This must be one of the strangest books I've ever read. Audition is a gigantic space ship, travelling through space. There are three giants inside; if they talk they stop growing and the spaceship keeps moving, if they are silent, they grow again, and are in danger of being crushed or the spaceship breaking apart. Much of the book is dialogue, and the giants are vague in their memory of how this all came about, and are not all that bright. They repeat themselves, and this gives the book an incantatory feel, which propels the reader through some very strange events.

Ithaca is a collection of personal essays, mostly about belonging and home. She has had an interesting life - a childhood in Ethiopia with missionary parents, a spell in the Australian army, Bible school, an attempt at the pilgrimage trail the Camino in Spain, among other adventures. It's a remarkably honest and engaged collection, thought provoking, emotional and confronting, as well as being brilliantly written and an effortless, frictionless read.

Stella Maris is a companion novel to The Passenger, and this was published a couple of months after that book. I read them in the order they were published, but I do think that it may be better to read them the other way round. This book is entirely a dialogue, between Alicia, genius mathematician and sister of Bobby, the main character in The Passenger, and her psychiatrist. It's a fiercely intelligent conversation about mathematics, physics, religion, the meaning of existence, madness and philosophy. It's very readable, if challenging to absorb, and profoundly questioning.

I was surprised to find that it's been over 10 years since Emily Perkins' last novel The Forrests, which I loved. Lioness is set amongst the comfortable upper middle classes of Wellington, and their self-satisfaction is brilliantly portrayed. The narrator, Therese, has married into an established wealthy family, and is much younger than her husband, and not fully accepted by his four adult children.

A powerful examination of what life in popular music does to the artists involved. Ian Winwood is a music journalist, and has first hand and personal experience of excess, drugs, alcohol and the impact on musicians mental health. It's a very honest and personal book as well, as Winwood describes his own agonising experiences with drugs and alcohol. It's a relentlessly grim chronicle, and according to the author, it's not getting any better.

Sebastian Barry comes from a long and grand tradition of Irish writers, and he's probably one of the best currently writing. This is a fantastically melancholy novel, as only the Irish seem to be able to conjure, as a recently retired policeman looks back over his life experiences. Two former colleagues turn up at his house unexpectedly, with questions about a decades old case. Tom Kettle can barely remember the case, but it stirs old and uncertain memories.