We have learned, thank you Bertolt, that there will still be singing in the dark times. Singing such as Ben Walter’s What Fear Was, constructed within and about the metastasising climate catastrophe. It is a short story collection of particularity—most obviously about a place, Tasmania, but also about a time, the howling now.

This is an elegiac book, curiously devoid of anger, notably short on politics, suffused with discontented restlessness but paradoxically passive. It is difficult to see where it will take its likely readership except into a place of disconsolate bias confirmation.