The Press reviews Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven, “A riveting and very damaging account of Mormonism and its various splinter groups.” Krakauer’s book examines the murder of a mother and her baby in American Fork, a small town “rife with ignorance, child abuse, corruption, and religious kooks…”

On a more cheery note, we have the long-awaited first novel from Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake. Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2000 with Interpreter of Maladies, a collection of short stories, and her novel has been worth the wait. According to Margie Thomson, “This is definitely one of the best books of the year”.

Less promising is Alex Miller’s Journey to the Stone Country. This novel won Australia’s Miles Franklin award, but David Larsen finds it “ghastly”, and an “overwrought bit of pseudo-romantic bluster”. Oh dear.