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 sally.pryor@canberratimes.com.au.

He's regarded as one of Australia's great national leaders who would go on to become the country's longest-serving prime minister. But even Robert Menzies had a formative period.

In an edited extract from a new book, The Young Menzies: Success, Failure and Resiliance 1894-1942, edited by Zachary Gorman, Frank Bongiorno writes about the relationship between John Curtin and Menzies, and how important it was in shaping their respective leaderships.

"Menzies and Curtin were both wartime prime ministers, which one might argue allows for comparison; yet they each faced a distinctive set of circumstances, Menzies's leadership ending before Pearl Harbor, Curtin's coinciding with the period of the war in the Pacific," he writes.

"And how does one compare a short wartime prime ministership such as Curtin's, with a long one such as Menzies's, undertaken mainly in an era of peace while haunted by the prospect of another war?"

It's always intriguing to read a writer's account of their own reading, and the different works that influenced or shaped them as a writer.

In Mad About Shakespeare, the eminent Shakespearean scholar Jonathan Bate recounts how the Bard's works nourished and sustained him through difficult parts of his life.

But review Amy Walters is not impressed.

"[H]is tone militates against his larger purpose: having set out to break down barriers between life and literature, he ends up providing a tour of his academic interests that seems lofty and disconnected from lived experience," she writes.

"If Bate had brought some of this humility and insight to Mad About Shakespeare it would have been a much stronger book."

Colm Toibin is a writer who can look subtly at nuances and see through pretence.

And his latest collection of literary essays, A Guest At The Feast, is no exception.

Reviewer Mark Thomas, a seasoned reader of Toibin's work, says the collection shows the marks of an accomplished writer.

"Conventionally, we claim that good readers make good writers. Conversely, good writers with well-stocked minds can make especially good - intense, intricate, involved - readers," he writes.

"Like Toibin, such writers can look subtly at nuances and inflections, then see through pretence or verbiage."

Writer Chloe Hooper's life was turned upside down when her husband, fellow writer Don Watson, was diagnosed with leukaemia.

In trying to explain to their young children what had happened to the family, Hooper turned to the craft of storytelling, and finds unexpected solace in the bedtime stories we so often reach for.

Bedtime Story is a memoir of this time, one that Robyn Ferrell says is both moving and instructive.

"It addresses a difficult topic that doesn't shirk the peculiar modern predicament of the loss of meaning in a world grown sceptical about myth," she writes.

Garry Disher is the master of Australian crime fiction, rocking the rural noir formula years before Jane Harper reignited our love of landscape-as-character. His latest, Day's End, is more of the good stuff.

The fourth in his series featuring Paul "Hirsch" Hirschhausen, the exiled country cop, is a topical and snappy page-turner with enough well-drawn characters to suspend disbelief.

"Unlike many of the novels in the new wave of Australian rural noir, Disher doesn't begin his novels with acts of violence or terror," writes our regular crime fiction reviewer Anna Creer.

"The Hirsch novels begin with him patrolling vast areas of farmland in his Toyota four-wheel drive, and Day's End is no exception."

Melbourne poet Sam Morley is well-established in the scene, but there's nothing predictable about his output.

Earshot, his first collection, is ambitious, writes our poetry critic Geoff Page.

"At times [h]is determination to avoid the facile can make the poems more difficult than they need to be, but mostly they have a satisfying dramatic shape and a considerable linguistic energy," he writes.

And another poet with a new collection, Sarah St Vincent Welch, is various in both subject and approach.

"Chalk Borders is an ultimately an intriguing mix of genres and strategies, almost all of them successfully managed," writes Page.