I feel more at home reading about the quintessential British experience than in books by writers of colour. Perhaps this is, in part, because of the continuing influence of the British Empire. I am Sri Lankan and, in Sri Lanka, the roots of colonialism run deep, so much so that those roots are still very visible in the education system.

If you have ever sought a book about the rise and consequences of capitalism that is both deeply, morally serious and a rollicking good read, then search no more. This narrative’s truly global sweep is a welcome antidote to triumphalist, anglocentric tales of the Protestant work ethic and suchlike, and the central argument about the role of nature in human economic activity is persuasive.

Grease-black, the Californian sea lion moves through the pool like a slick of oil pushed by a strong current. Propelled by rear flippers in a momentous leap, a halo of water spins from its glossy head, and, as the awkward mound flops down, a large splash rises to an elated chorus of laughter. A cool bead hits my arm. The smell in the air is cold fish mixed with the scent left in a room after a dog has been bathed.

Hedva’s book is a pulsing work. It makes you want to delete all your social media, even as it recognises the internet as a potential space of freedom for those who understand its workings. In On Hell, Hedva identifies the effects of control on the brown body, bodies that are routinely subject to the violence of systematic oppression and incarceration.

Here’s how my old FanFiction.net profile describes me: Author has written 24 stories for Gilmore Girls, Dawson’s Creek, Once and Again, Troy, Dirty Dancing, Love Actually, Misc. Movies, Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, Veronica Mars, West Wing, One Tree Hill, Grey's Anatomy, Robin Hood BBC, Twilight, Sookie Stackhouse/Southern Vampire Mysteries, and Mercy Thompson series.

‘Millennials are, potentially, a great revolutionary force,’ writes Helen Razer in a key passage of her latest book, Total Propaganda: Basic Marxist Brainwashing for the Angry and the Young. ‘First, many of them have inherited the useful parts of so-called ‘identity politics’... Second, many of them have acquired what we call class consciousness. It would be quite difficult to be young in this era and not sense that the greater part of your effort, both in leisure and in work, is in the service of somebody else’s profit.’

Massy’s vision for a new agriculture is to move away from industrial inputs and land clearing, and instead raise productivity by encouraging biodiversity and healthy soils. His book is so important (and long, and dense) that I keep the library’s fresh copy for far too long. It’s reported missing, but I’m spurred on to finish it, to reread it and lend it out, so I pay for it, and peel off the barcodes. My friend’s mum bought her a copy, only to flick through it, begin reading and realise she could not give it up. ‘I bought you another one,’ she tells her daughter. ‘It’s too important.’

In Amanda Lohrey’s ‘Primates’, the first story in the collection Reading Madame Bovary, the unnamed corporation for which the first-person narrator works is undergoing a dreaded ‘restructure’. Her manager, Winton, is attempting to introduce Theory Z, the Japanese business equivalent of a Danish lifestyle trend. It promises to get rid of ‘hierarchies’ and bureaucracies’ in favour of a ‘clan’ mentality with ‘a high state of consistency in their internal culture’.

Political theorist Hannah Arendt, in her 1963 book On Revolution, surmises that hypocrisy is the worst of all vices since it destroys integrity, the only thing that allows the individual to reclaim their incorruptible self: ‘Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil, but only the hypocrite is rotten to the core.’

Last December, Joyce Carol Oates stoked yet another Twitter controversy when she suggested that diverse writers quit complaining about representation and simply get on with the job – starting their own publishing houses being one of her recommendations. And when I read this alongside a number of friends’ annual ‘best of’ reading lists that defiantly featured only writers of colour, I got the sense of antagonistic sides that were irreconcilable.

I’ve never known quite how to feel about Alan Moore. Perhaps my feelings are best expressed by the time I found myself drunkenly screaming, ‘Alan Moore is a sex pervert’ in a public park immediately after declaring him one of the greatest living writers. His fondness for sex scenes has always left me prudishly uncomfortable and I’ve been very disturbed by the gendered violence in his work.

When published in 1995, Justine Ettler’s debut novel The River Ophelia received a lively critical reception. For some, the book exemplified a genre of gritty, in-ya-face writing then known as ‘grunge lit’, named after the contemporaneous music movement from Seattle (think Nirvana, Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam).

As a member of Sweatshop Western Sydney Literacy Movement, I have had countless conversations with other writers from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds about the responsibility we feel to our communities, and of the demands and restrictions that places on our work. When we critique narrow but socially dominant mimesis we are seen as bitter and demanding.

During Children’s Book Week, I visited an elite private school where a deputy principal asked me if I thought I was doing boys a disservice by having such girly covers on my books. I politely but firmly replied that I thought people who told boys they weren’t supposed to read books with girls on the cover were doing everyone a disservice.

In this book we are shown perspectives of lesser-known places on Sydney’s suburban fringes such as Hornsby, Warragamba and Turramurra; sleepy shopping arcades in Penrith; an abandoned theme park in Lansvale and a 1970s floating restaurant slowly disintegrating in Snails Bay. What emerges in these deftly observed urban essays is far more than a simple description of urban space and reminiscence.

It extrapolates, of course, the socially conservative values of the right of today: the withdrawal of contraceptive rights, denial of civil rights to queer citizens, the re-assertion of a women’s place, and so on. But it also demonstrates the dangers of the new social conservatives, as well as ‘a certain kind of thinking in the left’: a desire to re-establish tradition bonds of community, which they view as destabilised by the autonomous neoliberal world.