The Inaugural Meeting of the Fairvale Ladies Book Club (Sophie Green, Hachette)
Monday, 22 May 2017
Sophie Green’s novel The Inaugural Meeting of the Fairvale Ladies Book Club is an enjoyable, if predictable, examination of how women’s friendships and indeed good reading can overcome the darkest...
Watching Out (Julian Burnside, Scribe)
Tuesday, 9 May 2017
Julian Burnside is well known to those who follow refugee policy and human rights issues in Australia. In Watching Out, a successor to the earlier volume Watching Brief, Burnside examines...
Whipbird (Robert Drewe, Viking)
Tuesday, 9 May 2017
What better set-up than a huge family gathering to dissect attitudes, skewer pretensions and tell lots of stories? On a hot November weekend at his newly acquired vineyard near Ballarat,...
Taboo (Kim Scott, Picador)
Tuesday, 9 May 2017
Despite a bracingly strange start—a dead narrator speaks of when ‘we lifted ourselves from the riverbed and went back up the hill into town’; a skeleton of wood and stone...
On the Java Ridge (Jock Serong, Text)
Tuesday, 9 May 2017
Two boats on Indonesian waters: one carrying Australian surf tourists, the other filled with asylum seekers. In Canberra, the Minister for Immigration announces a new policy to outsource responsibility for...
The Lone Child (Anna George, Viking)
Tuesday, 9 May 2017
Away from the city and the lover who left her when she was eight months pregnant, Neve Ayres spends her days alone with her newborn son in the Victorian coastal...
Common People (Tony Birch, UQP)
Tuesday, 9 May 2017
Common People is Tony Birch’s third story collection and sixth work of fiction. He is a natural storyteller (as are many of his characters), and is deft at creating believable, if...
Ache (Eliza Henry Jones, Fourth Estate)
Thursday, 27 April 2017
Eliza Henry Jones’ second novel demands that you slow down, take a breath and settle in. This beautifully written novel will eventually reward you for working past the slow opening....
Heart to heart: Melanie Cheng on ‘Australia Day’
Thursday, 27 April 2017
Melanie Cheng’s Australia Day (Text, July) is a ‘bittersweet, beautifully crafted collection’ about the conflicts and realisations that occur when people of different backgrounds are brought together. She spoke to reviewer...
Untying the knots: Mark Brandi on ‘Wimmera’
Thursday, 27 April 2017
Mark Brandi’s debut crime novel Wimmera (Hachette, July) is a ‘languid and unsettling’ story about two boys growing up together in a small town in the 1980s. He spoke to reviewer...
No Way! Okay, Fine (Brodie Lancaster, Hachette)
Thursday, 27 April 2017
A coming-of-age story with a fierce, feminist heart and a broad sense of purpose, Brodie Lancaster’s debut memoir No Way! Okay Fine is narrated through a series of chronological yet...
Random Life (Judy Horacek, Horacek Press)
Thursday, 27 April 2017
Judy Horacek’s whimsical cartoons have long been a fixture in the Australian media landscape; Random Life (published through her own just-released imprint) is Horacek’s ninth collection. In the foreword, John...
Australia Day (Melanie Cheng, Text)
Thursday, 27 April 2017
The title story of Melanie Cheng’s debut short fiction collection Australia Day is about a Chinese medical student visiting the rural farm of an Australian friend who he hopes will...
Mischka’s War: A European Odyssey of the 1940s (Sheila Fitzpatrick, MUP)
Thursday, 27 April 2017
Professor Sheila Fitzpatrick met photonuclear physicist Mischka Danos in 1989. They married and spent the next 10 years together until Mischka’s death. But this biography is not about those years....
The Trip of a Lifetime (Monica McInerney, Michael Joseph)
Thursday, 27 April 2017
Set in the wine country of South Australia’s Clare Valley, and in Ireland, Monica McInerney’s latest novel is a saga about family, memories and promises, secrets and lies. At the...
Wimmera (Mark Brandi, Hachette)
Thursday, 27 April 2017
Set in small-town Australia in the 1980s, Wimmera is the story of two boyhood friends, Fab and Ben, presented in three parts. Part one is told in schoolboy Ben’s voice:...
Hinterland (Steven Lang, UQP)
Thursday, 27 April 2017
A small Queensland town is divided. The collapse of local industry in a once-thriving dairy community has seen farmland abandoned, repurposed for suburban sprawl or replanted by conservationists. When a...
Widening the frame: Briohny Doyle on ‘Adult Fantasy’
Thursday, 30 March 2017
Briohny Doyle blends memoir and cultural critique in Adult Fantasy (Scribe, June) to examine what it means to be an adult in a rapidly changing new millennium. Reviewer Jo Case...
Closing Down (Sally Abbott, Hachette)
Thursday, 30 March 2017
Sally Abbott’s manuscript was the inaugural winner of the Richell Prize, which was set up by Hachette Australia in honour of former CEO Matt Richell. Closing Down conjures a dystopian...
The Dark Lake (Sarah Bailey, A&U)
Thursday, 30 March 2017
Police detective Gemma Woodstock has lived in the regional Australian town of Smithson for her whole life, stuck there by a compounding trail of grief, love, comfort and childbirth. An...
The Good Girl Stripped Bare (Tracey Spicer, ABC Books)
Thursday, 30 March 2017
In the same vein as her viral TEDx talk ‘The Lady Stripped Bare’, journalist Tracey Spicer’s memoir The Good Girl Stripped Bare unearths the indignities of being a woman in...
The Gulf (Anna Spargo-Ryan, Picador)
Thursday, 30 March 2017
Just a year after her debut novel The Paper House was released to enthusiastic reviews, Anna Spargo-Ryan returns with another impressive novel that will have readers feeling every emotion experienced...
No More Boats (Felicity Castagna, Giramondo)
Thursday, 30 March 2017
First up should I say that one of the characters in this impressive novel from Felicity Castagna (The Incredible Here and Now, Small Indiscretions) works in a bookshop in Sydney’s...
Some Tests (Wayne Macauley, Text)
Thursday, 30 March 2017
One day, 37-year-old aged-care worker Beth Own, wife and mother of two young daughters, wakes up feeling a bit off-colour. She takes a day off work and is sent for...
This Water (Beverley Farmer, Giramondo)
Thursday, 30 March 2017
This Water features five new short stories from Beverly Farmer, one of Australia’s most underappreciated living writers. In this, her 10th book, Farmer draws heavily on ancient myths, folklores and...
Understory: A Life with Trees (Inga Simpson, Hachette)
Thursday, 30 March 2017
Many people dream about making a ‘tree change’. When Inga Simpson and her partner fell in love with 10 acres of bush in the Sunshine Coast hinterland, they succumbed to...
Year of the Orphan (Daniel Findlay, Bantam)
Thursday, 30 March 2017
There is a lot of post-apocalyptic fiction being published at the moment, and while we’re probably reaching saturation point, Year of the Orphan is definitely worth reading. In a desolate...
The Last Garden (Eva Hornung, Text)
Tuesday, 14 March 2017
Eva Hornung won the PM’s Literary Award for Fiction for her 2009 novel Dog Boy. In The Last Garden, she once again explores the frailties of humans and the strength...
Adult Fantasy (Briohny Doyle, Scribe)
Tuesday, 28 February 2017
Is ‘adulthood’ still achieved by ticking off a series of milestones, like marriage, mortgages, careers and babies? How might those milestones—and our ability to tick them off—have changed since the...
Woman of Substances: A Journey into Addiction and Treatment (Jenny Valentish, Black Inc.)
Tuesday, 28 February 2017
‘Women,’ writes Jenny Valentish, ‘drink and take drugs because it’s fun. They do it to be bulletproof. To be more intimate, or more intimidating.’ For most, this use is manageable....
