Thursday, 31 May 2018
Journalist Rachael Brown’s ABC podcast Trace, which earned comparisons to the global sensation Serial, investigated the cold-case murder of Melbourne bookshop owner Maria James. The 38-year-old single mother was stabbed...

Thursday, 31 May 2018
Gabbie Stroud always wanted to be a teacher. Her childhood teachers changed her life, and she wanted to do the same for others. This memoir weaves together a broader look...

Thursday, 31 May 2018
Picking up where her debut bestseller High Sobriety left off, journalist and author Jill Stark’s Happy Never After charts the period from her breakdown in October 2014 to her ensuing...

Thursday, 31 May 2018
A coming-of-age memoir brimming with no-holds-barred honesty, Always Another Country is a story about love, survival, politics and home. Sisonke Msimang charts various stages of her life, observing her surroundings...

Thursday, 31 May 2018
The title of Melissa Lucashenko’s latest book—both an accusation and a lament—speaks of hunger, greed, desperation, destruction and redemption. Central to the novel are themes of rage, incarceration, and generational...

Thursday, 31 May 2018
Angela Meyer’s A Superior Spectre is an eerie, gothic work that is both a richly detailed historical novel and a chilling prediction of the near future. The book follows Jeff,...

Thursday, 31 May 2018
Isa Alaki is 10 years old, a budding engineer with a loving family in the Congolese city of Bukavu, when a rebel militia descends on his city, slaughtering his family and...

Thursday, 31 May 2018
The stories in this impressive fictional debut by Moreno Giovannoni cover all aspects of noisy, nosey, gossipy Italian village life. Ninety-year-old Ugo introduces a series of stories from his Tuscan...

Thursday, 31 May 2018
Ruby J Murray returns with her second novel, The Biographer’s Lover, a book that is as much about the art of biography as it is a fictional story about a...

Thursday, 31 May 2018
In this meticulously researched first novel, Laura Elizabeth Woollett tells the story of Jim Jones’ religious cult, the Peoples Temple, infamous for the mass-suicide of nearly a thousand people in...

Friday, 27 April 2018
The romantic notion that female friendships are made of irrevocable bonds that can sustain all manner of hardships and joy is at the centre of Sally Piper’s The Geography of...

Friday, 27 April 2018
Hannah Richell’s third novel, The Peacock Summer, is a vivid tale stretching across 50 years. It tells the story of Lillian and her granddaughter Maggie, set against the intimidating backdrop...

Friday, 27 April 2018
When Elephants Fight is a novel that really packs a punch. Majok Tulba has previously written about the realities of the Sudanese civil war in his 2012 novel, Beneath the...

Friday, 27 April 2018
In The Knowledge Solution: Politics, editor Michelle Grattan presents a range of views dissecting today's most pressing political problems. A heavy artillery of top-brass contributors such as Paul Kelly, Peter...

Friday, 27 April 2018
The debut novel from award-winning journalist Trent Dalton is a harrowing coming-of-age tale set against the street-level drug trade in 1980s Brisbane. Boy Swallows Universe follows Eli Bell from ages...

Tuesday, 3 April 2018
In Armidale, NSW, in 2009, 24-year-old Elijah Holcombe was shot and killed by a police officer. Elijah was described by all who knew him as a sweet, sensitive and artistic...

Tuesday, 3 April 2018
Trauma and the events that provoke it involve a complex web of personal experience, history and society, but most books on the topic seem to sit squarely in either the...

Tuesday, 3 April 2018
Jessie Cole’s Staying is a well-written, extremely moving memoir that steers resolutely clear of stereotypes and self-pity. The ‘staying’ of the title refers to how Cole resumes control of her...

Tuesday, 3 April 2018
Ironbark brings to disturbing life three years in the life of Marcus, a young, gay country man. He has a casually supportive father, platonic girlfriends, an interest in poetry, a...

Tuesday, 3 April 2018
Claudia has returned to her hometown to get married. She should be happy, but instead she feels confused and sad, and running the gauntlet of her dysfunctional family in the...

Tuesday, 3 April 2018
Flames opens with a moment of transformation: ‘Our mother returned to us two days after we spread her ashes over Notley Fern Gorge.’ This arresting first line sets the tone...