Tuesday, 12 October 2021
Four strangers meet for a weekend writing retreat in an idyllic location south of Perth. While this might sound like a familiar premise for a work of commercial fiction, the individuality of the characters, and the...

Wednesday, 6 October 2021
It's 1932. Ivanna ‘Wanny’ Woldstad longs to enter the male-dominated world of hunting and trapping. An independently minded woman, she runs her own taxi in Tromsø, in Northern Norway. A...

Wednesday, 6 October 2021
For the charming, self-absorbed Rémi Victoire and his faithful companion, Pascal, the life of itinerant storytellers allows them to forget the staggering betrayal that first caused them to flee Paris....

Wednesday, 6 October 2021
Inga Simpson’s fourth novel asks who we would choose to become in a catastrophic near-future Australia. Ray, short for Rachel, is a glass artist who sequesters herself deep in the...

Wednesday, 29 September 2021
The latest collection from slam poet champion Omar Musa is a raw and muscular combination of poetry and woodcut art that uses the visual and literary capacities of each form...

Wednesday, 29 September 2021
The state of the humanities in Australia today fills Judith Brett with despair. If she had a child considering a liberal arts degree now, and she had the money, she...

Wednesday, 22 September 2021
Shane Jenek’s drag queen alter ego Courtney Act has been in the public eye for almost 20 years, beginning with her groundbreaking appearance on the first series of Australian Idol. As...

Wednesday, 15 September 2021
Thrombolites—living rocks made from microbes—exist in only a few places on Earth, including Lake Clifton, south of Perth. Here, the thrombolites are thousands of years old and incredibly fragile. This...

Wednesday, 8 September 2021
Readers won’t be shocked to learn that Sally Hepworth’s new novel The Younger Wife features a May–December romance between a younger woman and an older man, and the effects the relationship has...

Wednesday, 8 September 2021
The One That Got Away documents journalist and travel writer Ken Haley’s year evading the pandemic. While many of us were kept in captivity as Covid-19 raged across the world,...

Wednesday, 1 September 2021
John Hughes, whose last book No One was shortlisted for the 2020 Miles Franklin, grapples with the idea of whether it is possible to ever truly know another person in...

Tuesday, 24 August 2021
How Decent Folk Behave is an exploration of the systemic failures that have led to lockdowns, massacres, violence against women and worsening natural disasters over the past decade. This collection...

Tuesday, 24 August 2021
This fun, dark-comedy thriller is led by one of the most memorable characters I’ve encountered in recent contemporary fiction. Alice is in her late 30s, a near-genius (IQ: 159) content to waste her life away in a...