and confidence that their European counterparts didn't.

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