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If anyone doubted that young adult fiction is not the place to break the rules of writing and storytelling then even a glance at Illuminae should dispel that. Co-authors Kaufman and Kristof have concocted a hugely entertaining space opera composed of found and assembled documents, emails, transcripts, cross-sections, concrete poetry and more. The book is peppered with literary allusions, from Greek philosophers to Walt Whitman and George Orwell. In the year 2575 a planet containing useful minerals is unexpectedly attacked. Hundreds of innocent people are killed and communities devastated. At the centre of the story are teenage couple Kady and Ezra, who have just broken up, just three hours before the attacks. As powerful corporations seek the other’s annihilation, Kady and Ezra must work together to save each other. Between a malevolent artificial intelligence program, a deadly virus and pursuit by a killer spacecraft, what hopes for romance? A tour-de-force of storytelling.

The waiting is the hardest part. For 17-year-old Jack (Jacklin), she can’t wait for her real life to begin. She is living with her older sister, who has returned home from years living abroad. Jack has dropped out of school, from boredom more than anything. She lives in a town called Mobius, where life seems to go nowhere as though on some endless loop. Two crummy part-time jobs and a one-way romance aren’t taking her anywhere, either. What does the future hold and can she kick over the hurdles that lay ahead? With a small group of friends, and an unlikely older ally, Jack starts to find a way when they embark on reviving an old drive-in cinema. Vikki Wakefield captures the intense yearning and restlessness of teenage years with perfect accuracy. She can pivot from seeming devastation to piercing insight in a sharp turned phrase. Inbetween Days is a novel rich authenticity and memorably complex characters.

In Greek mythology the ‘red thread' helps a king escape from the labyrinth. In Chinese tradition the red thread joins people who will one day meet and help each other. In Adelaide's Secret World, by writer and artist Elise Hurst, a red thread ultimately brings together two lonely dreamers and revives a world once full of bustling wonders. Adelaide lives alone in a place that had once been a creative haven. To escape her loneliness, Adelaide ventures into the city where she encounters a creator just like herself. And when she comes into possession of their special book, Adelaide knows just what to do.

Artist Elise Hurst creates a richly imagined world with a palette of velvety reds, deep blues and her anthropomorphic characters include a hare, bears, a lion, foxes, cats and even the occasional human. Her sumptuous images render the line between fancy and realism permeable and enchant the reader more with each reading. Adelaide's Secret World contains enigmas that invite the reader to imagine other realities and a rich inner world.

Three small children pass a perfect day as they play, explore and discover the domestic and the natural world around them. Remarkably, and rather delightfully, these adventures take place without the hovering presence of adults. Children truly are the centre of the world in this book. Only a stripy grey cat is there through the day. They make cakes and draw on pavements with chalk, dig holes at the beach, climb on a rock walls and a tree, wave at a yacht, fly kites and revel in the coast and farmland that surrounds them.

There is lightness and strength in Freya Blackwood's images of children. She designs her pages and paces the book with a filmmaker's eye, exploiting unusual angles and tracking her young characters in the world. There is softness, almost a silence surrounding the children. Danny Parker's rhymed text offers clear navigation and leaves more than enough space for young readers and their elders to explore their world again and again and again. Perfect.

Nothing is going right today for Bill. His favourite socks are missing and his cereal is soggy. That cloud of concern has grown bigger and turned into its own depressing presence. Mr Huff is an exquisitely drawn and designed book about a child's anxiety, depression and resilience. Anna Walker's seamless images—digitally composed from etchings, gouache, pencil and collage—produce an arrangement so light and right to explore a child's experience of anxiety, depression and resilience.

In rendering those grey feelings into the shape-shifting figure of Mr Huff, here is a picture book that allows young readers to see and name a nameless dread. The interplay between Bill and Mr Huff is perfectly weighted. Mr Huff is first a stranger, then an unwelcome guest, then a deep enemy and something to be confronted. Bill's world is laced with tenderness and profound empathy.
As a storyteller Walker shows young readers that in his struggle, Bill's feeling will pass, and that a day that starts out cloudy with a chance of showers can be followed with the chance of sunshine.

Amnesia finds Carey looking back to the Australia of his younger days, in particular to the politically charged year of 1975, and the dismissal of the Whitlam Government. But Amnesia is no mere exercise in nostalgia; the novel’s over-arching theme is the complex relationship between Australia and America since the end of World War II.

In the here-and-now, washed-up journalist and hack Felix Moore is engaged by old-friend and shadowy entrepreneur Woody 'Wodonga' Townes to ghost-write the story of Assange-like computer hacker Gaby Baillieux, born in Melbourne on 11&nbps;November 1975. The story of Gaby, her mother and grandmother, takes the reader from the Battle of Brisbane in 1942, the turbulence of the Whitlam sacking, through to recent use of the Internet as a platform to publish classified and secret government information.

Richly told in a bold and colourful vernacular language, and filled with larger-than-life characters, Carey's indefatigable book is big in every sense. By turns comic and angry, and wildly ambitious in scope, Amnesia is a novel that revels in the complexities of Australia's political landscape over the past half-century.

In Certain Circles, Elizabeth Harrower's fifth and final novel, explores a series of relationships across two very different social worlds in the glitteringly beautiful Sydney from the post-war period through to the late sixties. Zoe and Russell are the privileged offspring of benign parents.

In a three-act psychological domestic drama, they encounter the orphaned and emotionally abandoned siblings Stephen and Anna. The narrative offers the promise of a love story but leads subtly to the conclusion that one can be reconciled rather than defeated by failure.

The central character Zoe, naively fuelled by the optimism of her class and with the benefit of beauty and talent, will learn the lesson that these attributes are not sufficient to prevail against the dark complexities she encounters in an increasingly unhappy and bitter marriage. In the clash between hope and cynicism, between privilege and disadvantage, these characters' limitations are revealed.

The dynamic between parents and children, siblings, married couples and lovers are explored by Harrower in a spare and economical prose style. In the era of amateur psychologising and self-indulgent introspection, much in the novel is refreshingly left unsaid.

Despite the high achievements of his work, and the unquestioning respect accorded to it by his contemporaries, it can be argued that Lehmann has been a neglected figure, not least in regard to the familiar measure of literary prizes.

Poems 1957–2013 is an unusual collection, in that it is not, as at first appears, a standard 'Collected Works' of the author; it is instead a complete reshaping of Lehmann's lifetime of poetry.

Many of the earlier poems have been so substantially re-written as to amount to new poems, while entirely new poems have been added to sequences such as the 'Simple Sonnets' and 'Spring Forest'. At the end of the book are enough new poems to constitute a new collection, while the last of all the poems, 'Why I Write Poetry', is not only one of the very best but a fitting summary of all that has gone before it.

The great strengths of Lehmann's work are his narrative talent and the classical austerity of his style.

The award-winning novelist, essayist, librettist, and short story writer David Malouf began his literary career as a poet, and now, in Earth Hour, he has returned to his beginnings.

In his early books, Bicycle and Neighbours in a Thicket the most striking poems were reminiscences of the author's suburban childhood in Brisbane, while the most striking feature of the writing was its syntax, the long sentences spilling over lines and stanzas while calling up, often in lovingly elaborated lists, the particular sights and sounds and scents of a remembered yet lost age. In his new book he returns to that style of writing, though the memories now lie at a greater distance than before, and he has reached 'the Age of the Seven Pills daily'.

All the same, the poems in this book are as fresh and sharply observed as those that first earned Malouf a reputation, as long as forty years ago; they are intimate, natural, and never self-admiring. Earth Hour is a book that is deeply involved with the human spirit and deeply humane; it is a precious rebuttal to the horrors of our time.