Stone Sky Gold Mountain (Mirandi Riwoe, UQP) Archive
Monday, 3 February 2020
In goldrush-era Australia the landscape is harsh, the law basically non-existent and discrimination bluntly and unashamedly informs every facet of life. Siblings Ying and Lai Yue are trying to scrape...
The Medicine: A doctor’s notes (Karen Hitchcock, Black Inc.) Archive
Tuesday, 15 October 2019
When discussing modern medicine there is a lot to consider. There are the complexities of the doctor/patient relationship. The wellbeing of doctors. How responsible treatment and the law sometimes intersect...
True West (David Whish-Wilson, Fremantle Press) Archive
Thursday, 26 September 2019
Opening on a Western Australian freeway in 1988, True West immediately introduces Lee Southern, a teenager on the run from the militaristic bikie gang in which he grew up. Such...
There Was Still Love (Favel Parrett, Hachette) Archive
Tuesday, 6 August 2019
Favel Parrett’s third novel, There Was Still Love, is a meticulously observed and masterfully crafted immigrant story about a displaced Czech family. The novel oscillates in nearly every way—between the...
The Weekend (Charlotte Wood, A&U) Archive
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...
Lucky Ticket (Joey Bui, Text) Archive
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’,...
On Drugs (Chris Fleming, Giramondo) Archive
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,...
The White Girl (Tony Birch, UQP) Archive
Friday, 26 April 2019
Tony Birch’s latest novel tells the story of Odette Brown and her granddaughter Sissy, who live on the fringe of Deane, a fictional town situated between the mountains and the...
Room for a Stranger (Melanie Cheng, Text) Archive
Wednesday, 27 March 2019
After an attempted home invasion leaves her feeling unsafe, elderly Meg signs on with a homeshare agency: Andy, an international student from Hong Kong who’s come to Melbourne to study...
The Colonial Fantasy: Why White Australia Can’t Solve Black Problems (Sarah Maddison, A&U) Archive
Thursday, 28 February 2019
Underpinned by denial, myth-making and blame-shifting, the settler rationale is prevalent throughout Australian history, justifying the frontier wars, dispossession and the Stolen Generations. The Colonial Fantasy by Melbourne University professor...
The Van Apfel Girls are Gone (Felicity McLean, Fourth Estate) Archive
Friday, 1 February 2019
Felicity McLean’s debut novel The Van Apfel Girls are Gone opens with the arrival of a ghost, ‘summoned by the death rattle of Cornflakes in their box’. It is an...
A Season on Earth (Gerald Murnane, Text) Archive
Thursday, 1 November 2018
In 1976 William Heinemann published Gerald Murnane’s second novel, A Lifetime on Clouds. In the book’s originally published two parts, the protagonist Adrian Sherd, a student at a Catholic high...
Imperfect: How Our Bodies Shape the People We Become (Lee Kofman, Affirm Press) Archive
Thursday, 25 October 2018
Lee Kofman turns her eye to bodies that ‘defy the natural order of things’ in her latest book, blending memoir with cultural criticism to delve into what bodies that contravene...
Best Summer Stories (ed by Aviva Tuffield, Black Inc.) Archive
Wednesday, 29 August 2018
When Black Inc. announced this year that it would discontinue the annual ‘Best Australian’ anthologies, readers and booksellers alike were disappointed. However, the announcement of a one-off anthology of short stories...
The World Was Whole (Fiona Wright, Giramondo) Archive
Friday, 24 August 2018
In this exquisite follow-on from her award-winning memoir-in-essays Small Acts of Disappearance, Fiona Wright continues to set the standard for the essay form in Australia. Wright’s perspective in The World...
Speaking Up (Gillian Triggs, MUP) Archive
Thursday, 26 July 2018
A self-described ‘conservative lawyer’ of nearly 50 years, Gillian Triggs attracted a barrage of criticism from right-wing politicians and media during her tenure as president of the Australian Human Rights...
Man Out of Time (Stephanie Bishop, Hachette) Archive
Thursday, 28 June 2018
In September 2001, Stella Gilman’s father, Leon, wanders the streets of a coastal city, armed with his camera, arbitrarily snapping photographs. His walkabout seems purposeless; his thoughts, fragmented. When the...
Scrublands (Chris Hammer, A&U) Archive
Thursday, 31 May 2018
In a dying Riverina town that’s suffering a merciless drought, ‘good people fight to retain honour and dignity against unfair odds’. Shockingly, one Sunday morning, the town’s priest opens fire...
The Nowhere Child (Christian White, Affirm Press) Archive
Friday, 27 April 2018
Sammy Went was a toddler when she disappeared from her home in Kentucky 28 years ago. Kim Leamy is an Australian photography teacher living a fairly unremarkable life until a...
The Making of Martin Sparrow (Peter Cochrane, Viking) Archive
Tuesday, 3 April 2018
Martin Sparrow is an ‘expiree’, a convict who has served his time and been granted a plot of land. When the terrible 1806 flood destroys his crops, he’s forced to...
The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart (Holly Ringland, Fourth Estate) Archive
Thursday, 22 February 2018
The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart is a lush, powerful contemporary novel from debut author Holly Ringland. It revolves around Alice, who we first meet as an isolated young girl...
The Shepherd’s Hut (Tim Winton, Hamish Hamilton) Archive
Thursday, 25 January 2018
Jaxie Clackton is a teenager on the run in the parched, unforgiving landscape bordering the salt lakes by the Western Australian desert. Convinced he’ll be held responsible for the accidental...
The Lebs (Michael Mohammed Ahmad, Hachette) Archive
Monday, 23 October 2017
Punchbowl Boys High, often dubbed ‘NSW’s most troubled school’, was the subject of a 2016 autobiographical essay by Michael Mohammed Ahmad. Now, that reminiscence of his alma mater has become...
Tracker (Alexis Wright, Giramondo) Archive
Wednesday, 27 September 2017
A biography can be written in a standard form: subject born, raised, educated, worked and died. And that will be fine for most people. But not Tracker Tilmouth. He was a polarising, intelligent, charismatic...
Whiteley on Trial (Gabriella Coslovich, MUP) Archive
Wednesday, 30 August 2017
From the dramatis personae of the opening pages—the Suspect Paintings, the Authentic Painting and the Individuals—I was taken by this story of true crime and courtroom drama. Who would want...
Writers on Writers: On John Marsden | On Kate Jennings (Alice Pung | Erik Jensen, Black Inc.) Archive
Monday, 17 July 2017
Australian writers are being honoured in a new essay series called ‘Writers on Writers’, published by Black Inc. in association with the University of Melbourne and the State Library of...
The Choke (Sofie Laguna, A&U) Archive
Thursday, 29 June 2017
Sofie Laguna is a writer who can wrench beauty even from the horror of a child caught up in the toxic world of bastardised masculinity. Fearsome, vivid and raw, her...
Sunlight and Seaweed: An Argument for How to Feed, Power and Clean Up the World (Tim Flannery, Text) Archive
Monday, 22 May 2017
It is difficult to overstate the importance of this concise, convincingly argued view of our world’s prospects for its survival and improvement over the next 33 years (ie to 2050)....
Hinterland (Steven Lang, UQP) Archive
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...
The Last Garden (Eva Hornung, Text) Archive
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...
