This week’s Reading Trail – to spark or complement your thinking and list-making for votes in ABC-RN’s Top 100 Australian Books poll, or simply to whet your reading appetite – begins with “When We Talk About Time”, a lyrical and powerful exchange between Wiradjuri author Tara June Winch and Kurdish author Behrouz Boochani, from the strange out-of-time/out-of-place times and places of their particular worlds in the particular year of 2020:

Tara June Winch: Every now and then, perhaps every few weeks, I end up asking how you feel about time. It baffles you, this strange question—it baffles me too. Perhaps that’s why I keep asking you—maybe it’s not that I’m searching for an answer that I cannot find, it’s that I don’t want to be alone in my confusion. It feels as if the past decade, but particularly this year, time has receded in a tide, never to break back on land. I don’t know where I’ve been.