This book is about a journey that is shared by many women. The trip of a lifetime! The Great Feminist Denial takes us on a scenic view from past years where women embraced feminism, created their own social consciousness, but then felt a little miffed when the train took a different turn on the tracks. What happened to feminism? What happened to feeling part of a collective; understanding the messages; feeling quietly confidently that the world was ours?

I’ve lived that train trip depicted in this book. So to be honest I read The Great Feminist Denial with glee – it warmed my tired feminist heart, because again I felt part of a collective. In this uniquely Australian book, the authors have collected thoughts from a range of women; interviewed others; listed influential books; named the people we followed and still follow (or didn’t and still don’t); and shared their own experiences. Brilliant. And the best part? Feminism – alive and well – in different shapes – but there for the taking and the sharing. Oh, and if you are a Greer fan – this one really is for you.

Paul Theroux writes about travel with an approach that sets standards for the genre. The locations which attract him are attractive in ambivalent ways – politically troubled, socially dysfunctional, or economically idiosyncratic – locations of geopolitical simmering enlivened by his empathy with local lives.

This book is the sequel to Theroux’s career-making 1973 railway adventure, a looping journey across Eastern Europe and the greater Asia continent. In 2006, Theroux relived the same route in railways carriages, sitting rooms and dining halls across the Balkans, the Caucasus, Central, South, Southeast and East Asia. In a region historically and repeatedly torn apart and put together, Theroux describes experiences of change through conversations with ordinary and extraordinary people. Patrician, pedestrian and peasant companions of this sequel journey include writers Orhan Parmuk, Haruki Murakami and the late Arthur C. Clarke; oppressed Turkmenistans and Singaporeans; unhappy Georgians and desperate Indians.

With the same acidity with which he once lacerated former friend V.S. Naipaul, Theroux’s work works because of a lack of inhibition, a willingness to speculate and a discipline for turning naïve observations into cynical provocations.

Russ Radcliffe, longstanding editor of the annual Best Australian Political Cartoon series, takes cartooning very seriously indeed. In his role as non-fiction commissioning editor at Scribe Publications, Radcliffe commissioned a stunning collection of Bill Leak’s finest work, Moments of Truth. To my mind, this impressive compilation of Bruce Petty’s anarchic (mostly cartoon) art – the first book from Radcliffe’s new publishing venture High Horse Books – reads like the second in a series. It’s certainly just as lovingly packaged, with beautiful production values and informative artist’s commentary interspersed throughout. In the introduction, Petty describes his current creative inspiration thus: ‘Now the future is rather a blur, the present is about barricading what we have accumulated, and cartoonists, like everyone else, search for who is responsible.’

This book showcases the range of Petty’s artistic styles as well as his intellectual and moral concerns, incorporating editorial cartoons, street sketches, film images and printmaking. Connoisseurs of cartooning or social and political commentary will relish this book.

Xinran Xue was born into a wealthy family subsequently undone by the Cultural Revolution; she has since carved out a prolific career documenting the experiences of ordinary people in China. Twenty people, near the end of their life expectancy, are selected as witnesses of the historical everyday, from Xinran’s oral compilations of two decades. As representatives of a generation silenced by inhibition and intimidation, they all lived through immense political and social changes in China over the twentieth century. A military teacher describes a prisoner-of-war city; a descendent of revolutionary martyrs describes life as a political prisoner; a retired acrobat describes the political bureaucratisation of the art; a career shoe-mender describes a central China street of 30 years. Faithfully interviewed narratives are introduced in concise background context.

The value of Xinran’s book is its contribution to a people’s history of China, where such histories are neither acknowledged nor dignified. Xinran’s work, unsurprisingly unavailable in China, is published in 30 languages in 30 locations. China Witness is her fifth book, all of which have been movingly captured in translation by Esther Tyldesley.

This is, I must say, a rather odd little book. Odd, but intriguing – a combination that Murakami fans will recognise and appreciate. The framework of this revealing, odds-and-sods memoir is Haruki Murakami’s four-month preparation for running the New York marathon. Against a changing backdrop (Hawaii, Tokyo, Boston), the novelist coolly meditates on his love affair with long distance running, which evolved almost in parallel with his writing career. He reflects on writing and running in almost equal measure, talking about how the discipline that his running develops feeds into his writing, and how taking up full-time writing (a stationary activity that burns few calories) necessitated the running.

There are some wonderful personal reflections here too, on himself (‘I don’t think most people would like my personality’), his love of music, public speaking, and the differences between Japanese and Western culture. He tells the story of how, in 1978, watching a baseball game, beer in hand, a thought struck the then jazz club owner: ‘You know what? I could try writing a novel.’ That’s how his writing career began. It progressed through persistence, discipline and sheer mental hard work. A fascinating read for fans of running, writing or Murakami.

Comparisons can be so tiresome. You know, ‘the female David Sedaris’. That sort of thing. Only, they’re kind of irresistible, too. And when Jonathan Lethem makes the Sedaris comparison, too, then at least it’s got a literary pedigree. Sloane Crosley is a twentysomething New Yorker, originally from the nearby suburbs (Westchester), who writes quirky, funny, sometimes poignant pieces about misadventures like accidentally signing on with the boss from hell in her first job in publishing (it’s not having a manuscript thrown at her head that makes Sloane realise she should quit; it’s the way her boss stops talking to her after she misguidedly presents her with a cookie shaped in her likeness).

She writes about being a reluctant bridesmaid in a girly-girl wedding for an almost forgotten high school friend, a passive-aggressive Bridezilla who addresses her friends as ‘ladies’ and changes her surname, along with her husband-to-be, to ‘Universe’. And then there’s the day that, in the midst of moving, she locked herself out of not one, but two apartments. I absolutely love this book and its author. And here’s the icing on the cookie: HBO has just bought the rights, for a TV series that 29-year-old Crosley hopes will ‘have more of a Larry David vibe than a Sex and the City vibe’.

Gideon Haigh is quite simply one of the best – and most intriguing – writers working in Australia today. He is amazingly prolific on a variety of subjects, but entirely consistent in delivering elegant prose that engages thoughtfully with his subject and wears its (often considerable) research lightly.

The Racket is a narrative history of abortion in Australia prior to its legalisation in 1968, detailing the Mob-like web of criminal influence that ran the highly lucrative ‘racket’ and fleshing out the stories of the people caught in it, from the abortionists, police and courts; to the hospitals often charged with finishing dangerously half-done jobs; the women and their families who were driven to what was then a dangerous and desperate act; and Bertram Wainer, abortion’s crash-through-or-crash campaigner.

This is not a book that makes moral judgments on either side, but it does give us a local and historical perspective on an issue that is often framed, these days, in terms of the quite different contemporary American debate about right-to-life versus right-to-choose. For me, this book brought home how important it is to have access to safe medical abortions – the alternatives for desperate people, as shown here, are deeply disturbing.