‘Tis the season to be planning your holiday reading. I take inspiration from the marvellous bookshop in the beautiful lobby of the National Library of Australia. And there’s our delightful local bookshop.

You can smell it, you can taste it, you can feel it; summer at the pool. Therese Spruhan has drawn together The Memory Pool: Australian stories of summer, sun and swimming (NewSouth). A delightful idea, this affectionate anthology is described by Robert Drewe: ‘A joyful, moving, nostalgic and original take at what it means to be Australian. Dive in’.

Not a guide to entertaining: The Surprise Party by Aaron Patrick is subtitled How the Coalition Went from Chaos to Comeback. (Schwartz) Some of us were less surprised than others. Patrick is the print editor of the AFR. In 2013, he published Downfall: How the Labor Party Ripped Itself Apart. This new book has another happy ending.Thinking of making Australia great, there is the inspirational story of Lachlan Macquarie who lobbied to have the first colony renamed ‘Australia’. Macquarie is the straightforward title of Grantlee Kieza’s major biography (ABC Books) of the man who transformed a penal colony into an emerging nation.

From one of our most gracious and disarming writers, Helen Garner’s Yellow Notebook: Diaries Volume 1 1978-1987 (Text Publishing) starts just after the publication of Monkey Grip; it’s bound to be a delight.

The sun’s shining, water’s fine: Dive in!