Border disputes: Meredith Jaffé on ‘The Fence’
Thursday, 28 July 2016
Meredith Jaffé’s examination of neighbourhood divisions in her debut The Fence (Macmillan, September) makes for an ‘engaging and satirical novel’ that ‘explores a range of topics beyond mere border patrol...
On tour: Lionel Shriver
Thursday, 28 July 2016
US author Lionel Shriver’s latest book, The Mandibles (HarperCollins), follows a family in the near future as they contend with the ruin of their fortunes in the aftermath of a...
On tour: Angela Flournoy
Thursday, 28 July 2016
Angela Flournoy’s The Turner House (Black Inc.) is a sprawling domestic drama that tells the story of Detroit through the generations of one family. She will be attending Melbourne Writers...
On tour: Chris Cleave
Thursday, 28 July 2016
Irish author Chris Cleave’s Everyone Brave is Forgiven (Sceptre) weaves a little-known segment of history during Blitz-torn London with a love story that draws on his grandparents’ courtship during in...
On tour: Lev Grossman
Thursday, 28 July 2016
Author of the ‘Magicians’ trilogy (Arrow) Lev Grossman is visiting the Melbourne Writers Festival and Sydney’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas in August and September. What would you put on a...
The Boy behind the Curtain (Tim Winton, Bolinda)
Friday, 8 July 2016
Tim Winton’s The Boy behind the Curtain is a collection of essays and reminiscences, some of it new and some previously published. Readers of Winton’s novels and stories will be...
The Best of Adam Sharp (Graeme Simsion, Text)
Friday, 8 July 2016
This new offering from The Rosie Project’s Graeme Simsion is another poignant glimpse into human relationships—what it is to love and to be loved. Adam Sharp, a 40-something database architect,...
The Better Son (Katherine Johnson, Ventura Press)
Friday, 8 July 2016
The Better Son begins with the hot Tasmanian summer of 1952, where nine-year-old Kip suffers at the hands of his father, while his 11-year-old brother Tommy is the putative ‘better’...
The Birdman’s Wife (Melissa Ashley, Affirm Press)
Friday, 8 July 2016
Elizabeth Gould deserves much credit for the early success of her husband’s work, and it is tragic to think of what was lost to art and science when she died,...
Goodwood (Holly Throsby, A&U)
Friday, 8 July 2016
It’s fitting that a reviewer once described Australian musician Holly Throsby as ‘a songstress with [the] literary depth of a novelist’, because Throsby is now writing fiction—and her debut, Goodwood,...
From the Edge: Australia’s Lost Histories (Mark McKenna, Miegunyah Press)
Friday, 8 July 2016
Mark McKenna is one of Australia’s leading historians, notable both for his engagement with contemporary political debates such as republicanism, and his embrace of the narrative and personal style of...
The Promise of Things (Ruth Quibell, MUP)
Friday, 8 July 2016
The Promise of Things is the debut nonfiction book from sociologist Ruth Quibell, whose essays have appeared in magazines such as Island and Womankind. Quibell is interested in what she...
Key change: Holly Throsby on ‘Goodwood’
Friday, 8 July 2016
Set around the disappearance of two people in the fictional small town of Goodwood, musician Holly Throsby’s debut novel ‘hits all the right notes’, writes reviewer Carody Culver. She spoke...
Character building: Melina Marchetta on ‘Tell the Truth, Shame the Devil’
Thursday, 30 June 2016
Melina Marchetta’s Tell the Truth, Shame the Devil (Viking, September) is ‘an electrifying contemporary detective thriller’ that ‘explores Europe’s simmering anti-Muslim sentiments’ in the aftermath of a bus bomb, writes...
On tour: Meg Rosoff
Thursday, 30 June 2016
YA author Meg Rosoff will be appearing at Melbourne and Brisbane writers’ festivals in August and September to discuss her first novel for adults, Jonathan Unleashed (Bloomsbury) What would you...
Obsessive impulsive: Maurilia Meehan on ‘5 Ways to be Famous Now’
Thursday, 30 June 2016
Set on a cruise ship headed for Antarctica, Maurilia Meehan’s satirical novel 5 Ways to be Famous Now (Transit Lounge, September) is a ‘delightfully wicked romp with a razor-sharp edge’,...
5 Ways to be Famous Now (Maurilia Meehan, Transit Lounge)
Wednesday, 29 June 2016
The confines of a cruise ship headed for the most remote part of Antarctica is the perfect setting for jealous temperaments to thrive and plots of revenge to unfold in...
Le Chateau (Sarah Ridout, Echo Publishing)
Wednesday, 29 June 2016
In Le Chateau, Charlotte de Chastenet awakens from a coma with no memory of her husband Henri, her daughter Ada, her overbearing mother-in-law The Madame, or her luscious life in...
A Chinese Affair (Isabelle Li, Margaret River Press)
Wednesday, 29 June 2016
Isabelle Li’s debut collection A Chinese Affair is a strange beast—a genre mashup that showcases the Chinese-Australian experience by mixing short story and memoir. Li makes the unusual decision to...
The Easy Way Out (Steven Amsterdam, Hachette)
Wednesday, 29 June 2016
Steven Amsterdam’s previous books Things We Didn’t See Coming and What the Family Needed are heavy with apocalyptic vision and metaphor, so his latest novel will immediately strike his fans...
The Historian’s Daughter (Rashida Murphy, UWA Publishing)
Wednesday, 29 June 2016
The Historian’s Daughter is a family story with a dark secret in its underbelly, cloaked by an otherworldly charm, where the traditional monikers of mum and dad are replaced with...
The Hate Race (Maxine Beneba Clarke, Hachette)
Wednesday, 29 June 2016
Maxine Beneba Clarke’s storytelling in The Hate Race has a heft to it that is at once steeped in history, and also exquisitely and playfully modern; it is lyrical, sincere...
The Love of a Bad Man (Laura Elizabeth Woollett, Scribe)
Wednesday, 29 June 2016
The Love of a Bad Man offers what feels like a genuinely fresh reading experience: a short-fiction collection that marries true crime with literary fiction. In each discrete story, Melbourne-based...
The Near and the Far (ed by David Carlin & Francesca Rendle-Short, Scribe)
Wednesday, 29 June 2016
Born out of WrICE—a program of reciprocal residencies focussed on writing from the Asia-Pacific—The Near and the Far interlaces the work of familiar Australian writers with that of emerging and...
Only Daughter (Anna Snoekstra, Harlequin)
Wednesday, 29 June 2016
This slow-burning psychological thriller will appeal to anyone devouring the subgenre dubbed ‘domestic noir’. While it’s a quicker, lighter read than Gone Girl, Only Daughter poses a mystery that is...
The Rules of Backyard Cricket (Jock Serong, Text)
Wednesday, 29 June 2016
When infamous ex-cricketer Darren Keefe wakes up bound and gagged in the boot of a car, he begins reflecting on the life that led him there. Drugs, sex, booze, gangland...
Tell the Truth, Shame the Devil (Melina Marchetta, Viking)
Wednesday, 29 June 2016
Outside Calais, a bomb tears apart a bus full of international teenage students. The uninjured include British ex-Chief Inspector Bish Ortley’s daughter Bee and 17-year-old Violette Zidane, the youngest member...
We. Are. Family (Paul Mitchell, MidnightSun)
Wednesday, 29 June 2016
Paul Mitchell’s debut novel is the rare book that seems to both invite every clichéd description of new Australian writing—visceral, lyrical, ‘ Wintonesque’—and somehow read as genuinely innovative. This is...
Wild Island (Jennifer Livett, A&U)
Wednesday, 29 June 2016
Jennifer Livett’s first novel interweaves Tasmanian colonial history with the untold periphery of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, assuming background knowledge of neither (though the reader is certainly rewarded by familiarity...
Doing It: Women Tell the Truth about Great Sex (ed by Karen Pickering, UQP)
Wednesday, 29 June 2016
Fucking, boning, rooting, getting laid, making love, banging, shagging—there are a lot of phrases we can use to refer to sex. ‘Doing it’ is Karen Pickering’s favourite, and it is...
