Here's to that. A novel without a good ending might be clever but it's hardly ever satisfying.

Also this week, Emeritus Professor Bob Douglas considers a survival guide for humanity. It's going to take some big changes, but if I can be forgiven for allowing a skerrick of optimism in, it's a relief to know there is a set of possible solutions. We're not hopelessly doomed.

You can find all the books we've reviewed this week below. And I welcome your thoughts and feedback on what we've been reading. You can reach me by email at jasper.lindell@canberratimes.com.au

Hanne Melgaard Watkins spoke to best-selling novelist Jane Harper this week about her new novel, Exiles (Macmillan, $39.99) - the final outing of Aaron Falk.

Harper says it is absolutely infuriating when there isn't a clear ending.

"I recognise it as a technique, and sometimes it can work - that question mark is really powerful," she told Watkins.

"But for me I always like to know. When you're reading a novel with a mystery, the reward is finding out at the end. And as a writer, because I plan from the end point, I always have the resolution.

"There's never really a good argument for not sharing that with the reader."

Tom Gilling recounts the mystery that surrounds Bill Sticpewich, who was a prisoner of war in a Japanese camp treated differently to the other Australians in the Second World War in The Witness (Allen & Unwin, $34.99).

"While most of those in the prisoner of war camp were being deliberately starved to death by the Japanese, Sticpewich carried no outward marks of malnutrition. While others were routinely bashed and degraded, Sticpewich avoided most of such treatment. He made friends with Japanese and Formosan guards, one of whom warned him that a massacre of remaining prisoners was being planned. Sticpewich slipped out of the camp that night," writes our reviewer Michael McKernan.

Gilling doesn't have all the answers and McKernan wonders whether that is appropriate for is it ever truly possible to understand the depths of horrendous evil?

Paul Daley tackles Australia's challenging history in his novel Jesustown (Allen & Unwin, $32.99), tracing the past actions of a white anthropologist among a remote Aboriginal community in the continent's north.

Our critic Karen Viggers says it's a bold and ambitious book, tackling challenging and confronting material.

"Writing First Nations characters is not without risks. Prominent Australian Indigenous writers hold conflicting views on whether white writers are entitled to do this. However, Daley's portrayal of First Peoples is sensitive and sympathetic, with a view to exposing the truth of the betrayal and manipulation by white people," Viggers writes in a review this week.

Was the mystery Agatha Christie created around herself her best ever?

Anna Creer considers Lucy Worsley's new biography - Agatha Christie: A Very Elusive Woman (Hodder & Stoughton, $59.99) - this week.

While there's not much new here, Worsley does offer a "radical" interpretation of Christie's motives for disappearing for 11 days in 1926: a distressing episode of mental illness.

"This is an affectionate, very readable biography. Worsley is a clever communicator and I wonder how long it will be before she presents a TV program on the 'elusive' Agatha Christie," Creer writes.

Michael Pascoe, the experienced finance and economics commentator, turns his hand to a memoir in The Summertime of Our Dreams (Ultimo Press, $34.99).

"Different scenes remind him of different people and times in his life: his father, a country policeman; his siblings, their life in Petrie - on the outskirts of Brisbane at that time. He gives observations and opinions on a range of subjects including: country towns, Indigenous Australians, Captain Thunderbolt, religion, USA gun laws and, inevitably, traffic accidents and roadside shrines," writes our reviewer Russell Wenholz this week.

"However, there are joyous moments."

Elisa Shua Dusapin's The Pachinko Parlour (Scribe, $24.99) is the second of the writer's books to be translated from French into English.

This time, our reviewer Christine Kearney tells us, Claire stays with her grandparents in a stifling Tokyo summer.

"The trio are preparing for a trip to Korea, with Claire as chaperone for the two old people. While she waits for their departure, Claire mooches around her grandparents' apartment, plays Tetris on her phone and occasionally tutors Meiko, a 10-year-old Japanese girl," Kearney writes.

"But this trip is no ordinary holiday. Claire's grandparents are Zainichi, Korean migrants who fled the Korean civil war and never returned."

And what is a pachinko parlour? They are "game ball salons, owned by Zainichi but considered shady or morally suspect. Zainichi themselves are tolerated by their adoptive country but never truly considered Japanese".

Bob Douglas considers Earth for All: A Survival Guide for Humanity (New Society Publishers, $34.99), which offers a "giant leap" scenario for helping humans to survive.

And, the authors believe, it can be achieved within a generation.

"Let's not pretend that the turnarounds proposed in this book will come about without unprecedented global collaboration," Douglas writes.

"But the book points to worldwide, growing community awareness about the diabolical risks we are now facing as a species and a willingness to contemplate very substantial change.

"And why ever not?!"