Wednesday, 13 March 2013
I thoroughly enjoyed this tale of Nell, a journalist in Perth during World War II. Although Nell generally covers ‘women’s business’ for a tabloid paper, one day she is asked...

Tuesday, 5 March 2013
Sweet Damage is the hotly anticipated new book from Rebecca James, whose debut YA thriller Beautiful Malice generated much hype around her reported million dollar advance and extensive foreign rights...

Tuesday, 26 February 2013
This is not a book about ‘how to feel good, how to find happiness or how to reap some reward for your goodness’. Hugh Mackay’s message is that while those...

Tuesday, 19 February 2013
Many of Books+Publishing’s readers may already be familiar with Jo Case, who is well known in Melbourne publishing circles as an editor and reviewer. Boomer and Me, a memoir about...

Tuesday, 12 February 2013
To say The Childhood of Jesus is a highly anticipated novel is an understatement; there has already been talk that it will bring J M Coetzee his third Booker Prize....

Wednesday, 6 February 2013
Bailey’s family has not had a good year. After her father’s accidental death, her sister has started drinking, her brother won’t take off his Batman cape, Bailey herself has stopped...

Wednesday, 30 January 2013
It’s the early 1930s. Whaling is booming in Antarctic waters while the fight for dominance over the land continues. The race to become the first woman to reach Antarctica is...

Tuesday, 22 January 2013
Alex has spent her whole life seeing someone else—the other Alex—looking back at her from the mirror. But now things have changed. A new school, new clothes—a new Alex. However,...

Tuesday, 15 January 2013
Murdered girls washed up on picture-postcard Tassie beaches. You could joke about not telling Tourism Tasmania, but sadly this novel takes some of its inspiration from real events, specifically, the...

Tuesday, 8 January 2013
Cat and Fiddle, winner of the 2011 CAL Scribe Fiction Prize for an unpublished manuscript, follows the scandals and fortunes of two connected families in rural Wiltshire ... This is...

Wednesday, 12 December 2012
Harry and Louisa are preoccupied with closeness, and while they struggle with the ups and downs of their own relationship, this need for intimacy manifests itself most strongly in their...

Wednesday, 5 December 2012
Marcus is a great warrior—a dragonslayer! At least, he is online. Gaming is the one place he feels at home since his only friend Bashir moved to India, a fact...

Wednesday, 28 November 2012
Alongside Rubinstein and Horowitz, William Kapell was widely considered one of the three greatest pianists of his time. Kapell died in 1953 at the age of 31 in a plane...

Tuesday, 20 November 2012
This broad collection of migration stories is an example of a good idea backed up by an excellent execution. Many of the contributors are known names in literary circles: Dmetri...

Tuesday, 13 November 2012
‘I was the binge-drinking health reporter. During the week, I wrote about Australia’s booze-soaked culture. At the weekends, I wrote myself off.’ A senior journalist with the Sunday Age, Scottish-born...

Wednesday, 7 November 2012
The Romance Diaries is a fun, fast-paced and modern read for lovers of the Clueless style of Jane Austen updates. In this first book in a new series written pseudonymously...

Tuesday, 30 October 2012
Some mystery novels ease into the story, and others just thrust you into the middle of everything and let you sort it all out yourself. Shallow Breath is definitely the...

Wednesday, 24 October 2012
I jumped at the chance to review this, the second of Judith Lucy’s memoirs. I found her first go at the genre (The Lucy Family Alphabet) genuinely moving and of...

Tuesday, 16 October 2012
Karen Andrews blogs at miscmum.com and previously edited and published a collection of writing from blogs, Miscellaneous Voices. Crying in the Car is a collection of short stories, essays and...

Tuesday, 9 October 2012
Following his successful books 1788 and The Gold Rush, David Hill’s The Great Race traces the little-known story of the competition between Britain and France to chart the last stretches...

Tuesday, 2 October 2012
'This book reveals two of life’s certainties: one, that Gideon Haigh is an outstanding writer, and two, that Shane Warne’s tabloid-fodder life is utterly compelling. Bring the two together and...

Wednesday, 26 September 2012
Imagine you are sitting in a cosy lounge room somewhere, chatting with literary journalist Ramona Koval about her life and reading interests. There are casual recollections of her past, and...

Wednesday, 19 September 2012
Chasing the Sun is a story about vampires who definitely don’t sparkle. Rather, they take drugs, wear sunglasses at night and have jobs in fields such as pet psychiatry. Honda...

Tuesday, 4 September 2012
Better than Fiction is a brilliant collection of travel stories, written especially for Lonely Planet, which spans the globe in the tradition of the publisher’s previous anthologies such as Unpacked:...

Tuesday, 28 August 2012
Black Spring is a dark, gothic tale inspired by Wuthering Heights. In this fantasy version of 19th-century England, some people are born with magical powers. However, only the male babies...

Tuesday, 21 August 2012
This is a heartfelt and moving collection of short stories that cuts right to the emotional centre of everyday life. With her trademark evocative prose, Cate Kennedy exposes the almost...

Tuesday, 14 August 2012
In The Happiness Show, Australian comedian and writer Catherine Deveny turns her hand to fiction for the first time. The result is a lively, if a little predictable, blend of...

Tuesday, 7 August 2012
Raised in a fundamentalist family of Pentecostals, where sin is an ever-prevalent danger, 13-year-old Ruth must reconcile her faith with reality as dark family secrets unravel over the course of...

Tuesday, 31 July 2012
S.C.U.M. (Students Combined Underground Movement—the name Tom gives his group of misfit buddies) takes the reader on a day in the life of 14-year-old Tom Zurbo-Goldblatt, facing school bullies, his...

Wednesday, 25 July 2012
Judd Bell is a NASA astronaut who has lost his mojo. Ever since his best friend was killed in a shuttle disaster, he’s been doubting himself, and the strain is...