Australian Lives: An Intimate History (Anisa Puri & Alistair Thomson, Monash University Press)
Tuesday, 28 February 2017
Using interviews recorded by the National Library of Australia’s Australian Generations Oral History Project, the authors of this major book have selected the recorded stories of 50 people to provide...
The Hot Guy (Mel Campbell & Anthony Morris, Echo)
Tuesday, 28 February 2017
When sports publicist Cate is dumped by her boyfriend for inappropriate puns about polo and social climbing, her friends introduce her to The Hot Guy—refuge of dumped women everywhere and...
Congo Dawn (Katherine Scholes, Viking)
Tuesday, 28 February 2017
Gunfire and grenades. Suffering and bravery. Fathers and daughters. In her seventh adult novel, Katherine Scholes (author of The Rain Queen, The Stone Angel and The Perfect Wife) again draws...
The Hidden Hours (Sara Foster, S&S)
Tuesday, 28 February 2017
Arabella Lane is a beautiful, successful publishing executive whose body is found in the Thames following the office Christmas party. The last person to see Arabella alive is Eleanor, who...
A Hundred Small Lessons (Ashley Hay, A&U)
Tuesday, 28 February 2017
A Hundred Small Lessons (the title is drawn from a Michael Ondaatje poem) explores notions of home, family, identity, creativity, ageing and our relationship with cities and the natural world....
The Midsummer Garden (Kirsty Manning, A&U)
Tuesday, 28 February 2017
The Midsummer Garden is the first novel from former lifestyle and travel writer Kirsty Manning, and follows two storylines in tandem. One narrative centres on medieval French cook Artemisia and...
Rubik (Elizabeth Tan, Brio)
Tuesday, 28 February 2017
In Elizabeth Tan’s debut novel-in-stories, the untimely death of young Perth woman Elena Rubik tears a hole in the fabric of reality, and the reader is thrown into a sprawling...
See What I Have Done (Sarah Schmidt, Hachette)
Tuesday, 28 February 2017
Like Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites and Laura Elizabeth Woollett’s The Love of a Bad Man, See What I Have Done is based on true crimes committed by women. In 1892, 32-year-old Lizzie...
Storyland (Catherine McKinnon, Fourth Estate)
Tuesday, 28 February 2017
Storyland by author and playwright Catherine McKinnon is a beautifully woven story of Australia: the land, the animals and the people—those who have always been here, those that have arrived,...
On the Many Shapes Bodies Will Take (Karen Andrews, Miscellaneous Press)
Tuesday, 28 February 2017
Karen Andrews’ reputation as a writer, editor and publisher precedes her, and this slim volume of poetry tackles the course of a life with such tenderness and grace that you...
After (Nikki Gemmell, Fourth Estate)
Tuesday, 28 February 2017
Freedom is the right to choose the way we live, but what about the way we die? Euthanasia is a difficult subject and one that creates an emotional and political...
Beyond the Rock: The Life of Joan Lindsay and the Mystery of Picnic at Hanging Rock (Janelle McCulloch, Echo)
Tuesday, 28 February 2017
Strange, moody and yet also darkly comic, Picnic at Hanging Rock has enjoyed Australian classic status for close to 50 years. Is the novel fact or fiction? The question has...
Fear of Abandonment: Australia in the World since 1942 (Allan Gyngell, LTUP)
Tuesday, 28 February 2017
Allan Gyngell has written Fear of Abandonment with detail and insight drawn from a long career in foreign policy, from diplomat to intelligence advisor. It examines Australia’s involvement with the...
Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea and the Deep Origins of Consciousness (Peter Godfrey-Smith, HarperCollins)
Tuesday, 28 February 2017
When we think of intelligence in the animal kingdom, it is usually the mammals that spring to mind, like dogs or chimps—the creatures that we can most easily identify with....
The Other Mother (Kelly Chandler, Affirm)
Tuesday, 28 February 2017
When Kelly met Pete, it was easy, straightforward and just what she’d been looking for. Negotiating where she fitted into his life with two kids under six, however, would prove...
Stop Fixing Women: Why Building Fairer Workplaces is Everybody’s Business (Catherine Fox, NewSouth)
Tuesday, 28 February 2017
Catherine Fox’s new book explores the longstanding issue of gender imbalance in the workplace, interrogating ingrained myths and assumptions about why this problem persists. She looks at what she terms...
Things That Helped (Jessica Friedmann, Scribe)
Tuesday, 28 February 2017
Canberra-based writer Jessica Friedmann makes an impressive debut with her essay collection Things That Helped. Having lived with depression her entire life, Friedmann has learnt to find comfort in cherished...
A Writing Life: Helen Garner and Her Work (Bernadette Brennan, Text)
Tuesday, 28 February 2017
I don’t think there has been a more significant writer in my bookselling life than Helen Garner—Monkey Grip was published in 1977, the year I began selling books. Every work...
Body of work: Karen Andrews on ‘On the Many Shapes Bodies Will Take’
Tuesday, 28 February 2017
Karen Andrews’ poetry collection, On the Many Shapes Bodies Will Take (Miscellaneous Press, April), ‘tackles the course of a life with such tenderness and grace that you could be tricked...
System override: Elizabeth Tan on ‘Rubik’
Tuesday, 28 February 2017
Elizabeth Tan’s Rubik is a novel of interconnected short stories with plotlines that explore ‘a sprawling world of shady corporations, sentient memes and hackable bodies’. The result is ‘conceptually and structurally...
From the Wreck (Jane Rawson, Transit Lounge)
Thursday, 2 February 2017
In 1859, the steamship Admella sunk off the coast of South Australia. Among the few lucky survivors was sailor George Hills and a mysterious woman who vanished upon her rescue....
Bloodlines (Nicole Sinclair, Margaret River Press)
Thursday, 2 February 2017
Thirty-one-year-old Beth is lost in her current life in Western Australia’s wheat belt and running from a past that haunts her. She seeks refuge on an island in Papua New...
The Circle and the Equator (Kyra Giorgi, UWA Publishing)
Thursday, 2 February 2017
The Circle and the Equator introduces readers to an original and fresh voice in Australian fiction. Perth-born writer and cultural historian Kyra Giorgi has drawn on her love of history...
Do You Love Me or What (Sue Woolfe, S&S)
Thursday, 2 February 2017
A dancer moves towards clarity; an ill-defined friendship threatens to sink a marriage; a strange Florentine love affair awakens a traveller’s longing for home. Across eight stories and a cast...
Down the Hume (Peter Polites, Hachette)
Thursday, 2 February 2017
The narrator of Peter Polites’ smart and pleasantly unnerving debut novel, Down the Hume, is in a bad relationship with a physically abusive man who is only ever referred to...
First, We Make the Beast Beautiful (Sarah Wilson, Macmillan)
Thursday, 2 February 2017
Sarah Wilson is a journalist, editor, TV presenter and the bestselling author of I Quit Sugar. In her new book, she explores the anxiety disorder that turned her life upside...
The Hope Fault (Tracy Farr, Fremantle Press)
Thursday, 2 February 2017
On a rainy weekend, Iris and her family—her ex-husband, his new wife, her son and her friend’s daughter—are packing up their coastal holiday home. The house has seen parties, homemade...
To Know My Crime (Fiona Capp, Fourth Estate)
Thursday, 2 February 2017
The cover blurb on Fiona Capp’s To Know My Name asks the reader, ‘how far would you go, for the ones you love?’. It’s a fair summary of this compelling...
Peak: Reinventing Middle Age (Patricia & Don Edgar, Text)
Thursday, 2 February 2017
I opened this book expecting ‘middle age’ to cover approximately the ages 45-65 but noted social policy experts Patricia and Don Edgar believe that extended life expectancies—an added 25 years...
The Restorer (Michael Sala, Text)
Thursday, 2 February 2017
In Newcastle author Michael Sala’s second novel, set in his hometown in 1989, a young family of four arrives from Sydney under strained circumstances. The coastal house Roy has bought...
