Boat People: Personal Stories From The Vietnamese Exodus 1975-1996 edited By Carina Hoang, Freemantle Press, $45.

In 1979, Carina Hoang, then 16, fled her Vietnamese homeland with her younger brother and sister in a 25-metre wooden boat crammed with 373 others.

They were part of the greatest mass exodus in human history as 1.5 million South Vietnamese escaped the communists in the aftermath of the Vietnam War.

Carina now lives in Perth and her heartbreaking, but ultimately liberating book tells the stories of many of the survivors of that exodus.

They are powerful tales simply told, which triumph the human spirit and act as an important document of a terrible time in an all too recent history.

Many of the photographs are hard to take in and are interspersed with envelopes containing reproductions of official documents charting the refugees’ battles to build new lives.

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A Field Full of Butterflies: Memories of a Romany Childhood by Rosemary Penfold, Orion, $22.99.

When Rosemary Penfold’s mother left her “gadje” (non-roaming) life to marry a Romany, who could not read or write, she never looked back.

“We were her life,” writes UK-born gypsy Rosemary, now 73, who along with her three brothers, was born in her parents “vardoe”, or wagon, but would ultimately return to the gadje way of life when she married at 18.

This honest, funny, humble, yet proud little memoir, is no great tearjerker, has no place in literature or chapters to shock; but is a spellbinding, vivid, first-hand account of a way of life and freedom that belonged to another time.

There’s Granny with a roll of money in her pinny pocket, Granfer, with his silver kiss curl, and old brown Trilby, and the “varmints” (troublesome children) gobbling skinned rabbit stew on the caravan steps.

Attending a gadje school, the “dirty gyppo” kids suffered prejudice the moment they stepped foot in their first ever building.

Winters were cold, provisions few, but love abundant; mum suffering malnutrition from going without herself to feed her brood during punishing war years.

“I dream about my childhood. It seems like paradise,” is Rosemary’s testament to traditions that taught dignity and fortitude, generosity and gratitude.

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Pictures Of You by Caroline Leavitt, Allen & Unwin, $27.99.

There’s something rather satisfying about a book you can’t instantly classify, that can’t be neatly filed away as a romance, a mystery or an emotional drama.

That is the very joy you’ll find in Pictures Of You, which magically combines all three.

The tipping point comes when four lives are changed forever, after two cars collide on a foggy highway, killing one of the drivers.

The survivor, Isabelle, is a photographer who is fleeing her cheating husband, and her life becomes entwined with the grieving husband and son that the other driver, April, left behind.

Together they try to solve the mystery of where April was running to. Why was there a suitcase in the car? And why was her son there?

The author is an expert storyteller, who alternates perspective among the three leading characters — but it was not an easy road for her.

“I tend to write about what obsesses me and I’ve always been very phobic about cars and car accidents,” Caroline says. “I’ve had my licence since I was 16, but have driven once, and then felt so panicked I have never driven again.

“So, because I always worried I would be in an accident and kill someone, I had been thinking about writing a novel about it for many years, hoping to purge my fears. Didn’t work.”

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The Stranger’s Child by Alan Hollinghurst, Picador, $32.99.

Seven years after British author Alan Hollinghurst won the Booker Prize, his follow-up novel displays much of that playful quality of writing and engrossing acuteness of characterisation, but in a new world which spans several decades.

This well-made tale starts just before the World War I and brings to mind Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited and Ian McEwan’s Atonement, amid a clutch of other classic authors like E.M. Forster and Henry James.

At the outset, the English upper classes are at their zenith living a rarefied existence of manhattans at sunset and frisky frolics in manicured gardens after dinner.

George Sawle delights his rather more middle-class family at the modest Two Acres by bringing uni chum, clandestine lover, aristocrat and poet Cecil Valance home to stay for the weekend.

Handsome, debonair, rakish Cecil immediately thrills George’s sister Daphne writing a poem for her (but really about George).

And when Cecil dies young in the war and Daphne marries his brother, the ironic reconstruction of who Cecil was takes on a fictitious life all of its own.

Divided into four sections, each set decades apart, yet interweaving our characters’ lives, the novel examines the inevitable decay of a society built on privilege, but with a sense of nostalgia that has you longing for a highball.

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The Book of Lies by Mary Horlock, Text Publishing, $32.95.

Like many 15-year-old girls, Catherine Rozier has a flare for the dramatic and a loose association with the truth, so did she really, as she claims, kill her best friend?

It’s 1985 and Catherine lives on the island of Guernsey, a place that suffered terribly under the Nazi occupation.

Her father’s brother, Charlie Rozier, was just 12 when thousands of German boots goose-stepped into town, marching Charlie towards the guilt and shame that he would live with all his life.

With a father who’s an “expert on Guernsey’s guilty past”, fat, smart, and insecure Catherine gradually discovers the truth; that sometimes the guilty are innocent and the innocent guilty, and that those who turn a blind eye can be just as much to blame.

Catherine’s teenage voice rings true — she’s funny, difficult, annoying and a joy, the first person in her family to learn and bravely confront a generation of lies.

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The Girl From Baghdad by Michelle Nouri, William Heinemann Australia, $29.95.

Born to a wealthy Iraqi father and a beautiful Czech mother, Michelle Nouri experienced the best and worst of Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad and Communist Eastern Europe.

From her spoiled childhood as her father’s princess to her grotty Prague flat, Michelle’s true life story has been one of extremes.

In Baghdad’s lush country club, this young beauty enjoyed an innocent flirtation with Uday Hussein, who she would years later barely recognise as a bloated corpse on her TV.

When her indulgent father leaves the family for another woman, Michelle, her mother and her two sisters become the target of men who’ve heard they’re fair game, potential rapists who crawl all over their house desperately trying to get inside.

It’s a fascinating insight into life in Baghdad for women before the downfall of Saddam Hussein.

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A Decline in Prophets by Sulari Gentill, Pantera Press, $29.99.

Travel back in time to 1932 and book yourself a first-class suite on the luxurious passenger liner RMS Aquitania, but take care, for among your fellow well-heeled passengers is an elegant ruthless killer.

Also travelling the seas in style is wealthy young Australian pastoralist and artist Rowland Sinclair and his band of bohemian friends.

He’s an old school gentleman with new ideas, but his life of polo, parties and painting is interrupted by his polite attempts to find the murderer, who seems very keen on making Rowly his next victim.

Rowland and his mates are fresh, witty and vividly alive. They make the most of 1932, socialising with movie stars Marion Davies and Cary Grant, roaring over the newly completed Sydney Harbour Bridge in a slick roadster and partying in the Blue Mountains with naughty genius artist Norman Lindsay.

An elusive killer, a charming but down-to-earth sleuth, and a glamorous historical setting, A Decline in Prophets is glossy, original and appealingly Australian.

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Until Thy Wrath Be Past by Asa Larsson, Quercus, $32.99

The first chapter of Until Thy Wrath Be Past is so shockingly powerful, beautiful and terrifying, I forgot to breathe.

It sat on the bedside table as I took a few deep inhalations before I could continue, but once picked up again it was only ever put down reluctantly.

Teenager Wilma Persson is dead, the victim of more than one cold-blooded killer.

She watches as beautiful District Prosecutor Rebecka Martinsson and pugnacious Inspector Anna-Maria Mella gradually close in on her murderers.

Asa Larsson cleverly cuts between Wilma’s youthful first-person account and the narration, creating a novel that mixes quiet menace with gently exuberant regret, something like what you’d get if you put The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo in a blender with The Lovely Bones.

Investigator Rebecka Martinsson is kind, subtle and intelligent, she’s the last person you’d want to see meet the same terrible fate as lovely Wilma, making the last chapter of this must-read thriller as gripping as the first.

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A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, Corsair, $24.95.

“Time’s a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?” As if anyone can stop the clock.

This exciting novel, winner of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction, takes us on a wild ride across 40 years in the lives and loves, hopes and disappointments, of a dozen or so interconnected characters based in New York.

They’re a cool bunch, by and large — record executives and celebrity journalists and burnt-out punk rockers, brothers and bosses and friends-of-friends running a criss-cross relay race through each other’s lives, blind to the chaos they cause and those who stumble and fall around them.

Stripped of the of hip and hype, though, they are people like us, wanting to be special and different and wondering when and how it was we actually gave in and grew up.

It sounds sad, and ultimately it is — time being the great leveller — but it’s also funny, fresh and brilliantly done.

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Gilgamesh by Joan London, Random House, $23.95.

This is an oldie-but-goody, recommended with such enthusiasm by a fellow reader I felt I had to give it a go — and so enjoyed the experience I am now passing it on.

Drawing on the epic of Gilgamesh, the world’s oldest known poem, it is both a paean to wanderlust (the book’s chief character, Edith, moves from a poor farm in south Western Australia to London, Istanbul, Armenia and Alexandria) and a celebration of the notions of love and home.

Edith is seeking the exotic traveller to whom, while still a teenager, she bore a son. The authorities take her baby away, she steals him back, and together they set out to reclaim his father and a homeland.

This synopsis gives but a scant sense of the elegance and poignancy Australian writer Joan London brings to her subject.

Like the Babylonian King Gilgamesh, Edith must test and almost lose herself before, ultimately, discovering her true value.

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