The best new books released in March, as selected by avid readers and critics

Welcome to ABC Arts' monthly book column: a shortlist of new releases read and recommended by The Book Show's Claire Nichols, The Bookshelf's Cassie McCullagh, ABC Arts' Nicola Heath and critic Declan Fry. Pheasants Nest by Louise Milligan Allen & Unwin "Every time I drove over bridge, I always felt a chill," Milligan told ABC RN's The Book Show. "Someone is always guilty — this is the intrinsic propulsion of true crime…" That's the opening of Calla Henkel's gracefully written and very, very funny book. Birch looks at how the process of "settlement", both historically and within Scott's work, has seen Australia transplant its "frontiers" inside of "the civilised world of the institution and a supportive bureaucratic framework". As in much of the Black Inc. series, the critic's own life and their appraisal of the author's work coalesce in vivid set pieces: I think of Josephine Rowe, haunted and unmoored by her encounter with Beverley Farmer's The Bone House at Bertie and Lorri Whiting's studio in Rome; or Stan Grant reading Thomas Keneally's Jimmie Blacksmith, revealing the contradictions of self and identity in his desire "to tell you exactly who he is, just so long as he doesn't think you are trying to tell him first".