Tuesday, 8 October 2013
When I was asked if I wanted to review Shimmer, it was pitched to me as ‘a teenage genie from another planet is sent to earth …’ and I didn’t hear...

Tuesday, 1 October 2013
The subtitle of this book is quite fitting. For unlike other explorers of colonial Australia, Edward Eyre has never had much hold on the cultural memory. Aside from the highway,...

Tuesday, 24 September 2013
I’ve been a fan of Debra Adelaide’s writing since The Hotel Albatross was published in the mid 90s. Her last novel, The Household Guide to Dying, was a wonderfully touching...

Tuesday, 17 September 2013
Picking up on the current Sherlock Holmes zeitgeist, Every Breath is the story of two teenagers playing at detective, trying to solve the death of their friend Homeless Dave. Rather than Holmes...

Tuesday, 10 September 2013
Lloyd Jones lives in Wellington, but when an earthquake devastates Christchurch he is asked by the BBC to write about it. Feeling unable to ‘speak for all’, he declines. Instead,...

Tuesday, 3 September 2013
Stuck in hospital after an accident he can’t remember, Alex is forced to try to put together the events that led him to this moment, starting with the terrible loss...

Wednesday, 28 August 2013
The Tudor family has long been a focus for historical novels, with authors such as Alison Weir, Philippa Gregory and Hilary Mantel flooding the market with Henry VIII and his...

Wednesday, 21 August 2013
A weeping girl, a haunted somnambulist and a mysterious magician named Bob—Margaret Wild’s latest YA novel is a riveting exploration of the measure of human life and happiness, worlds away...

Tuesday, 13 August 2013
The subject of Peter Goldsworthy’s memoir is his first 18 years and ‘the getting of stupidity’. ‘The getting of wisdom would have to wait,’ he writes. Goldsworthy’s father was a...

Wednesday, 7 August 2013
This impressive debut novel from Melbourne writer Nelika McDonald had me hooked from the beginning. Told through realistically drawn characters, this part thriller, part coming-of-age story revolves around 14-year-old Sarah...

Friday, 26 July 2013
Author and Indigenous academic Alexis Wright’s haunting third novel is hard to capture in simple terms as, similar to her previous fiction, it operates largely through abstraction and metaphor. Wright’s...

Monday, 22 July 2013
Sixteen-year-old Danika is a street kid in a world where a tyrant king keeps the population cowed with alchemy bombs dropped by royal biplanes. The only way to escape to...

Wednesday, 17 July 2013
Kirsten Krauth’s debut novel is by turns frustrating and exhilarating. On one hand, the plot is fraught with clichés connected to the too-familiar ‘rite of passage’ plotline. On the other,...

Wednesday, 10 July 2013
Green Vanilla Tea is the winner of the 2013 Finch Memoir Prize and it’s easy to see why. Marie Williams, her husband Dominic, and their two sons Michael and Nicolas are...

Tuesday, 2 July 2013
It’s quite a bold move to name your book Holy Bible; it could pique curiosity or incite alienation. Let’s hope it’s the former, as regardless of first impressions, Vanessa Russell...

Wednesday, 26 June 2013
This short book is the first in what promises to be a great new series from Black Inc. called ‘Redbacks’. The series aims to introduce readers to important national debates...

Wednesday, 19 June 2013
Ali Alizadeh’s critically acclaimed book of poetry Ashes in the Air was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards last year and I would be surprised if Transactions doesn’t receive...

Thursday, 13 June 2013
‘Now you are dead perhaps we can really talk.’ Ryan’s last poetry collection, The Argument, won the WA Premier’s Book Award for poetry and her previous volume, Scar Revision, was shortlisted in...

Wednesday, 5 June 2013
Catherine Berlin, a private investigator with a heroin addiction, is battling the unseasonal heat of London as well as physical scars from an earlier investigation. She is also grappling with...

Wednesday, 29 May 2013
ABC journalist Mark Willacy won a Walkley Award for his coverage of the 2011 tsunami and subsequent nuclear disasters in Japan. In the years since he has conducted interviews with...

Wednesday, 22 May 2013
The book that comes to mind on having finished Inga Simpson’s Mr Wigg is Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. They share nothing much in common; Mr Wigg is set in country Australia in 1970,...

Wednesday, 15 May 2013
In this suspenseful gothic thriller set in late Victorian England, John Harwood (The Ghost Writer, Séance) has clearly had fun with the genre while creating a compelling page-turner with enough...

Wednesday, 8 May 2013
A road novel, a tale of magic realism, a story of two outsiders finding each other, and a search for identity saga. Lightning, an ambitious, finely written novel from first-time...

Tuesday, 30 April 2013
Over the years Perth-based screenwriter Ron Elliott has accumulated a drawer full of part-finished scripts or sketches for film or TV projects that haven’t come to fruition. Rather than letting...

Monday, 22 April 2013
Timeliness is next to godliness if you’re a popular fiction author, and Peter Cotton’s debut novel Dead Cat Bounce is about as on the money as it gets in terms...

Tuesday, 16 April 2013
The entire town of Broken Hill has been killed off by a deadly weapon: a word. And it seems as though the word is still in there. Only one man...

Wednesday, 10 April 2013
Mel Campbell’s first book is a lively and personal waltz through the history and culture of clothing size and fit. Campbell cuts through the rhetoric of clothing designers and fashion...

Wednesday, 3 April 2013
Sabina is no ordinary 16-year-old girl. On alternate days, she wakes up in a different life. In one, she’s a popular socialite with a rich family and a ‘perfect’ boyfriend....

Wednesday, 27 March 2013
On Christmas morning a biblically epic storm traps Sarah Barnard and her horse on the (nominally Tasmanian) Devil’s Mountain. Sarah finds shelter and supplies at an abandoned workmen’s camp and...

Wednesday, 20 March 2013
In his third novel, Richard Beasley tells a ‘rites of passage’ story from the perspective of the child while the adult lurks in the background. The best parts of Me...