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WBN advance reviews >

Chinese Fish (Grace Yee, Giramondo) 

Tuesday, 25 April 2023
Chinese Fish is a brilliant work of genre-bending prose poetry by award-winning poet Grace Yee. Full of subtle poetic turns, Yee’s narrative is an intimate look at a Cantonese family...

Endo Days (Libby Trainor Parker, Wakefield) 

Tuesday, 25 April 2023
Libby Trainor Parker has written the perfect book adaptation of the cabaret show she performed in her PJs about endometriosis. The vibe? Women have been in pain, and ignored, forever....

Feast (Emily O’Grady, A&U) 

Tuesday, 18 April 2023
Like her Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award-winning debut The Yellow House, Emily O’Grady’s Feast is a compelling but often uncomfortable work of literary fiction. In a secluded manor house in the Scottish...

The Interpreter (Brooke Robinson, Harvill Secker) 

Tuesday, 18 April 2023
Revelle Lee is a court interpreter in London. She spends her days translating the words of victims, criminals and witnesses. It’s her job to inhabit them, wear their skin and...

Sad Girl Novel (Pip Finkemeyer, Ultimo) 

Tuesday, 11 April 2023
When we first meet aspiring writer Kim Mueller, she’s taking a train through Berlin, on her way to see her therapist. She’s wondering if she’s ‘talented or deluded’. She has...

Notes on Her Colour (Jennifer Neal, Vintage) 

Tuesday, 11 April 2023
Gabrielle has inherited the gift of being able to change the colour of her skin from her mother Tallulah, and her mother before her. Yet Gabrielle grows up in a...

Trump’s Australia (Bruce Wolpe, A&U) 

Tuesday, 11 April 2023
What would happen to Australia should Donald Trump win a second term as president of the United States? Such a situation seems an impossibility, yet the same was said for...

Search History (Amy Taylor, A&U) 

Tuesday, 4 April 2023
Most of us have left some kind of regrettable imprint on the internet. It’s with this discarded online ephemera that anxiety swells about what people may make of it all—including...

Monster Island (George Ivanoff, Puffin) 

Tuesday, 4 April 2023
When Bernie’s mother gets a top-secret new job, it seems too good to be true. So instead of staying behind with his aunt, Bernie decides instead to sneak along—and it’s...

Where I Slept (Libby Angel, Text) 

Tuesday, 4 April 2023
Where I Slept, by award-winning poet and author Libby Angel, is a sharp and sobering piece of autofiction that follows a struggling, unnamed poet/artist living on the margins in 1990s...

Media Monsters (Sally Young, NewSouth) 

Tuesday, 4 April 2023
After breaking through to the mainstream with her 2019 Stella Prize-longlisted book Paper Emperors, academic Sally Young continues to expose the dark interplay between Australian media and politics with Media...

Anam (André Dao, Hamish Hamilton) 

Tuesday, 4 April 2023
Winner of the 2021 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript, Anam is a remarkable debut novel exploring memory, family, colonialism and displacement. The narrator, a young Vietnamese-Australian man...

Desert Jungle (Jeannie Baker, Walker) 

Tuesday, 28 March 2023
Nearly seven years since her last picture storybook, Jeannie Baker returns in top form with Desert Jungle, a breath of fresh air in children’s books, offering a humble and vital...

Reckless (Marele Day, Ultimo) 

Tuesday, 28 March 2023
Accomplished crime writer Marele Day’s memoir Reckless opens in coastal NSW, where the author learns of the death of her French friend Jean. Day had met the charismatic Jean in...