Samos Island was bliss. I swam in the Aegean, danced Zumba in the town square and drank Ouzo. I also read some great books!

So today’s post contains reviews of Tenth of December, Shooting the Fox and The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot. The first two are for short story enthusiasts and the third for those who love to roam — in the mind, through words and in the flesh.

Tenth of December

One-word review: Genius.

Saunders’ ten stories pull your thoughts in so many intriguing directions it’s exciting.

“Victory Lap” was a favourite.

Kyle Boot has been described as “the palest kid in the land” by Alison Pope, his neighbour, who is “three days shy of her fifteenth birthday”.

Kyle does a lot of swearing in his head while trying desperately to be perfect for his mum and dad.

They set down rigorous rules and award him Work Points and Usual Chore points if he adheres to them. The points can be cashed in for yoghurt-covered raisins and free choice TV minutes — though he must negotiate with his parents which shows are acceptable.

Alison has been taking ethics classes at school and thinking about what makes a good person …

Kyle breaks the house rules in response to a crime …

Edge of the seat reading to see how this might change their young lives forever.

The collection’s title story, “Tenth of December”, is also an absolute cracker.

Don Eber has a “nickelised brown spot” in his brain. He’s had surgery and chemo but the prognosis is not good. He’s trying to stage his suicide. Partway through he helps a small boy called Robin and has time to assess what his suicide might mean to his wife and kids.

Before Eber’s encounter with Robin, “He’d kept waiting for some special dispensation. But no. Something/someone bigger than him kept refusing. You were told the big something/someone loved you especially but in the end you saw it was otherwise.”

Masterful characterisation, voice, humour, human understanding, ethical thinking and provocation … “Semplica Girl Diaries” is another story that illustrates the many strengths of Saunders’ work. It’s a storytelling tour de force. Seek it out.

PS: One of my favourite lines from the book was one of the simplest: “You did perfect. I’m here. Who did that?”

George Saunders, Bloomsbury, $22.99

Shooting the Fox

Nineteen stories. Lean and assured writing. Perfect holiday reading.

As I wandered the streets of Samos these stories wound through my thoughts like wisps of breeze.

I particularly liked:

“It’s the Cheroot”: This is a neatly rendered crime story. It takes place in a unique setting, where the boat is the only way in. “It comes in, unloads the stores, takes the venom and goes again.”

“Letters from Eden”: This builds gently into a creepy take on the possibilities for a new Australian capital city and how easily the dream of an enlightened, civilised society can turn sinister.

“At the Pool”: This meditation on an indoor pool that’s part of a gym space illustrates how a stranger can interrupt the routine of such a closed world and how we feel we know some of the regulars or, at least, have a narrative about them.

Ergo: “I always like to see the snorkelling man but he isn’t here.”

“The Original is Unfaithful to the Translation”: A beautifully rendered example of that old chestnut — young student, older scholar, his wife away …

They translate Rimbaud. He keeps a diary about which he says, “The unexamined life is not worth living, don’t you agree?”

The Rimbaud translation comes out and she is “only listed as one of many in the book”.

She muses: “They say that to translate is to betray, said one review, but in this case there is total fidelity. To everything but the poetry, Susan thought, as she had at the time they were doing them. Poetry is what is lost in translation, she discovered Robert Frost saying, years later.”

Marion Halligan, Allen and Unwin, $29.95

The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot

I’m joining the Camino-length line of reviewers who say, “You’ve got to read this book.”

Why?

Macfarlane writes exquisitely about journeys and about nature — an intoxicating mix.

Here are some grabs of the fine prose in his book to entice you:

“We tend to think of landscapes as affecting us most strongly when we are in them, when they offer us the primary sensations of touch and sight. But there are also the landscapes we bear with us in absentia, those places that live on in memory long after they have withdrawn in actuality, and such places — retreated to most often when we are most remote from them — are among the most important landscapes we possess.”

“Nature can cure but it can also be brutally mute, shocking in its disinterest: the river’s seawards run, the chalk’s whiteness, the hawk’s swivelling stare.”

Macfarlane’s book explores the human heart and its heights and depths.

He both knows and shows, like the writer and walker “Nan” Shepherd, “that landscape has long offered us keen ways of figuring ourselves to ourselves, strong means of shaping memories and giving form to thought.”

He writes with clear-eyed eloquence about the Anglo-Welsh poet and essayist Edward Thomas (1878-1917) and of his tremulous relationship with his adoring wife Helen.

Macfarlane says: “He [Thomas] experienced that tension between roaming and homing even as it was first forming. It was a tension I know something of myself.”

Robert Macfarlane, Penguin, $29.99