Wednesday, 18 July 2012
Sixteen-year-old Sadie is growing tired of spending her summer days lounging on the beach with her tedious cousins and her wants-to-be-more-than-a-friend Tom. She can’t wait to bid farewell to her...

Wednesday, 11 July 2012
The Rise of the Fifth Estate is a well-researched and engaging look at the world of social media and blogging in the context of the Australian political system, and author...

Wednesday, 4 July 2012
We first meet the Westaway family through the character of young Kip, brother to Francis and Connie, son to a grieving mother Jean and a recently deceased father. It is...

Wednesday, 27 June 2012
South Sudanese refugee Majok Tulba’s brutal, poetic debut views the monstrousness of war through the innocent eyes of a young boy. Beneath the Darkening Sky tells the harrowing tale of...

Wednesday, 20 June 2012
Fishing for Tigers is Emily Maguire’s fourth novel, and a departure from the darkness of the most recent Smoke in the Room. Maguire’s exploration of unconventional relationships ... is central...

Thursday, 14 June 2012
Roberta ‘Bertie’ Lightfoot suffers from polio as a child, and is helped through it by her tough-minded mother, along with the paper and pencils given to her by her father....

Wednesday, 6 June 2012
Aden wakes up in a blood-filled bathtub in a strange place. He knows he has killed himself, but remembers only fragments of his life. As he explores his surroundings he...

Wednesday, 30 May 2012
You may know of Susan Johnson for her brave memoir of motherhood, A Better Woman, or her novel about writer Charmian Clift, The Broken Book, among other titles. Her seventh...

Tuesday, 22 May 2012
'Although The Rest is Weight spans seven years of Mills’ short fiction, it has a graceful coherence of style and theme. With crisp, vivid prose, Mills inhabits the inner lives...

Wednesday, 16 May 2012
'With the kind of minute detail and first-hand accounts that bring to life an era and its people, Bongiorno draws his reader into the tangled s-xual web of our history...

Wednesday, 9 May 2012
'Emily Perkins, acclaimed author of Novel about My Wife, chronicles a person’s life with depth, poignancy and passion. She manages to find the right, often surprising, words to describe the...

Wednesday, 2 May 2012
'Randa Abdel-Fattah’s first adult novel ... the cleverly named No Sex in the City is unadulterated Aussie chick-lit with a twist: lead character Esma is a devoted Muslim, which adds...

Thursday, 26 April 2012
The Vogel Award is announced tonight. Floundering by Romy Ash was shortlisted for last year’s award and was subsequently published by Text this month. ‘It’s a dark and lyrical tale’...

Wednesday, 18 April 2012
Spring-boarding off the recent wave of global natural disasters (particularly Queensland), Gleeson does a chillingly effective job of destroying all that is familiar and safe. Like Red, the reader is...

Thursday, 12 April 2012
We have had histories of salt, porcelain and even double-entry bookkeeping—so why not the office? It is an integral part of many people’s lives and yet we know so little...

Wednesday, 4 April 2012
The Children of the King challenges stereotypes of war from the first page, which opens, not with a sombre and terror-filled London, but with a lively household full of love...

Tuesday, 27 March 2012
Khemri is a prince of the empire, which governs the staggeringly huge population of humanity scattered across the galaxy. Taken from their parents as children and equipped with the ultimate...

Sunday, 11 September 2011
Stephanie Laurens’ readers will be familiar with Lord Julian, or Roscoe, the hero of her latest Regency-set romance. However, they will be disappointed with the result: the novel is marred...