The Paper House (Anna Spargo-Ryan, Picador)
Thursday, 26 May 2016
Anna Spargo-Ryan has a strong voice on social media and in shorter-form writing, advocating for mental-health awareness by being honest about her own raw experiences with mental illness. Her debut...
The Island Will Sink (Briohny Doyle, Brow Books)
Thursday, 26 May 2016
Local literary journal The Lifted Brow makes its first foray into trade publishing with this debut speculative-fiction novel by regular Brow columnist Briohny Doyle. In the middle-distant future, major ecological...
Ghost Empire (Richard Fidler, ABC Books)
Thursday, 26 May 2016
In Ghost Empire radio presenter Richard Fidler recounts his travels to Rome and Istanbul with his 14-year-old son, exploring the fabled Land Walls of Constantinople and undertaking a rite of...
Position Doubtful: Mapping Landscape and Memories (Kim Mahood, Scribe)
Tuesday, 10 May 2016
Artist and writer Kim Mahood grew up on Tanami Downs Station in the Northern Territory. She has always felt the strong pull of the land and its Indigenous people, and...
Brett Whiteley: Art, Life and the Other Thing (Ashleigh Wilson, Text)
Tuesday, 10 May 2016
It just so happens that I was reading Our Man Elsewhere by Thornton McCamish and considering what makes a good biography when Ashleigh Wilson’s Brett Whiteley: Art, Life and the...
Writing to the Wire (ed by Dan Disney & Kit Kelen, UWA Publishing)
Tuesday, 10 May 2016
What place is there for poetry in Australia’s highly divisive and politicised public debate about refugees and immigration? It’s a question the editors of this significant new collection of both...
Truly Madly Guilty (Liane Moriarty, Macmillan)
Tuesday, 10 May 2016
Liane Moriarty is an author with a dedicated fan-base, and it seems only fair to preface this review by saying I have not read any of her previous novels. Not...
Skylarking (Kate Mildenhall, Black Inc.)
Tuesday, 10 May 2016
Kate Mildenhall’s debut novel Skylarking is a historical novel reminiscent of Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites and Shirley Barrett’s Rush Oh!, though perhaps for a younger readership. It’s a story of...
Rebellious Daughters (ed by Maria Katsonis & Lee Kofman, Ventura Press)
Friday, 29 April 2016
Rebellious Daughters features a stellar line-up of Australian female writers sharing touching stories of rebellion, family life, coming of age and motherhood. Edited by Maria Katsonis and Lee Kofman, this...
The Art of Time Travel: Historians and their Craft (Tom Griffiths, Black Inc.)
Friday, 29 April 2016
History, writes Tom Griffiths, is ‘the fundamental fabric of a common humanity’. In The Art of Time Travel: Historians and their Craft, the Canberra-based academic and historian examines how writers...
Treading Air (Ariella Van Luyn, Affirm Press)
Friday, 29 April 2016
Confined to a locked Brisbane hospital in 1945, Lizzie O’Dea is thinking about the imminent release from gaol of her husband Joe. He’s served 20 years and she’s not sure...
Nevernight (Jay Kristoff, HarperVoyager)
Friday, 29 April 2016
This is an unusual new fantasy novel. Told in a mixture of third- and second-person narrative, it’s the story of a young woman who goes from noblewoman to outcast before...
Troppo (Madelaine Dickie, Fremantle Press)
Friday, 29 April 2016
In Madelaine Dickie’s debut novel Troppo, which won the 2014 TAG Hungerford Award for an unpublished manuscript by a WA writer, we meet Penny, a young, directionless woman who finds...
Labour of Love: A Story of Generosity, Hope and Surrogacy (Shannon Garner, S&S)
Friday, 29 April 2016
With two children of her own and positive birth experiences, Shannon Garner felt the urge to help others and found a gay couple, Jon and Justin, who needed a surrogate....
The Sound (Sarah Drummond, Fremantle Press)
Friday, 29 April 2016
From the first pages of Sarah Drummond’s debut novel—with its descriptively realistic prose—you can tell the author has spent time at sea. In fact, Drummond, who has a PhD in...
Wood Green (Sean Rabin, Giramondo)
Friday, 29 April 2016
Sean Rabin’s debut novel Wood Green begins as a quiet, small-town Australian drama and ends, spectacularly, as a bizarre metafictional parable on literary influence that a young David Cronenberg would...
Black British (Hebe de Souza, Ventura Press)
Friday, 1 April 2016
Hebe de Souza’s debut novel explores identity and belonging in post-colonial India. Lucy has returned to Goa 21 years after her family was forced to leave their home as the...
The Healing Party (Micheline Lee, Black Inc.)
Friday, 1 April 2016
This debut family drama centres on Natasha Chan, who, having sought exile in Darwin away from her devout Christian family, returns home to nurse her ailing mother, who is dying...
Out of the Ice (Ann Turner, S&S)
Friday, 1 April 2016
Out of the Ice is the second novel by screenwriter Ann Turner (The Lost Swimmer). Its narrator is a scientist who has just over-wintered in Antarctica, and is sent to do...
Error Australis (Ben Pobjie, Affirm)
Friday, 1 April 2016
Ben Pobjie sets the tone for his book Error Australis by comparing history to reality TV; both are filled with drama, suspense, love, hatred, loyalty, deception and horses—and we may...
Comfort Food (Ellen van Neerven, UQP)
Friday, 1 April 2016
Comfort Food is the eagerly anticipated poetry collection from Ellen van Neerven, whose debut 2014 fiction collection Heat and Light marked her as one of our most promising new writers....
A Long Time Coming: Essays on Old Age (Melanie Joosten, Scribe)
Friday, 1 April 2016
It can be difficult to admit that we are all products of an ageist society, guilty of stereotyping and discrimination against the elderly, regarding them as a hopeless and expensive...
The Dry (Jane Harper, Macmillan)
Monday, 21 March 2016
In the tiny town of Kiewarra, a mother and son are found murdered. The likely culprit is the father, also found shot dead in the back of his truck. It...
The Last Days of Ava Langdon (Mark O’Flynn, UQP)
Monday, 21 March 2016
Let us be clear—not all novelists are poets and not all poets are novelists. Mark O’Flynn is that rare writer who can do both well. The Last Days of Ava...
Portable Curiosities (Julie Koh, UQP)
Monday, 21 March 2016
Armed with an uncanny ability to capture the zeitgeist of the time—whether it be contemporary society’s obsession with foodie culture or institutionalised racism and misogyny—Australian writer Julie Koh’s darkly satirical...
Avalanche: A Love Story (Julia Leigh, Hamish Hamilton)
Monday, 21 March 2016
Author and director Julia Leigh began IVF treatment at 38, knowing that the odds were stacked against her yet still hoping that she would be ‘one of the lucky ones’....
Between a Wolf and a Dog (Georgia Blain, Scribe)
Wednesday, 24 February 2016
Georgia Blain’s Between a Wolf and a Dog explores the intricacies of modern family life with the emotional veracity you might expect of a book with a therapist as a...
An Isolated Incident (Emily Maguire, Picador)
Wednesday, 24 February 2016
There has been a proliferation of pretty-dead-girl thrillers in the past few years and it shows no sign of letting up. But don’t let the trend fool you into thinking...
A Kiss from Mr Fitzgerald (Natasha Lester, Hachette)
Wednesday, 24 February 2016
It’s 1920s New York. Evelyn Lockhart has moved to Manhattan to chase her dream of studying at Columbia University and becoming one of the first female doctors in America. In...
The Last Painting of Sara de Vos (Dominic Smith, A&U)
Wednesday, 24 February 2016
It’s the late 1950s and a young Australian post-grad student, Ellie Shipley, agrees to make a copy of a little known work by the 17th-century Dutch painter Sara De Vos....
