The second Review month of 2016 I opened with two contemporary works set in Switzerland of the 1970s and the USA of the early 1950s respectively. The award-winning Swiss novel The Encyclopaedia of Good Reasons by Monica Cantieni tells the story of a foster girl in line for adoption trying to fathom her new life in Zurich, while self-published Bells Above Greens by David Xavier is about a nineteen-year-old who just returned from the Korean War that cost his idealised brother’s life and finds it difficult to adjust to university routine in Indiana. Then I presented two classics, namely The Loving Spirit by Daphne du Maurier from 1931 and The Tree of Man by Australian Nobel laureate Patrick White from 1955. The first is the four-generation saga of a Cornish family devoted to the sea and the latter is the life story of a farmer in the greater Sydney area.