When Charles Dickens was offered 10,000 pounds by some colonial admirers to give a series of readings in Australia a few years before his death, Dickens declined: the journey was long and the seas vast.

Simon Leys was a noted sinologist and writer who remains most famous for the zeal and lucidity with which he tried to demystify and destroy the cult of Mao Zedong.

"I'm ready for it and I think most people are ready for it and I really don't see what the fuss is about - this is about looking at the facts of things and confronting them, as we have always done."

• Wordplay

More than ever, race is the new gelignite of language, a rewired taboo to supplant the defused f-bomb. Ounce for ounce, in terms of hurt, vulgarity has morphed into allusions to identity.

Kamila Shamsie's most recent novel Fire is a reimagining of a classical Greek myth but is bang up to date.

The Years, Months, Days is some kind of parable and has the familiar manner of a story told to the folk in a style that is archetypal in its simplicity and all-embracing in its application.

While there has been a renewed concentration of power in Russia, the country is nowhere near as oppressive as North Korea.

The Librarian of Auschwitz and The Tattooist of Auschwitz are works that re-establish the bond between compassion and truth.

If Rolling Stone magazine Jann Wenner had only one great idea it was the notion that the Sixties "for all its passion and idealism was at its scared core a business".

The influence of the self-help book is pervasive and universal.

Roy and Celestial's marriage is derailed when he is jailed for a crime he didn't commit.

In this novel Anne Holt's two lead characters investigate three crimes 14 years apart, an old murder case and two current cases of suicide and kidnapping respectively.

Sarah Krasnostein has won the $100,000 Victorian Prize for Literature for her remarkable book, The Trauma Cleaner.

This is essentially a story about human feeling and its capacity to trump tribalism and enforced, artificial enmity.

Samantha Silva has a lot of fun with A Christmas Carol and with the facts of Charles Dickens' life.

This meticulous biography explores the complexities of Stuart Challender's character and pays tribute to his unique contribution to musical life in Australia.

Rogue Nation examines the range of alternatives that have sprung up like mushrooms on the mulch of disenchantment with mainstream politics.

This collection of stories about the love affairs of great composers shows that their private lives could be as soap operatic as their compositions.

The brain, we are told, craves stimulation but it also craves emptiness, possibly to rest our defence system.

Rose McGowan has suffered some hard knocks, from a cult to homelessness to repeated abuse. The actress, director and musician, who has become a vocal women's rights advocate, opens up about her trauma in her memoir "Brave," which comes out Tuesday.

• Wordplay

Words continue to delight, puzzle, perplex and surprise us all.

Literary news and events in Canberra.

Nora Roberts leads the Sci-Fi bestsellers chart with Year One.

Dan Sheehan's novel about male friendship flits between comic buddy narrative and brutal trauma.