Islands (Peggy Frew, A&U)
Friday, 1 February 2019
Peggy Frew shows her trademark flair for bringing complex domestic lives to the fore in her latest novel Islands. At first the book seems to have more in common with...
Unlike the Heart: A Memoir of Brain and Mind (Nicola Redhouse, UQP)
Friday, 1 February 2019
Unlike the Heart is a quest to understand a mind, from the mind governing it, and offers much to appeal to different interests. Nicola Redhouse relates her troubled pregnancies and...
The Van Apfel Girls are Gone (Felicity McLean, Fourth Estate)
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...
Into the Fire (Sonia Orchard, Affirm Press)
Thursday, 29 November 2018
Sonia Orchard’s second work of literary fiction, Into the Fire, is a distinctly Australian novel. Descriptions of smoky blue-green gums that paint a vivid picture of rural Victoria are balanced...
Driving into the Sun (Marcella Polain, Fremantle Press)
Thursday, 29 November 2018
At the centre of Marcella Polain’s second novel is 11-year-old Orla, whose flawed-yet-beloved father, a man with his own thwarted hopes and dreams, is a figure with whom she is...
Fridays with My Folks (Amal Awad, Vintage)
Thursday, 29 November 2018
In her fifth nonfiction book, journalist Amal Awad investigates ageing in Australia from her perspective as an adult daughter grappling with a parent’s decline. Woven into her analysis is the...
Rapture’s Roadway (Virginia Jealous, Peter Bishop)
Thursday, 29 November 2018
Author Virginia Jealous is a travel writer for Lonely Planet and a published poet in her own right, but in Rapture's Roadway, she pursues her late father’s lifelong obsession with...
Accidental Feminists (Jane Caro, MUP)
Thursday, 29 November 2018
Jane Caro grew up in Australia in the 1960s and 1970s—the heyday of second-wave feminism. In her latest work of nonfiction, she paints a picture of the everyday women and...
Invented Lives (Andrea Goldsmith, Scribe)
Thursday, 29 November 2018
On the streets of St Petersburg in 1985, Galina bumps into Andrew, an irrevocably shy Australian artist. Soon, she is on a plane to Melbourne in search of freedom. As...
Fusion (Kate Richards, Hamish Hamilton)
Thursday, 1 November 2018
Kate Richards burst onto the literary scene in 2013 with her award-winning Madness: A Memoir, which described her decade of living with psychosis. She returns now with her first novel,...
A Season on Earth (Gerald Murnane, Text)
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...
Written in the stars: Minnie Darke on ‘Star-crossed’
Tuesday, 30 October 2018
Minnie Darke’s Star-crossed (Michael Joseph, March) follows an aspiring journalist who begins to tinker with her paper’s astrology section after learning that her crush consults his horoscope whenever he’s faced with making...
Bound together: Kate Richards on ‘Fusion’
Tuesday, 30 October 2018
Kate Richards’ Fusion (Hamish Hamilton, February 2019) tells the story of conjoined twins, their carer, and an injured stranger who is brought into their isolated bush home. Reviewer Jacqui Davies described...
Star-crossed (Minnie Darke, Michael Joseph)
Tuesday, 30 October 2018
Star-crossed is a charming rom-com centred on an aspiring journalist whose attempts to influence fate lead to unintended—and at times hilarious—consequences. When Justine Carmichael finally gets a promotion at the...
Call Me Evie (J P Pomare, Hachette)
Thursday, 25 October 2018
What do you do when you can’t remember the incident that changed your life? Seventeen-year-old Kate—now using the alias ‘Evie’ to protect her identity—is being held captive in a remote...
Bookish backchat: Elias Grieg on ‘I Can’t Remember the Title but the Cover is Blue’
Thursday, 25 October 2018
Author, academic and bookseller Elias Grieg’s debut book I Can't Remember the Title but the Cover is Blue (A&U, December) is an ‘always amusing and often laugh-out-loud funny’ compendium detailing Grieg’s...
Half Moon Lake (Kirsten Alexander, Bantam)
Thursday, 25 October 2018
In July of 1913 Sonny Davenport, the four-year-old son of a prominent family in America’s Deep South, goes missing. The father puts his political ambitions on hold to chase up...
Beyond Words: A Year with Kenneth Cook (Jacqueline Kent, UQP)
Thursday, 25 October 2018
On the face of it, Jacqueline Kent’s memoir feels like a simple story, a May to December romance between editor Kent and author Kenneth Cook. Like most of us, Kent...
Imperfect: How Our Bodies Shape the People We Become (Lee Kofman, Affirm Press)
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...
Man at the Window (Robert Jeffreys, Echo)
Thursday, 25 October 2018
In the mid 1960s at a boarding school in Western Australia, a boarding master is shot dead. The shooting is deemed an accident and Detective Cardilini is sent in to...
Saving You (Charlotte Nash, Hachette)
Thursday, 25 October 2018
Following The Paris Wedding and her series of romantic rural medical dramas, Charlotte Nash’s novel Saving You features a woman crossing the US on an emotionally fuelled odyssey to find...
I Can’t Remember the Title but the Cover Is Blue (Elias Greig, A&U)
Thursday, 25 October 2018
Sydney bookseller Elias Greig thought writing down his customer interactions would make for a nice creative outlet in between part-time work and his PhD thesis. The resulting book, similar in...
The Finest Gold (Brad Cooper, Scribe)
Wednesday, 24 October 2018
Australian swimmer Brad Cooper won gold at the Munich Olympic Games in 1972. The Finest Gold is a coming-of-age memoir that looks at Cooper’s teenage years and the amazing route...
A twist of fate: Leigh Sales on ‘Any Ordinary Day’
Thursday, 27 September 2018
Author and journalist Leigh Sales’ third work of nonfiction, Any Ordinary Day: Blindsides, Resilience and What Happens After the Worst Day of Your Life (Hamish Hamilton, October), is an incisive...
The Spite Game (Anna Snoekstra, HQ Fiction)
Thursday, 27 September 2018
Anna Snoekstra's thriller The Spite Game opens with protagonist Ava confessing to the cops everything she knows about the disappearance of her former high school friend Mel, beginning with when...
Two Old Men Dying (Tom Keneally, Vintage)
Thursday, 30 August 2018
Tom Keneally’s latest novel is a dual narrative shared between Shelby Apples, an Oscar-winning documentary maker in the present day, and Learned Man, thought to be a link to early...
Table for Eight (Tricia Stringer, HQ Fiction)
Thursday, 30 August 2018
The cover for Table for Eight noticeably lacks two mainstays of Tricia Stringer’s usual book covers: a woman in a hat, and a landscape in the background. This is because...
Preservation (Jock Serong, Text)
Thursday, 30 August 2018
Jock Serong's Preservation is based on the true story of the shipwrecked merchant vessel Sydney Cove in 1797. A stranded group of 17 men set out on the arduous trek...
Sisters of No Mercy (Vincent Silk, Brio)
Thursday, 30 August 2018
In Vincent Silk's debut ‘cli-fi’ novel, scenes of destruction and desperation are artfully crafted in a city that seems like most metropolises in the western world. It's an unnamed, yet...
Best Summer Stories (ed by Aviva Tuffield, Black Inc.)
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...
