The Naturalist’s Daughter (Tea Cooper, HQ)
Monday, 23 October 2017
At the heart of Tea Cooper’s The Naturalist’s Daughter are the stories of two bold, inspirational women connected across history by a great scientific controversy—the classification of the platypus. This...
Spinifex and Sunflowers (Avan Judd Stallard, Fremantle Press)
Monday, 23 October 2017
This disturbing novel is based on the experiences of its author, who spent three months working at Curtin Immigration Detention Centre in Western Australia. His protagonist, a university dropout and...
The Tattooist of Auschwitz (Heather Morris, Echo)
Monday, 23 October 2017
This novel is based on an incredible true story of resilience, loss and survival—the result of years of interviews between Heather Morris and Holocaust survivor Ludwig (Lale) Sokolov. The Tattooist...
A Free Flame: Australian Women Writers and Vocation in the Twentieth Century (Ann-Marie Priest, UWA Publishing)
Monday, 23 October 2017
This book traces the creative vocations of four notable Australian women writers of the mid-20th century, hinging on the notion of writing as an urgent, privately held imperative. Ann-Marie Priest’s...
Border Districts (Gerald Murnane, Giramondo)
Thursday, 28 September 2017
In Border Districts, which is conceived as Gerald Murnane’s last work of fiction, the narrator has moved to a remote town, near the border of a neighbouring state, so that he...
Dissent (Sally Percival Wood, Scribe)
Wednesday, 27 September 2017
Sally Percival Wood’s Dissent is a lively and accessible slice of Australian cultural history. Percival Wood revisits the tumultuous 1960s and reveals the extent to which an unlikely and often-forgotten...
A Timeline of Australian Food (Jan O’Connell, NewSouth)
Wednesday, 27 September 2017
Jan O’Connell’s A Timeline of Australian Food is a worthy and useful addition to the small but growing canon of Australian food history writing. Spanning 1860 to 2010, the book...
The Woman Who Fooled the World: Belle Gibson’s Cancer Con (Beau Donelly & Nick Toscano, Scribe)
Wednesday, 27 September 2017
The now infamous story of how Belle Gibson gave false hope to cancer patients in a global health and wellness scam is a treasure trove of lies and complicit enabling....
My Life and Other Fictions (Michael Giacometti, Spineless Wonders)
Wednesday, 27 September 2017
Bringing together 20 very different stories, My Life and Other Fictions is a bold debut from Michael Giacometti and a unique exercise in experimentation with form and voice. Initially it...
Into the World (Stephanie Parkyn, A&U)
Wednesday, 27 September 2017
Inspired by true events in the 18th century, Into the World is the story of Marie-Louise Girardin, an unwed woman who must escape revolutionary France to save the life of...
Surrogacy: A Human Rights Violation (Renate Klein, Spinifex)
Wednesday, 27 September 2017
Renate Klein’s book on surrogacy is intended to be a feminist work focusing on the rights of the surrogate, donor and child. Klein sets out her oppositions to the practice by...
Domestic Interior (Fiona Wright, Giramondo)
Wednesday, 30 August 2017
Fiona Wright’s second book Small Acts of Disappearance won the Kibble Literary Award for Australian women writers, and her debut Knuckled won the Mary Gilmore Award for poetry. In this new...
Homecamp (Doron and Stephanie Francis, Hardie Grant)
Wednesday, 30 August 2017
Homecamp is 250 pages of pure escapism. Compiled by Doron and Stephanie Francis, creators of the popular Homecamp blog and stylish outdoor lifestyle brand, this unusual coffee-table book features short...
Incorrigible Optimist: A Political Memoir (Gareth Evans, MUP)
Wednesday, 30 August 2017
Gareth Evans has enjoyed a stellar career as a politician, policy expert and internationalist. He has worked for governments and institutions that he variously describes as ‘gold standard’, ‘platinum’ and...
The Greatest Gift (Rachael Johns, HQ)
Wednesday, 30 August 2017
Rachael Johns is best known for her rural romances, but her more recent books, including the ABIA-winner The Patterson Girls, have moved into contemporary women’s fiction, or ‘life-lit’, as Johns...
The Passage of Love (Alex Miller, A&U)
Wednesday, 30 August 2017
The Passage of Love is a slow-burning, fictional recasting of dual Miles Franklin Award-winning novelist Alex Miller’s life, told through the often lost and solitary life of Robert Crofts, an...
Deadly Kerfuffle (Tony Martin, Affirm)
Wednesday, 30 August 2017
Dunlop Crescent is in an uproar. Muslims have taken over this once peaceful enclave. The Tamaki family, as rumour has it, are turning their house on its axis so it...
Atlantic Black (A S Patric, Transit Lounge)
Wednesday, 30 August 2017
Seventeen-year-old Katerina is an ambassador’s daughter on the precipice—and perhaps already over the edge—of womanhood. Travelling on board the transatlantic ocean liner RMS Aquitania en route to her beloved father...
Can You Hear the Sea? My Grandmother’s Story (Brenda Niall, Text)
Wednesday, 30 August 2017
When Brenda Niall was 10 years old her grandmother gave her a cedar box that was made more than 50 years ago by a brother who died as they were...
The Trauma Cleaner (Sarah Krasnostein, Text)
Thursday, 27 July 2017
Sandra Pankhurst was adopted through the Catholic Church in the 1950s by a Melbourne couple who would prove to be horrendously abusive parents. Driven out of home by the age...
Baby Lost: A Story of Grief and Hope (Hannah Robert, MUP)
Thursday, 27 July 2017
Baby Lost is a heartbreaking study of the aftermath of an accident that changed the author’s life. Hannah Robert—a law lecturer at Melbourne’s La Trobe University—is not a saccharine writer,...
Force of Nature (Jane Harper, Macmillan)
Thursday, 27 July 2017
Jane Harper’s follow-up to her 2016 bestseller The Dry is another well-written, pacey crime thriller. Force of Nature is set after the events of The Dry but can be read...
Suburbia (Jeremy Chambers, Text)
Thursday, 27 July 2017
Melbourne author Jeremy Chambers’ second novel is a nostalgic coming-of-age story set in the unglamorous outer-eastern suburbs of Melbourne in the 1980s. The book’s protagonist Roland is a bookish outsider...
The Book of Thistles (Noëlle Janaczewska, UWA Publishing)
Thursday, 27 July 2017
This debut from Windham-Campbell prize-winning playwright Noëlle Janaczewska is a genre-bending mash-up that incorporates memoir, popular science, history and food writing. Janaczewska uses her lifelong personal interest in the thistle...
Soon (Lois Murphy, Transit Lounge)
Thursday, 27 July 2017
Five four-wheel drives with tinted windows roll slowly, mysteriously, through a small Australian town during a winter solstice. Their purpose is unknown, their arrival an ominous portent. When they depart,...
Drawing Sybylla (Odette Kelada, UWA Publishing)
Thursday, 27 July 2017
Drawing Sybylla is an ambitious piece of writing that shines a spotlight on the injustices and inequalities faced by women writers in Australia throughout history. The winner of the 2016...
Bird Country (Claire Aman, Text)
Thursday, 27 July 2017
Claire Aman has regularly referred to Grafton, her northern New South Wales hometown, as ‘an inspiring town’. This inspiration is realised in Bird Country, a suite of quietly beautiful short...
Two Steps Forward (Graeme Simsion & Anne Buist, Text)
Thursday, 27 July 2017
Martin, a divorced English engineer, and Zoe, a widowed American artist, are each at a turning point in their lives. Unexpectedly alone, without money or young families to care for,...
A New England Affair (Steven Carroll, HarperCollins)
Wednesday, 26 July 2017
The third instalment of Steven Carroll’s quartet based on the life of T S Eliot is a quiet but strong narrative centred on the poet’s muse Emily Hale. As is...
Call of the Reed Warbler (Charles Massy, UQP)
Tuesday, 18 July 2017
Farmer and author Charles Massy has been thinking intensely about the environment and our relationship to it for most of his life. Brought up in the industrial farming tradition, with...
