The Weekend (Charlotte Wood, A&U)
Thursday, 25 July 2019
After Sylvie’s sudden death, her three closest friends—former restaurateur Jude, public intellectual Wendy and actress Adele—must renegotiate the boundaries of their lifelong foursome. As they retreat to Sylvie’s isolated beach...
Being Black ’N Chicken, & Chips (Matt Okine, Hachette)
Thursday, 25 July 2019
It’s 1998. Mike Amon is almost 13 and about to start high school. All he wants is to be good enough at athletics to be chosen for the Dobson Dash,...
Hide (S J Morgan, MidnightSun)
Thursday, 25 July 2019
Hide opens in the Australian outback in the 1980s. A hitchhiker, Alec, is picked up by a man who has his own intentions for the passenger. When the driver reveals...
The Tiniest House of Time (Sreedhevi Iyer, Wild Dingo)
Thursday, 25 July 2019
The Tiniest House of Time is the well-researched debut novel by Sreedhevi Iyer, an Indian-Malaysian-Australian author. Matriarch Susheela Sastri is dying. Her granddaughter, Sandhya, born on the same date as...
Silver (Chris Hammer, A&U)
Thursday, 25 July 2019
Silver is Chris Hammer’s follow-up to his bestselling debut Scrublands. In Hammer’s second novel, journalist Martin Scarsden, fresh from turning the events of Scrublands into a book, follows his new...
Growing Up Queer in Australia (ed by Benjamin Law, Black Inc.)
Thursday, 27 June 2019
Mapped across a spectrum of ages and eras, sexualities and ethnicities, Growing Up Queer in Australia captures the resilience and strength of queer people coming of age in Australia. Edited...
A River with a City Problem: A history of Brisbane floods (Margaret Cook, UQP)
Thursday, 27 June 2019
Who can forget the image of a disheveled Premier Anna Bligh, in the midst of the devastating 2011 Brisbane floods, making her ‘We are Queenslanders’ speech? In the aptly titled...
Lucky Ticket (Joey Bui, Text)
Thursday, 27 June 2019
Lucky Ticket is the debut short story collection from Joey Bui, runner-up in Overland’s 2017 Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize for ‘Hot Days’, which features in this collection. ‘Lucky Ticket’,...
The Trespassers (Meg Mundell, UQP)
Thursday, 27 June 2019
Meg Mundell’s second novel has been hotly anticipated since her debut, Black Glass, showed her to be a writer of extraordinary imaginative prowess, with a commitment to exploring themes of...
The Wooleen Way: Renewing an Australian resource (David Pollock, Scribe)
Thursday, 27 June 2019
David Pollock, a second-generation pastoralist from Western Australia, describes a wicked environmental problem in his memoir The Wooleen Way. Animals produced for food—beef in particular—eat native grasses and plants, degrading...
Going Under (Sonia Henry, A&U)
Thursday, 27 June 2019
Dr Kitty Holliday has just started her internship at a Sydney hospital and is struggling to stay afloat. The problem isn’t just the long hours or the emotional drain of...
Sand Talk: How Indigenous thinking can save the world (Tyson Yunkaporta, Text)
Thursday, 27 June 2019
Tyson Yunkaporta is a researcher, academic and arts critic. With ties to the Apalech clan in Far North Queensland, Yunkaporta combines his lived experiences and academic interests in this innovative...
Women, Men and the Whole Damn Thing (David Leser, A&U)
Thursday, 27 June 2019
Following on from his article 'Women, Men and the Whole Damn Thing', which was published in Good Weekend magazine in early 2018, journalist David Leser once again positions himself at...
Bewildered (Laura Waters, Affirm)
Thursday, 27 June 2019
Bewildered, a memoir by Laura Waters about hiking the Te Araroa Trail in New Zealand, will inevitably invite comparisons to Cheryl Strayed’s Wild. On a surface level, there are some...
Meet Me at Lennon’s (Melanie Myers, UQP)
Thursday, 27 June 2019
In her debut novel, Melanie Myers delves into an under-explored area of Brisbane history: the influx of US soldiers during World War II and how their presence affected the social...
The Rich Man’s House (Andrew McGahan, A&U)
Thursday, 27 June 2019
Andrew McGahan’s posthumously published The Rich Man’s House reads like an earlier draft of a more mature work. Though its premise of a billionaire who builds his home inside the...
Sharing the truth: Stephanie Wood on ‘Fake’
Thursday, 30 May 2019
Fake (Vintage, July) is journalist Stephanie Wood’s account of her relationship with a man who turned out to be not who he said he was, interweaved with expert opinion and...
Australia’s Original Languages: An introduction (R M W Dixon, A&U)
Thursday, 30 May 2019
Bob Dixon has an impressive academic and publishing career, which includes 50 years of researching Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages. Dixon’s latest book combines linguistics, colonisation history, anthropology and...
Lapse (Sarah Thornton, Text)
Thursday, 30 May 2019
Former corporate lawyer Clementine Jones is holed up in a country town where no-one knows her past, and she’s hoping to keep it that way. During her self-imposed exile she...
Storytime: Growing up with books (Jane Sullivan, Ventura)
Thursday, 30 May 2019
Storytime is a delightful collection of essays by literary journalist Jane Sullivan on her favourite childhood books, revisited as an adult. Best known as the scribe behind the Saturday Age’s...
On Drugs (Chris Fleming, Giramondo)
Thursday, 30 May 2019
Philosopher Chris Fleming’s memoir is a searching, considered account of drug and alcohol use and the mechanisms of addiction. Fleming traces his history of marijuana, codeine-based painkillers and alcohol consumption,...
Taking Tom Murray Home (Tim Slee, HarperCollins)
Thursday, 30 May 2019
This debut novel and winner of HarperCollins’ Banjo Prize is based on the ingenious premise of a funeral-protest that raises awareness of the pressures facing dairy farmers from banks, supermarkets...
Love and Other Battles (Tess Woods, HarperCollins)
Thursday, 30 May 2019
Tess Woods’ latest novel follows the lives of three generations of women: Jess is a flower child who falls for a soldier under the shadow of the Vietnam war; Jamie...
Guinea Pig in White Wine Sauce (Alan Rochford, Affirm)
Thursday, 30 May 2019
Guinea Pig in White Wine Sauce is the memoir of restaurateur Alan Rochford, whose cottage bistro is tucked away in the Adelaide Hills. Told as a series of anecdotes, the...
Fortune (Lenny Bartulin, A&U)
Thursday, 30 May 2019
Lenny Bartulin—who cut his teeth with the Jack Susko crime series—made a dramatic shift with his rollicking 2013 historical novel Infamy. But the visceral energy and dirty, real descriptions that...
The Yield (Tara June Winch, Hamish Hamilton)
Thursday, 30 May 2019
The Yield unpicks intergenerational trauma and redacted histories in prose that glimmers. The word ‘yield’ has a dual meaning: in English it refers to the harvest reaped from the land...
A Constant Hum (Alice Bishop, Text)
Thursday, 30 May 2019
Alice Bishop’s debut is a collection of short stories linked by the central theme of bushfire, specifically Victoria’s 2009 Black Saturday fires, which killed and injured hundreds of people, decimating...
The Warming (Craig Ensor, Ventura)
Thursday, 30 May 2019
There’s a lot of climate change-inspired fiction around at the moment—sci-fi, apocalyptic, hopeful and despairing. The Warming has elements of all these but it’s really just about people. People who...
Something to Believe In (Andrew Stafford, UQP)
Thursday, 30 May 2019
This memoir is rock journalist Andrew Stafford’s first book since his 2004 milestone Pig City, which mapped Brisbane music ‘from the Saints to Savage Garden’. Named after a Ramones song,...
Fake: A startling true story of love in a world of liars, cheats, narcissists, fantasists and phonies (Stephanie Wood, Vintage)
Thursday, 30 May 2019
In 2017 journalist Stephanie Wood penned a piece for Good Weekend magazine in which she detailed a relationship she’d had with a man she met online. The relationship went awry,...
