Tuesday, 28 February 2017
Storyland by author and playwright Catherine McKinnon is a beautifully woven story of Australia: the land, the animals and the people—those who have always been here, those that have arrived,...

Tuesday, 28 February 2017
Karen Andrews’ reputation as a writer, editor and publisher precedes her, and this slim volume of poetry tackles the course of a life with such tenderness and grace that you...

Tuesday, 28 February 2017
Freedom is the right to choose the way we live, but what about the way we die? Euthanasia is a difficult subject and one that creates an emotional and political...

Tuesday, 28 February 2017
Allan Gyngell has written Fear of Abandonment with detail and insight drawn from a long career in foreign policy, from diplomat to intelligence advisor. It examines Australia’s involvement with the...

Tuesday, 28 February 2017
When we think of intelligence in the animal kingdom, it is usually the mammals that spring to mind, like dogs or chimps—the creatures that we can most easily identify with....

Tuesday, 28 February 2017
Canberra-based writer Jessica Friedmann makes an impressive debut with her essay collection Things That Helped. Having lived with depression her entire life, Friedmann has learnt to find comfort in cherished...

Thursday, 2 February 2017
Thirty-one-year-old Beth is lost in her current life in Western Australia’s wheat belt and running from a past that haunts her. She seeks refuge on an island in Papua New...

Thursday, 2 February 2017
The Circle and the Equator introduces readers to an original and fresh voice in Australian fiction. Perth-born writer and cultural historian Kyra Giorgi has drawn on her love of history...

Thursday, 2 February 2017
A dancer moves towards clarity; an ill-defined friendship threatens to sink a marriage; a strange Florentine love affair awakens a traveller’s longing for home. Across eight stories and a cast...

Thursday, 2 February 2017
The narrator of Peter Polites’ smart and pleasantly unnerving debut novel, Down the Hume, is in a bad relationship with a physically abusive man who is only ever referred to...

Thursday, 2 February 2017
On a rainy weekend, Iris and her family—her ex-husband, his new wife, her son and her friend’s daughter—are packing up their coastal holiday home. The house has seen parties, homemade...

Thursday, 2 February 2017
The cover blurb on Fiona Capp’s To Know My Name asks the reader, ‘how far would you go, for the ones you love?’. It’s a fair summary of this compelling...

Thursday, 2 February 2017
I opened this book expecting ‘middle age’ to cover approximately the ages 45-65 but noted social policy experts Patricia and Don Edgar believe that extended life expectancies—an added 25 years...

Thursday, 2 February 2017
In Newcastle author Michael Sala’s second novel, set in his hometown in 1989, a young family of four arrives from Sydney under strained circumstances. The coastal house Roy has bought...

Thursday, 2 February 2017
An Uncertain Grace is a powerful story told in five parts through the eyes of five characters from the present day to a post-climate-change world that is 100 years in...

Tuesday, 11 October 2016
Noel Tovey has led an amazing life. He went from a terrible childhood of deprivation and abuse to become one of Australia’s great artistic exports, before returning home to be...

Tuesday, 11 October 2016
Heather Taylor Johnson’s second novel Jean Harley Was Here is an exploration of grief, with each chapter presenting a different glimpse into the aftermath of the character Jean Harley’s death,...

Tuesday, 11 October 2016
Paula Keogh suffers a breakdown following the death of her best friend Julianne. It is while undergoing treatment in M Ward—the psychiatric unit of Canberra Hospital—that she meets the poet...

Tuesday, 27 September 2016
Barking Dogs is a novel in stories from short-story writer Rebekah Clarkson, set in the fictional Mt Barker, a once sleepy country town being engulfed by the outer suburbs. Each...

Tuesday, 27 September 2016
Candice Fox, winner of two Ned Kelly Awards and co-author with the bestselling James Patterson, has unleashed another taut, gripping crime thriller that is as accomplished as her publishing history...

Tuesday, 27 September 2016
Kit Gossard thinks her life is on track. She’s a photographer for an internationally renowned food magazine, and is engaged to a man who can provide a secure future. So...

Tuesday, 27 September 2016
Beth’s blogging alter-ego Lizzy may seem to have the perfect life, but Beth’s reality is far messier. Following the family’s relocation to Newcastle from the US, conflict seems to be...

Tuesday, 27 September 2016
Gwen, Goldie Goldbloom’s uneven but engaging new novel, takes a panoramic approach to familiar territory. Set mainly in London and Paris at the turn of the 19th century, it chronicles...

Tuesday, 27 September 2016
In 2015, Text reissued Robin Dalton’s 1965 memoir Aunts up the Cross as part of its ‘Text Classics’ series. The book offered a humorous glimpse into Dalton’s bohemian childhood in...

Tuesday, 27 September 2016
This book from German-born, Australia-based historian Jürgen Tampke is a great example of revisionist history. It’s a popular historical conceit that the end of World War I and the Treaty...