Need a new book? Check out our critics’ fiction and non-fiction picks

While Matt Lloyd-Cape recognises that the current government has put more money into housing than any since the 1990s, and acknowledges the daring and breadth of Jim Chalmer’s budget changes aimed at addressing the housing crisis – basically abolishing the rort of negative gearing and scrapping the CGT discount – he says more still needs to be done. Moreover, in this surprisingly upbeat study, he argues that our approach needs to be rethought so that we see it in terms of the big national picture. This crisis impacts so many aspects of daily life: birth rates, crime rates, job mobility and mental health.

It also impacts our politics, facilitating simplistic populism like One Nation. But, he says, we have faced just such a crisis before in the post-WWII years, when PM Ben Chifley and the brilliant Nugget Coombs devised the Commonwealth Housing Commission, which, combined with Menzies’ measures, made Australia a world beater in terms of housing. A timely, jargon-free study.

Captain’s Dinner by Adam Cohen (Bedford Square, $37)

When Sydney lawyer John Henry Want bought a yacht in England in 1883 and hired a four-man crew to sail it back to Sydney, he couldn’t have known the chain of events he’d set in motion. The yacht sank, and the starving crew drifted for three weeks. On the 23rd day, the captain proposed they kill the cabin boy, Parker, who was semi-conscious and ill from drinking seawater.

Soon the captain and first mate were feasting on Parker’s warm blood, liver and heart. They had committed murder and were officially cannibals – but protected by the tradition (or, so they thought) of a quaint old notion called “custom of the sea”. When they fetched up in England and told everyone their story, they were astonished to find themselves arrested for murder.

The resulting case – the Crown Vs Dudley and Stephens – became one of the most celebrated in Western legal history. Cohen, a former New York Times journalist, tells the story almost with a pervasive air of disbelief while also being alive to the gravity of his themes.

The Remarkable Greig Sisters by Iola Mathews (Monash University Publishing, $33)

We take women doctors and lawyers for granted now, but as this meticulously documented history of Jane, Janet and Flos Greig reveals, it was a hard-won right. Mathews (the sisters’ great-niece) takes the reader on a sweeping journey from Scotland to Australia in the second half of the 19th century and into the 20th, charting the lives of three intelligent, ambitious and determined women who chose professional lives in medicine and law over roles of wives and mothers (although one nearly married). Encouraged by their father, the family moved to Melbourne in 1889 because Melbourne University had begun taking female medical students.

Jane and Janet not only studied medicine (often to furious opposition), but established medical practices and were instrumental in establishing institutions like the Queen Victoria Hospital for women and children. Flos, the first woman to practise law in Australia, became a royal commissioner. A keyhole onto the times as well, this is a richly detailed (sometimes too much) group portrait of bravery, struggle and triumph.