What to read next: 10 new releases for your book stack

Pack a coat, some sunscreen and perhaps working knowledge of political philosophy for this week’s reading. The new fiction takes us through a frozen Paris, an exclusive Greek art camp, wartime Melbourne and the Australian desert. On the non-fiction side, democracy and Australian exceptionalism are put under the microscope, alongside ADHD, masculinity and a forgotten chapter of Jewish history.

Six Days by Amanda Curtin (Upswell, $35) With wildfires burning through France and Spain over this European summer, it’s easy to forget the deep freeze that descended on Paris in the winter of 2012. Amanda Curtin’s latest takes place over six days during that extreme weather event, which brought sub-zero temperatures to the French capital. It unfolds through Daniel, an Australian expat who’s gone native after four decades in Paris. He’s having a dark night of the soul and seeks a road back to the good. Daniel’s perambulations around the Latin Quarter, with an old dog in tow, spawn myriad vignettes, as the hidden interconnections between citizens, and the forces that divide them, emerge.

Anyone who loves Paris will be struck by this beautifully written love letter to the city, and the constraint of the premise seems to liberate the author’s imaginative ambit. Walking novels have a strong pedigree as vehicles for literary and philosophical meditation – think W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn , or Teju Cole’s Open City – and this essayistic anatomy of Paris is elevated to that level by the clarity, sophistication and lyricism brought to pressing concerns, from sexual assault to homelessness, that lie in the city’s shadows.

Contrapposto by Dave Eggers (Canongate, $35) Dave Eggers has a thing for highfalutin titles. I remember reviewing his memoir – A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius – back in 2000 and thinking, “With a title like that, it had better be”. It was, and if his fiction since then has been less inspired and ambitious, Eggers has made up for it in other ways, notably as founding editor of the literary journal Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern , among other projects. “Contrapposto” is a term of art. It refers to figures leaning their weight mostly on one foot – an imbalance that creates an aesthetically pleasing asymmetry.

Two young teachers, Olympia and Cricket, sign up to work at a private art camp on a small Greek island. They’ll be instructing an exclusive cohort of children from the international elite, and their vaulting idealism soon runs into unnerving truths about privilege and the cult-like environment of the world they’ve entered. There’s more than a splash of art-world satire and some creepy, unpleasant truths about the psychology of wealth running through it, but Eggers has always written best at his most unguarded, and the chief appeal of this big-hearted book is its unjaded devotion to love, and the pleasures and pains of a creative life.

Quite the Pair by Tobias Madden (Penguin, $35) Stepping out from queer young adult (YA) fiction, Tobias Madden’s debut novel for adults explores the kind of close friendship that can develop between gay men and women.