Best of books: Melbourne grunge, small-town war heroes, and the lives of politicians

You can find all the books we've reviewed this week below. And I welcome your thoughts and feedback on what we've been reading. You can reach me by email at sally.pryor@canberratimes.com.au.

They may be a dime a dozen, but political biographies can actually have an awesome kind of power. No one knows this better than Chris Wallace, who, back in 2011, started and then stopped writing a biography of then-prime minister Julia Gillard. Instead, 12 years later, she's written a different kind of book, Political Lives, in part justifying her decision.

"I understood that biographers had a point of view and I understood that some biographers would want to help their subject, some would want to hurt their subject and really professional biographers would simply write well-rounded portraits of their subject," she tells Olivia Ireland.

"I had not fully realised how even the most ethical biography could be seized on by others and used for their own ends, at odds with the intention of the biographer."

Belgian novelist Georges Simenon was pretty much the polar opposite of his most famous literary creation, the pipe-smoking police inspector Maigret.

Barry Forshaw contextualises the man amid his work in a new biography, Simenon: The Man, the Books, the Films, and finds a man completely at odds with his character. It must have been deliberate?

"He delivers an informed collage of snippets on Simenon's life and work, as well as an up-to-date annotated bibliography of the publications, which takes up over half the book," writes reviewer Colin Steele.

Family relations in inner-city Melbourne will always be literary fodder, and this is especially the case for Ronnie Scott.

His second novel, Shirley, captures the strangeness of the early lockdown period of the pandemic, and all that comes after. But reviewer Jasper Lindell finds much of the book falls flat for those readers not familiar with the streets of Melbourne.

"The coolness extends from the characters to the setting," he writes.

"Scott's Melbourne is described with a kind of shorthand. Characters cross named streets, eat at real eateries and navigate by the landmarks of urban life: service stations, intersections and train lines. But Scott's Collingwood, where most of the book takes place, is as flat as a page from the Melways if you don't know the city like he does."

These Impossible Things, the debut novel by writer, poet and screen presenter Salma el-Wardany paints a vivid portrait of three feisty British Muslim women, estranged friends who are introduced through a discussion of sex.

Reviewer Mark Thomas is quite captivated.

"The three women, and their creator, remain refreshingly funny, sassy and tart throughout the book," he says.

"Moreover, they express and expound views on integration, dislocation and emigration in an alert but amusing manner. Race, religion and true love are the three undercurrents which frame the narrative."

It's easy to discount the profound effect of the Great War on small Australian towns, but He Belonged to Wagga, by Ian Hodges, proves this is a topic worth examining.

"This is a fair-minded and wise book that offers important correctives to what now may be the settled account of the Great War in Australia," writes Michael McKernan, himself a military historian.

"Excited recruits dashing off to war, excited communities farewelling them, jaded, dispirited men, survivors, returning home to hardship and difficulty. Financial, domestic and medical problems abound in this story. Ian Hodges sees more."

There's nothing like a good, cosy-crime thriller (yes, that is a legitimate literary genre, see Richard Osman for reference), and all the better when it's an all-out page-turner. Bleeding Heart Yard, by Elly Griffiths, definitely fits the bill.

"Told from multiple perspectives and packed with red herrings, Bleeding Heart Yard is a clever, entertaining whodunit, with an ending which is as shocking as it is unpredictable," writes our resident thriller expert Anna Creer.