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.

It was nearly 20 years ago that Clive James described Australian poetry as being in its own "golden age". The extent to which this may or may not have been so is up for discussion, but Geoff Page thinks the current crop of Australian poets suggests he was right.

"To judge from the five collections reviewed here Australian poetry is still lively, various, accomplished - and well worth sampling if you're not already a follower," he writes. "They provide excellent departure points for making up your own mind about the 'golden age' issue."

Nearly 16 years since his last novel, Cormac McCarthy returns with Stella Maris, a characteristically bleak story told through the psychiatric sessions of a disturbed young woman.

Reviewer Michael McKernan is impressed, but urges the reader to look beyond the depressing premise.

"It is a profound and deeply moving meditation on what people are searching for in life and how they might make sense of the world we all inhabit," he writes.

"Stella Maris will reward readers who are prepared to put in the hard work."

In Deeptu Kapoor's energetic and stylish crime thriller, Age of Vice, the streets of Delhi play a starring role. Characteristically, India is depicted as kaleidoscopic impressions.

Review Mark Thomas, who has lived and worked in India, says Kapoor's approach is nuanced.

"India is easy to love, but the emotion should be tough love, informed by awareness of how unjust and unfair the system can be, suffused by human sympathy and, wherever possible, kindness," he writes.

In another novel evoking kaleidoscopes in an entirely different context, Sweeney and the Bicycles by Philip Salom, language is a character all its own, quite apart from the human protagonist.

In her review, Suzannah Marshall Macbeth says "exquisite depictions of joy - wild, unregulated moments of escape" are central to the rich, layered narrative.

The book uses language like colour, building layered characters who are finely and colourfully drawn. Sentences offer contradictions and clarity in a single paragraph," she writes.

Ah Sydney - that ennervating, glorious Aussie city.

"Sydney is a beast. Anyone who has spent time in this city, perhaps even only a day, or the first 18 years of their life, as is the case with this reviewer, knows it to be true," writes Nigel Featherstone in his review of Sydney: A Biography, by Louis Nowra.

With a three-strand structure - chronological history, spaces and places - "Nowra leads his readers through the establishment of the penal outpost and its swift growth into a city that some praised while others thought merely mimicked London".

And while the book has its shortcomings, "anyone who attempts the unnerving task of trying to pin Sydney down should be congratulated".

Life isn't like the movies; it's often fragmented and illogical. Saha, the surreal new novel by Cho Nam-Joo is a prime example - a collection of sketches drawn into an dystopian narrative.

Reviewer Hanne Melgaard Watkins is strangely entranced.

"For this reader, who loves the tropes and satisfactions of crime but also to read and think about the various ways in which authors subvert and play with our expectations, Saha is an intriguing, sometimes confusing, and overall delightfully weird read," she writes.