For Fiona McFarlane it was a trip to the Flinders Range in South Australia that would go on to inspire The Sun Walks Down, her new novel which is published next week. McFarlane spoke to Amy Martin this week about the effect the landscape had on her writing.

In a funny way, it reminded me of that W. Somerset Maugham line about three rules for writing a novel but unfortunately no one knows what they are.

For some writers the rule is a strong and rich setting - a landscape that becomes a character in its own right - and for others, like the science fiction author Colin Steele considers this week, it's the nub of an idea that makes the story work.

There are plenty of rules. You just have to pick the right three rules to get the novel to work. Pick wrongly and it can end badly.

You can find all the books we've reviewed this week below. And I welcome your thoughts and feedback on what we've been reading. You can reach me by email at jasper.lindell@canberratimes.com.au

Did the pandemic completely change the way Australians relate to state leaders?

Canberra Times reporter Lucy Bladen considers two biographies of the most prominent state premiers, one of whom remains in the job and faces an election and another who made a stunning resignation.

Daniel Andrews by Age state political reporter Sumeyya Ilanbey (Allen & Unwin, $32.99) and The Secret by Sydney Morning Herald state political editor Alexandra Smith (Macmillan, $36.99).

"Both books expose and highlight the ruthlessness of Andrews and Berejiklian. Neither takes lightly to criticism or what they perceive as disloyalty from those close to them and both have cut off people from their lives," Bladen writes.

Colin Steele considers a suite of new science fiction this week, which takes in the usual big questions of what it means to be human, what government is like when it goes wrong and the ramifications of creating a technologically driven hive mind.

Among the titles Steele considers are Sean Williams' Uncanny Angles (Wakefield Press, $29.95), a collection of 14 stories in which the author sets out to leave readers seeing things "from a new an uncanny angle".

The This by Adam Roberts (Gollancz, $45) takes in philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the English author George Orwell as it imagines the impact of a "hands-free Twitter" with an implanted app.

Quantum of Nightmares by Charles Stross (Orbit, $45) takes a look at humanity in the late 28^th century where the universe "doesn't give a damn about what's fair and right".

Our critic Frank O'Shea high recommends The Cutting by Richard McHugh (Viking, $32.99), which traverses Australia from Sydney's exclusive schools to university and then on to the fly-in fly-out workforce in Western Australia's Pilbara.

"There are two reasons to recommend this book. The first is that it is a good story, set in modern Australia, with characters that are recognisable, credible and 21st century. But the second is just as significant: the writing is sharp and clever, the kind that will often have you tending to ignore the story as you are seduced by the sparkling prose," O'Shea writes.

"In The Woman In The Library, we have neither story nor style," writes Amy Walters this week of Sulari Gentill's new novel (Ultimo Press, $32.99).

"Gentill sets out to satirise the tropes of both crime and postmodernism in a tricksy, metafictional way, but the novel's main conceit of unreliable narration falls flat."

A woman's body is discovered in the Boston Public Library - but that's revealed to be a story in a story. An Australian writer, Hannah Tigone, is writing this story - it's the plot of her fictional novel.

Walters was left unsatisfied.

"Ultimately, Gentill's appropriation of the metafictional format is cynical rather than satirical, falling back on empty cliches masquerading as tired philosophical questions," she writes in her review.

Fiona McFarlane spoke to The Canberra Times' Amy Martin about her forthcoming novel, The Sun Walks Down, inspired by the landscape of the Flinders Range in South Australia, which McFarlane saw when she was in the state for Adelaide Writers' Week.

"I was struck by its beauty, and also by the number of colonial ruins that I saw scattered throughout the whole region, from just a chimney or a ruined house to whole ghost towns," McFarlane told Martin.

"One of the things that drew me in when I first visited [Flinders Range] was this story about a little boy going missing and I thought that since it seems as if I'm going to write a colonial outback novel, what if I also tackle this other huge narrative, which is the lost child, the white child who goes missing in the 'inscrutable or devilish wilderness'? And I'm using those words, ironically," McFarlane said.

"What if I tackle this huge narrative that we have built into our culture in art, fiction and film, and I try and pull it apart a little bit and think about what that might look like from various different points of view?"

The Sun Walks Down (Allen & Unwin, $32.99) is published on Wednesday, October 5.

Finally this week, Mark Thomas considers Heidi Sopinka's new novel, Utopia (Scribe, $29.99), set in Los Angeles in 1978.

"Instead of an idyllic utopia, [Sopinka] presents dysfunctional adults in a dystopian setting. The pivot of the tale is the suspicious death of the first narrator, an artist working in the desert who "had once been told that I sparkled". After declaring that her art should resemble "the kind of work that seems like no-one made it", her brief narrative contribution segues into a ferocious riff on rage and alcohol," Thomas writes.

"The fully-fledged artist is then replaced as storyteller by an art student called Paz, who totes around a baby named Flea, child of the previous wife of her husband. The plot hinges on how Paz tries to determine how and why the first wife died."