GLORY GIRL BY PETER YELDHAM, PENGUIN, $32.95.

It’s 1927, Sarah Carson is fearless, charismatic and determined to take part in the first flight from England to Australia. She makes a deal with pilot James Harrington that she can come on the flight. What follows is fame, love, tragedy and notoriety, with one of them even be accused of murder.

You couldn’t make it up. In fact, much of it is true. Yeldham has fictionalised the incredible life of Australian aviatrix Jessie Miller, cleverly and sympathetically. Truth leaps from every page, demonstrating that life is hardly ever what you expect and it’s almost never like a Hollywood script. The ending is exponentially more powerful because it’s true. Glory Girl is a wonderful account of a gutsy Australian who lived an extraordinary life.

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MY STORY BY DANNII MINOGUE, SIMON & SCHUSTER, $35.

It’s tempting to scour little sis Dannii’s autobiography for headlining scraps about Kylie. And, of course, there is the time territorial Kylie sticks black tape down the middle of their shared childhood bedroom to keep her adoring sibling at bay and the time that Dannii ratted on Kylie to Mum when big sis snuck out in spray-on skinny jeans and blue eyeliner for a pash with her boyfriend at the 10 pin bowling alley!

Yet this confessional is much more about the communal fighting spirit of the Minogue family. How Dannii held a dignified silence during a casting out by ex-husband Julian McMahon’s mother. “Lady Sonia McMahon wanted nothing to do with me … my engagement to her son was the worst piece of news Sonia could possibly have had – I simply wasn’t good enough.” How Dannii ended the marriage in terrible debt, having paid for “virtually everything”. How she spiralled from a teen magazine’s Best New Artist to Worst Female Artist in a year. And then the chapter devoted to “My Sister” that deals with Kylie’s breast cancer.

Now with Myer model partner Kris Smith and baby Ethan, the “final” chapter comes full circle to Scoresby in Melbourne, the suburb where life began and dubbed a “battler’s area” by Dannii’s dad. It certainly gave the Minogue sisters a battler’s start in life.

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MURIEL SPARK: THE BIOGRAPHY BY MARTIN STANNARD, PHOENIX, $29.99.

Muriel Spark was an imaginative child brought up in a bookless Edinburgh household in the 1920s. The curious 11-year-old laid the foundations for her best-selling 1961 novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, the moment she walked into Christina Kay’s classroom at the James Gillespie’s School for Girls.

Brodie’s famous remark that her girls were the “crème de la crème” was originally Miss Kay’s. Biographer Stannard fills this brilliant bio with the intensity of Muriel the artist, who “wanted wide readership while refusing to pander to popular taste”. A “terrible mistake” of a marriage at 19 resulted in a son and separation, then an independent career in London and success in New York. Yet melancholy often defeated Muriel, who found peace with her companion, artist Penelope Jardine, at a palazzo in Italy during her final years. She died in 2006, Jardine at her side.

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SWAINSTON’S FISHES OF AUSTRALIA BY ROGER SWAINSTON, VIKING, $125.

It may seem an odd choice for an artist, but once you see Roger Swainston’s gentle, mesmerising illustrations of Australia’s fish, you’ll understand immediately where this artist gets his inspiration.

This is a big book and certainly a specialised one, but it’s also surprisingly captivating. Swainston observes, photographs and sketches his aquatic subjects while underwater. Decked out in scuba gear, he captures them in their natural environment, which is possibly why his colours have such a luminous vibrancy. The book is a work of art and a comprehensive guide to the 4500 species, within 346 fish families, which live in Australia’s marine environment. A rare pleasure.

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AN OBJECT OF BEAUTY BY STEVE MARTIN, WEIDENFELD & NICOLSON, $32.99.

This is Steve Martin’s third novel and, Hollywood star status aside, he’s a pretty decent novelist. The setting is one close to his heart, if a little rarefied – the New York art scene.

Yet he imbibes it with sass in the form of heroine Lacey Yeager, an ambitious, stunning, fearlessly self-confident art wannabe, who works her way up from the dusty basements of Sotheby’s to the Big Apple’s coolest galleries, capturing the hearts of men and women as she climbs. The book’s narrator is a 30-something nerdy intellectual (shades of Mr Martin perhaps?), who is also the mouthpiece for some sneaky art critiques.

Intrigue, affairs, lots of sex – which is, at times, a little stilted – are played out against a backdrop of recent New York history, from 9/11 to the GFC. The result is a slightly soulless, but enjoyable romp.

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THE ROMANTIC: ITALIAN NIGHTS AND DAYS BY KATE HOLDEN, TEXT PUBLISHING, $32.95.

Plot-wise, Kate Holden’s latest memoir is a bit like the very dark sister of Eat, Pray, Love. A woman heads to Italy in search of romance, adventure and knowledge. She eats well, struggles with the language, has lots of great sex and constantly examines her own actions and motives, before finding a strange sort of peace and heading home.

Yet there the similarities end. Kate Holden carries heavy baggage. Over five years in her 20s, as described in her previous book, In My Skin, she went from Melbourne honours grad to heroin user and sex worker – and somewhere along this squalid path discovered her own clear, graceful voice as an author. I found Holden’s sexual choices in this book distinctly unromantic, even confronting, and suspect many other women readers will, too. Yet it is a compelling study of damage.

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A TINY BIT MARVELLOUS BY DAWN FRENCH, PENGUIN, $32.95.

Families are the current Big Subject in fiction, so I was interested to check out UK comedian Dawn French’s first novel, which arrives with the tag, “Everyone hates the perfect family. So you’ll love the Battles”. Well, I didn’t love them at first.

Written in the form of diary entries by mother Mo and the two teenage Battles, it felt like being stuck in the middle of a raging, rowdy generational war – and please, can’t someone stop them yelling at each other? Yet the characters won me over halfway through, especially the son of the house, Peter, who dresses like a 19th century fop, prefers to be addressed as Oscar and affects a Wildean pomposity that made me hoot. The husband finds his voice only late in the book, which, after all the laughs, ends with a gentle gravity that takes you by surprise.

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD BY HARPER LEE, RANDOM HOUSE, $21.95.

Fifty years old. Thirty million copies sold. Does Harper Lee’s classic of injustice and courage in a small town in the Deep South really warrant this celebratory edition? Can it be as good as we remember from school? Yes and even better.

The familiar tale of lawyer Atticus Finch’s defence of a black man charged with a white girl’s rape, told through the eyes of his children, Scout and Jem, works on every level. As courtroom drama. As coming of age story. As exposé of race and class. And as simple character study – the noble Atticus, the vicious Bob Ewell, the lost soul that is Boo Radley and, of course, the gossipy dowagers of Maycomb melting in the heat until “by nightfall, they were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum”. This is the only book Harper Lee ever wrote and it’s pretty much perfect: funny, wise and soul-deep. Happy birthday, may we read and re-read it forever.

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