Jane Jolly and Sally Heinrich’s ‘One Step at a Time’
Wednesday, 14 January 2015
MidnightSun ran a successful crowdfunding campaign to finance its first picture book. It is an unusual and challenging book to launch its children’s list. It is touching and tragic, but also...
Debra Oswald’s ‘Useful’
Wednesday, 7 January 2015
At his nadir, Sullivan Moss stuffs up his own suicide attempt and is forced to reflect on his unreliable, selfish, underachieving ways. He strikes on the idea of doing something...
Dianne Touchell’s ‘A Small Madness’
Wednesday, 10 December 2014
Rose is in Year 12, happy spending time with her best friend Liv and being madly in love with her perfect boyfriend Michael. Then suddenly, she finds out she’s pregnant...
Rebecca Starford’s ‘Bad Behaviour’
Wednesday, 3 December 2014
Being a 14-year-old girl can be brutal, and Bad Behaviour is Melbourne-based editor Rebecca Starford’s memoir of a harrowing year spent at a posh boarding school’s bush campus. Starford lived in a...
Nick Dyrenfurth’s ‘Mateship: A Very Australian History’
Wednesday, 26 November 2014
Surveys of Australians continue to show that ‘mateship’ is one of our country’s defining qualities. But what does it actually mean? In this provocative history, academic Nick Dyrenfurth traces Australian...
Leisa Rayven’s ‘Bad Romeo’
Wednesday, 19 November 2014
Bad Romeo doesn’t quite shake off its Twilight fan-fiction origins, but author Leisa Rayven manages a funny, sexy narrative voice that lifts this book above its peers. Cassie Taylor is cast in a...
Jackie French’s ‘Birrung: The Secret Friend’
Wednesday, 12 November 2014
The setting is Sydney Cove, 1790. When Barney Bean catches the eye of the ‘Indian’ girl adopted by the colony’s chaplain, he has no idea how it is going to...
Lynette Noni’s ‘Akarnae: The Medoran Chronicles Book One’
Thursday, 6 November 2014
This is another book about ‘young people at magic school’, which we’ve seen a lot of in the post-Harry Potter market. To be fair, the magic school plot device was...
Patrick Holland’s ‘Navigato’
Tuesday, 28 October 2014
With the poise and economy of expression of a Zen Buddhist kōan, Navigatio explores the worldly and metaphysical searchings of St Brendan of Clonfert, a sixth-century Christian monk who braves...
Jim Haynes’ ‘Australia’s Best Unknown Stories’
Wednesday, 22 October 2014
Jim Haynes sorts the facts from the furphies in the audiobook Australia’s Best Unknown Stories, which combines snippets of Australian colonial history, short stories and poetry. With the voice of a...
John Marsden’s ‘South of Darkness’
Wednesday, 15 October 2014
South of Darkness is John Marsden’s first novel for an adult audience, set in London in the late 1700s. Barnaby Fletch has no memory of his parents. For as long as...
Jukuna Mona Chuguna, Pat Lowe & Mervyn Street’s ‘The Girl from the Great Sandy Desert’
Wednesday, 8 October 2014
This chapter book is a charming collection of stories by Jukuna Mona Chuguna, a storyteller from the great Sandy Desert. They have been interpreted and re-told by her friend and...
Susan Hawthorne’s ‘Bibliodiversity: A Manifesto for Independent Publishing’
Wednesday, 24 September 2014
In 2002 I attended the launch of Susan Hawthorne’s Wild Politics: Feminism, Globalisation and Bio/diversity and later used it as an economics text. In that book Hawthorne put the case...
Helen Razer & Bernard Keane’s ‘A Short History of Stupid’
Wednesday, 24 September 2014
A Short History of Stupid is concerned with the rise of Stupidity in a world ruled by ‘fade-resistant individualism’, extreme paternalism, political condescension, conspicuous compassion and ‘the injurious yoga class...
Erik Jensen’s ‘Acute Misfortune: The Life and Death of Adam Cullen’
Wednesday, 17 September 2014
When the Archibald Prize-winning artist Adam Cullen died in 2012 at the age of 46, the Australian art world was unsure who it had lost: a vulgar, naïf enfant terrible,...
Judith Rossell’s ‘Withering-by-Sea’
Wednesday, 10 September 2014
Set in a glum Victorian seaside town, Judith Rossell has written an engaging and evocative mystery-adventure story. Eleven-year-old Stella Montgomery lives a dreary life with her three horrible aunts in...
Steve Kilbey’s ‘Something Quite Peculiar’
Wednesday, 3 September 2014
This memoir from one of Australia’s most gifted songwriters is a lively, anecdotal account of 40-plus years of musicianship. As the frontman of The Church—one of this country’s great rock...
Andrew Rule’s ‘Kerry Stokes’
Wednesday, 27 August 2014
The cards have always been stacked against Kerry Stokes. Born John Patrick Alford, his mother gave him up for adoption. His name was scratched out by a judge’s pen on...
Claire Atkins’ ‘Nona & Me’
Wednesday, 20 August 2014
Nona & Me is one of those wonderful books that takes you deeply into a rarely seen world and brings it vibrantly to life. Set in a remote part of the...
Peter Carey’s ‘Amnesia’
Wednesday, 13 August 2014
After recent novels set in England and Germany (The Chemistry of Tears) and the US (Parrot and Olivier in America), Peter Carey returns to Australia for the first time since...
Helen Garner’s ‘This House of Grief’
Wednesday, 6 August 2014
On the evening of Father’s Day 2005, Robert Farquharson was driving his three children home to their mother—from whom he was separated—when his car left the road, travelled through a...
Lorelei Vashti’s ‘Dress, Memory’
Wednesday, 30 July 2014
Dress, Memory is a memoir of Lorelei Vashti’s twenties, told with a focus on her impressive—and mostly vintage—dress collection. From her family home to university in Brisbane, to a fledgling...
Catherine Harris’ ‘The Family Men’
Wednesday, 23 July 2014
A month after a post-season celebration, footballer Harry Furey still can’t remember what actually happened at the team’s men-only Sportsman’s Night—but he knows it was bad. Harry comes from an...
Sonya Hartnett’s ‘Golden Boys’
Wednesday, 16 July 2014
Golden Boys is not a departure for Sonya Hartnett, but it’s a continuation of her craft that shows why she is one of Australia’s best writers, for adults as well...
Paddy O’Reilly’s ‘The Wonders’
Wednesday, 9 July 2014
After a failed heart transplant, Leon is the world’s first recipient of an entirely mechanical heart, engineered and implanted in secret. He is recruited by a Texan entrepreneur to join...
Jessie Cole’s ‘Deeper Water’
Wednesday, 2 July 2014
The premise of Jessie Cole’s second novel is reminiscent of her acclaimed debut novel Darkness on the Edge of Town: a car accident brings a stranger into the lives of...
Christie Nieman’s ‘As Stars Fall’
Wednesday, 25 June 2014
The fire swept through Murramunda two months ago. For bird-loving Robin, it was the spark that caused her family to fall apart, forcing her and her mum to move to...
Claire Zorn’s ‘The Protected’
Wednesday, 18 June 2014
Strong characters and a standout depiction of high school bullying make Claire Zorn’s second YA novel, following The Sky So Heavy, worth reading. In the present tense, 14-year-old Hannah awaits...
Peter Docker’s ‘Sweet One’
Thursday, 12 June 2014
Sassy, hard-drinking, menthol-smoking, blonde-curled protagonist Izzy is a newspaper journalist and daughter of a cop who is determined to reveal the truth, particularly about racism and police injustice. A big...
Malcolm Fraser’s ‘Dangerous Allies’
Wednesday, 4 June 2014
Former prime minister Malcolm Fraser argues that for too long Australia has relied on what he terms ‘strategic dependence’. Rather than set our own course on defence strategy and foreign...
