Most mentioned this week

Carrie Tiffany’s Mateship with Birds (Picador) is set on the outskirts of an Australian country town in the 1950s. A lonely farmer trains his binoculars on a family of kookaburras that roost in a tree near his house. Rod Usher’s Poor Man’s Wealth (HarperCollins) is part fable, part love story, part comi-tragedy. It is narrated by El Gordo, the mayor of Higot, a dusty village in an unnamed Spanish-speaking country under military rule. Christopher Morgan’s Currawalli Street (A&U) is a story about the secret lives of the generations of families living in an Australian street. Also on the most mentioned chart are Peter Carey’s The Chemistry of Tears (Hamish Hamilton) and Michael Sala’s The Last Thread (Affirm Press)–Media Extra.