The Philanthropist by John Tesarsch, Sleepers Publishing, $27.95

The good man who does bad things is a familiar figure in fiction. So points to first-time author John Tesarsch who’s taken the harder road and given us a thoroughly rotten protagonist who does good things (like, philanthropy) though for all the wrong reasons (status and tax-deductions).

Not that businessman Charles Bradshaw’s bad character has blocked him from the very highest levels of Melbourne society. Rich, respectable, he possesses everything in life but a moral code — until a massive heart attack forces him to face the demons lurking in his past, a journey which introduces him to regret and guilt but never to genuine remorse.

It’s this unusual distinction which give the book its freshness. You don’t sympathise with Bradford — he’s too unlikeable for that — but you do get a sense of how a lifetime’s worship of “the false gods” of money and power can blight your family and burn your soul.

A new voice, offering a different take on contemporary Australia.

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Our Kind of Traitor by John le Carré, Viking, $32.95

The key question whenever a new Le Carré comes out is: is it a good one? He’s the master of the spy thriller but, as even fans concede, he can be patchy. The good news: yes, novel number 22 is a very good one.

A rattling mix of old and new Le Carré, with a plot as current as the headlines. Dima, money-launderer to the vicious Russian mob, wants to turn rat and trade what he knows in exchange for asylum in London for his family. His secrets implicate not just his cronies but the highest-level British politicians, power-brokers and bankers.

Two dedicated but disenchanted intelligence agents — fantastic characters both — work to cut a deal with the would-be defector but their own bosses seem to be blocking it. So which side are the spy-masters on? Who are they protecting?

As ever, Le Carré plays with notions of honour, betrayal and villainy — with a twist at the end that will make you gasp.

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Vivian Rising by Daniella Brodsky, Simon & Schuster, $29.99

She has a dead end job, a dead boring boyfriend, and a deadbeat mother. Vivian Sklar’s one true joy is her feisty grandmother, who dies in her hospital bed, as poor Viv cowers in the loo.

Lost and bereft, she’s cared for, and constantly fed, by the warm-hearted senior citizens in her Brooklyn apartment building.

But missing her stern but sensible Grams, she looks for a new guide, and finds one in a very kooky character, wild-haired Kavia — the abrupt and abrasive astrologer. Viv hangs off her every word, blindly following the stars, until she’s forced by circumstance to take her life back into her own hands.

Daniella Brodsky has created a sassy but vulnerable character in Viv Sklar. By the end of Vivian Rising, you’ll be cheering her on as she loosens her tight grip on the past, and embraces a new life on her own two feet.

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We Had It So Good, by Linda Grant, Virago, $29.99

The title sums it all up, We Had It So Good, and oh yes they did. This is the familiar but fascinating story of the baby boomers, and their journey from sweet self-absorbed hippies to a lost self-absorbed middle age.

It’s 1968 and Californian Stephen Newman travels to Oxford on a science scholarship, bright, confident and eager for adventure. There he meets two beauties on campus, Andrea and Grace, who fancy themselves as the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age.

We Had It So Good follows them through the drug-induced hallucinations of the ’60s, the dirty squats of the ’70s, and the emerging family life and career aspirations of the ’80s.

This is a bold book about life with a capital L, but it is written close-up — life in lower case. Linda Grant succeeds in showing us the inner lives of three compelling characters, while looking at them, and their generation, from afar.

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Mennonite In A Little Black Dress by Rhoda Janzen, Allen & Unwin, $29.99

Rhoda Janzen writes with wit and fondness of growing up in a “painfully uncool”, but happy and supportive community of Mennonites; they’re the less picturesque cousins of the better-known Amish people.

Years later her glamorous and sophisticated life in the city falls apart when her husband leaves her for a man called Bob, a chap he meets on Gay.com. After the triple-blow of the Bob incident, a major operation, and a bad car accident, Rhoda goes home to her Mennonite family.

It sounds like grim stuff, but Rhoda’s family is comedy gold, and she has gift a for milking her (real) life of clashing cultures for genuine belly laughs. She’s welcomed home with lashings of the kind of food that rings of the 16th century German origins of the Mennonite church, kartoffelsalat anyone? And there’s relationship advice you won’t hear from Dr Phil: “Why not date your first cousin? He has his own tractor.”

It’s a fascinating and entertaining memoir of an unconventional life.

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Lyrics Alley by Leila Aboulela, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, $32.99

Nur Abuzeid has it all, he’s the heir to his father’s business empire, and he’s betrothed to Soraya, the girl he loves. He’s a gentle, optimistic soul, and this is a gentle story of love and growth.

When poor Nur is badly injured in an accident, its repercussions ripple through his wealthy Sudanese family. His father, Mahmoud Abuzeid, struggles to cope, and his relationships with both of his wives change greatly.

His younger Egyptian wife yearns for a sophisticated life in Cairo, away from the ignorant influence of wife number one, Hajjah Waheeba. Soraya’s future changes dramatically, but not necessarily for the worse.

Lyrics Alley is set in the heat and dust of 1950s Sudan, as it emerges from beneath British colonial rule. But Sudan and its history never intrude on what is at heart a domestic story, the story of a family and its prejudices, difficulties, and love for each other. It’s exotic and humble, sad and uplifting, exotic and familiar.

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In Bligh’s Hand by Jennifer Gall, National Library of Australia, $34.95

William Bligh’s water-stained pocket notebook, kept by the sea captain following the mutiny on The Bounty, when he was cast adrift with 18 crew in a 7-metre open boat, is one of our most important historical documents.

For years the Bligh family retained the notebook, but it was bought at auction in London in 1976 by the National Library of Australia for $73,000.

This fascinating, beautifully illustrated book features extracts from that notebook, as well as other accounts of the mutiny and subsequent events which show that even with his loyalist crew, a difficult and temperamental Bligh constantly battled fear of new rebellion.

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Anne Frank’s Tales From The Secret Annex, Cassell Reference, $27.99

The posthumously published diary of Anne Frank is world famous; 40 million copies published in 70 languages, ranking the inner thoughts of the 13-year-old Jewish chatterbox and would-be journalist, kept in captivity with her family during Nazi occupation of Amsterdam.

What this latest collection of “daydreams”, fables and an unfinished novel (written at the same time as the diary, but out of print for many years) adds, is a wistful window onto the world outside “Villa Annexe” — as the ever cheerful Anne dubbed the rooms above her father’s offices, where evening black-out and the ritual grind of Sundays became almost unbearable — as seen through Anne’s hopeful eyes.

In her essay The Battle of the Potatoes, Anne counts her blessings — “In a labour camp you have to do a whole lot more than peel potatoes…” while in her short story The Caretaker’s Family (who ignore the blackout) she dreams of the mother “…who doesn’t want to hear the ack-ack guns, so … she sits in the shower and listens to her loudest jazz record.”

In her unfinished novel Cady’s Life, convalescing Cady, bedridden in hospital as war is declared, debates immense subjects of parental love and trust, of equality and cruelty — just as Anne did from her cramped attic.

Anne Frank and her elder sister Margot both died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in March 1945.

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The Lightkeeper’s Wife by Karen Viggers, Allen & Unwin, $29.99

Nature can both isolate and enlighten; inspire and depress. Battling the elements can be as much about battling the storms within yourself. In The Lightkeeper’s Wife, there are characters who find nature healing and those who are desperate to escape it.

The novel’s eye of the storm is Mary, who was the lightkeeper’s wife at Cape Bruny, Tasmania. Young and enchanted by a new life with her husband, she raises her children in isolation in harsh, windswept climes, surviving on provisions brought in by boat and the meagre offerings of a sandy garden patch.

What she didn’t realise was that love too would become an emotion frozen by the desolate environment. In the twilight of her life now, she prepares herself to die – and along with her, the secret she’s kept for most of her life.

Meanwhile, her son Tom also struggles with his emotions. Much younger than his two older siblings, he grows up alone and cared for by Mary; his father an impenetrable tower, like the lighthouse he kept.

Tom has also chosen a solitary vocation and spends 18 months as a “dieso” at an Antarctic research station — reachable only via icebreaker. When his wife calls to say she is leaving him, he has no way of getting back to her as winter on the cold continent sets in and no ship will be arriving for months.

Melbourne author Karen Viggers, who’s been “south” twice, sets the scene in a family dynamic filled with regret, loss and love. Poetic in its treatment, it’s a novel of parallels and, ultimately, hope.

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The Discovery of Jeanne Baret by Glynis Ridley, Fourth Estate, $29.99

An extraordinary true-life tale of a remarkable “herb woman” from an impoverished peasant family in the Loire Valley region of France, destined to become the first woman to circumnavigate the world — and more importantly to fight eighteenth century moral codes, to blossom as a brilliant botanist, all the while dressed as a teenage boy.

Jeanne Baret bore French expedition naturalist Philibert Commerson a son, before giving the child up as a foundling, and accompanying him on a treacherous 1766 two-year sea passage with more than 100 men, her chest painfully bound to cover her womanhood.

Under constant suspicion, Baret is believed to have survived a horrific gang rape, and the barbaric ritual “baptism” (tarring and feathering) of an ordinary seaman, against a backcloth of the tantalising first sighting of the Great Barrier Reef (in 1768) and the personal discovery of medicinal Bougainvillea (named after the expedition’s commander).

Ridley pieces together a unique slice of geography, history, discovery and adventure, recording one woman’s courageous stand to experience all the “new world” had to reveal, at a time when traditional sexual roles were at their most limited.

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