Cain by José Saramago, Harvill Secker, $29.95.

You know that Woody Allen film Zelig, about a man who inexplicably bobs up in the background at key moments of history?

Well, that’s what Cain — the murderous brother of Abel in the Bible — does in this last satirical novel by Nobel laureate Jose Saramago. And boy, does this Cain like an argument.

He first takes God to task over the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden (“if he really didn’t want them to eat that fruit, it would have been easy enough simply not to have planted the tree or surrounded it with barbed wire”) then reappears at all the Old Testament high points — the walls of Jericho, at the foot of Mt Sinai with Moses, even on board Noah’s ark — constantly niggling about what he sees as the flaws and cruelty in God’s judgment.

In its way, it’s as provocative and irreligious as anything written by Richard Dawkins but Saramago’s tone is witty rather than fierce. It’s certainly a brave last book to write.

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The Quarry by Johan Theorin, Doubleday, $32.95.

The Swedish crime wave rolls on. The interesting thing is how good these books are; turns out there was a talented crowd banked up behind Stieg Larsson.

And within the genre is emerging a sub-genre centred on remote islands; the winter locks them off, bad things happen there.

Author Theorin — winner of last year’s CWA International Award — has chosen the Baltic island of Oland where traditions run deep, including faerie-stuff — which normally I don’t enjoy but here serves as a shadow, a mysterious twist, to a strong story.

Per Morner is preparing for his children’s Easter visit to the island when his estranged father, video porn-peddler Jerry, rings and begs for help.

There’s a mysterious fire, several murders, and some link to the dank, green overgrown quarry at the bottom of Per’s garden.

The novel starts slowly but builds compulsively, sucking the reader into a world completely other to our own.

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This is Di Morrissey’s 20th book, arriving 20 years after she published her first — though she’ll be selling a lot more copies, having spent those years building a strong and supportive base of readers.

As the title suggests, The Opal Desert is set in and around Australia’s remote opal fields, in a small imaginary town not far from Lightning Ridge where three women, spanning three generations, have come to sort out challenges in their lives.

Kerrie is the new widow, who sacrificed her own art career to help promote her husband’s and must now beat her own path; Shirley is close to 80 and lives as a recluse beneath the opal fields after being abandoned by her great love; and young Anna is a promising athlete — but can she find the will and discipline to become a champion?

The fourth character in the book is Opal Desert itself — sometimes dry, sometimes shimmering, where the women find friendship and a way forward for each one.

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Snowdrops by A.D. Miller, Atlantic, $19.99.

In Moscow, a snowdrop is not a flower but a slang term for a corpse which “blooms” during spring when the snow melts and exposes the body beneath.

A useful way to conceal a murder … This literary thriller starts as thirtysomething expatriate lawyer Nick Platt discovers his own snowdrop — then spools backward to examine how and why he knew this man.

It’s a confession of sorts, of how four years doing deals with conmen in tailored suits, enjoying the debauched best Moscow has to offer — the seedy bars and grasping, beautiful girls — has thrown Nick’s moral compass way off course.

The evil was there, he just chose not to see it.

Now, like the snowdrop in spring, it’s about to reveal itself, causing Nick first to trip and inevitably to fall.

Shortlisted for this year’s Man Booker Prize, it’s a classy, suspenseful read and vividly revealing of both the hedonism and corruption of the so-called ‘New Russia’.

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Rules of Civility by Amor Towles, Sceptre, $29.99.

Take The Great Gatsby, throw in a little Breakfast At Tiffany’s, and mix it up with a whole lot of attitude in a cocktail shaker and you’ve got Rules of Civility, a sophisticated coming of age story set in 1938 Manhattan.

Katey Kontent is a typist in the big city, streetwise and smart and headed for bigger things. Her friend Eve Ross is a freedom loving, surprising beauty from the Midwest.

Together they’re scamming drinks and cheap meals when they meet the well-connected young banker Tinker Grey and are introduced to the trust fund crowd.

Just as Gatsby’s young friend Nick discovered, all is not as it seems in high society. Katey is a smart and sassy storyteller, who learns on her journey through the Upper East Side that all the random decisions we make in our twenties shape our lives for decades to come, and that New York is the kind of city that just turns you inside out.

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I Am Half Sick of Shadows by Alan Bradley, Orion, $32.99.

Flavia de Luce may be a delightful innocent, but she’s well acquainted with murder and easy in its company.

In her well-stocked chemistry laboratory in a wing of her crumbling family estate, neglected Flavia explores the fascinating world of poisons, while her older sisters read, flirt and think up new ways to torture her.

When the house is turned upside down by a film crew and a famous actress, Flavia’s scientific and investigative talents come into their own, and this 11-year-old girl steadily outpaces the local constabulary.

Will Flavia find out too late that murder is not a game? Clever Canadian writer Alan Bradley has created a fresh forensic scientist and investigator in young Flavia, and his world of snowy 1950s rural Britain is bittersweet.

I Am Half Sick of Shadows won’t demand too much of you, it’s an easy escape into the world of a crafty young eccentric and has lashings of charm.

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The Year After by Martin Davies, Hodder &Stoughton, $32.99.

It’s 1919 and, still grimy with Flanders dust, Captain Tom Abbott returns to a strangely muted London.

Before the war, he’d vowed never to return to Devon and rose-scented Hannesford Court, the home of the charming Stansbury family.

Yet a yearning for music, noise and bustle draws him back. Life there before the war seemed golden, but was it really? And was there more to the two deaths on the estate than anyone knew?

The Year After is a country house mystery with historical and emotional depth.

Tom and the Stansbury’s poor cousin Anne Gregory, lead us through the dramas of a family whose careless arrogance and easy charm play havoc with each other’s lives, and those of their guests.

Martin Davies cleverly creates many Hannesford Courts; the one seen by innocent Tom and Anne in 1914, the one they re-examine from the perspective of 1919, and the Hannesford Court left in the wake of World War I.

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The Affair by Lee Child, Bantam Press, $32.95.

Jack Reacher fans are wildly possessive of him and there’s a guerrilla reader movement against casting Tom Cruise in the upcoming Reacher film.

Their passion prompted me to read my first Reacher novel, the 16th in the best-selling series. I got lucky with the chronology.

The Affair is set in March 1997, six months before the first Jack Reacher thriller, Killing Floor.

This prequel sees Reacher sent by the army to a small town in Mississippi to keep an eye on the local sheriff as she investigates the murder of a local woman.

The nearby army base is in lockdown and locals suspect it’s harbouring a killer. Reacher finds himself torn between his duty and his increasingly intimate relationship with Sheriff Elizabeth Devereaux, who’s more than capable of dealing with the manipulative defence force.

It’s easy to understand the attraction readers have for Jack Reacher, who does the right thing in the face of overwhelming opposition.

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Tiger Men by Judy Nunn, Random House, $32.95.

Spanning 65 years of Tasmanian history from 1853 to 1918, actor and best-selling author Judy Nunn follows the fortunes of three disparate yet inexorably linked families in the sweeping saga Tiger Men.

Where the term used to describe the bounty hunters who hunted the Tasmanian tiger into extinction, in Judy’s writing it refers instead to the novel’s eponymous new barons of industry who pillage Van Diemen’s Land of its natural resources for their own gains.

At the opening of the book, the docks of Hobart Town are ruled by the roughest; jailors and convicts who arrived in chains.

The sealers and whalers have fished the seas dry and the indigenous population have been fatally transported to Bass Strait.

Progressively philanthropic colonists and do-good clergy will groom the city into sophistication and prosperity, triumphantly bathed in electric light and boasting running trams.

Nunn’s founding cast in book one, wealthy English wool merchant Silas Stanford, paddy-on-the-run Mick O’Callaghan and US political prisoner Jefferson Powell, set out on very different paths, but their labyrinthine families will collide and collude.

As books two and three unfold, their century-old politics are breached by new thinking generations.

“Don’t work for your money, marry it,” was the word on the Wapping slum streets and in the brothels in the days before penal reform, but when money still does not buy respect and acceptance, blackmail and bribery cannot keep love at bay.

The days of buying silence and aborting the fruits of infidelity must be replaced with burying hatchets, and acts of heroism and true love.

The advent of the telephone and the Turkey Trot dance heralds the newest brigade of young guns at war with the eye of the tiger clearly facing the enemy on a united front. An epic miniseries in the making?

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Adventures in Correspondentland by Nick Bryant, Random House, $32.95.

For five years, until he hung up his headphones last month, Nick Bryant was the BBC’s man in Australia.

For 11 years prior to his posting Down Under, Bryant roamed the globe as a foreign correspondent.

His reflections on this time as a microphone-wielding witness to history form the backbone of this highly entertaining memoir.

With Bryant as our guide, we roam through the Troubles in Northern Ireland, relive the sensation that was the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, spend time with warlords in Afghanistan and visit Guantanamo Bay.

We revisit the horror of the Boxing Day tsunami, the terror of September 11 and the sideshow of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal.

And then Bryant gets to Australia — where he casts the kind of insightful eye across our land that only a foreign, professional observer can.

It’s an armchair guide to modern realpolitik, told in an easy-to-digest style. A fast-paced read that gives a human face to the disasters, conflicts and major news events that have defined the last two decades.

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