Vikki Wakefield’s ‘Inbetween Days’
Wednesday, 12 August 2015
The small-town setting of Mobius captures and amplifies the isolation of adolescence. It is the perfect backdrop for Inbetween Days, a story about the bruises left on our hearts by...
Shirley Barrett’s ‘Rush Oh!’
Wednesday, 5 August 2015
Screenwriter and director Shirley Barrett has mixed fact and fiction to tell the story of the whaling community of Eden in New South Wales in the early years of the...
Charlotte Wood’s ‘The Natural Way of Things’
Wednesday, 29 July 2015
The latest novel from the author of Animal People and Love and Hunger is a powerful story of misogyny and corporate control taken to disturbing extremes … read Portia Lindsay’s...
Gail Jones’ ‘A Guide to Berlin’
Wednesday, 22 July 2015
Gail Jones’ sixth novel, A Guide to Berlin, is named after a short story by Vladimir Nabokov and offers more than a nod to his work. During a harsh winter...
Peter Doherty’s ‘The Knowledge Wars’
Wednesday, 15 July 2015
‘How do we know anything?’ asks Peter Doherty at the start of his lucid and entertaining new book The Knowledge Wars. Doherty guides the reader to a satisfying answer to...
Craig Munro’s ‘Under Cover: Adventures in the Art of Editing’
Wednesday, 8 July 2015
Former University of Queensland (UQP) publishing director Craig Munro’s memoir is a nostalgic retelling of his long and distinguished career in Australian publishing, which coincided with a boom in the...
Emma Viskic’s Resurrection Bay
Wednesday, 1 July 2015
Caleb Zelic’s deafness has made him an astute observer of the minute details of world around him, and of people in particular, a skill he has parlayed into a career...
Sonja Dechian’s ‘An Astronaut’s Life’
Wednesday, 24 June 2015
An Astronaut’s Life is the debut short-story collection from ABC Radio producer and editor Sonja Dechian. Her book circles some big themes, namely our changing climate and ecological destruction …...
Stephanie Bishop’s ‘The Other Side of the World’
Wednesday, 17 June 2015
Set in the 1960s, The Other Side of the World centres on couple Charlotte and Henry as they struggle with their new identities as a married couple, as parents and...
Honey Brown’s ‘Six Degrees’
Thursday, 11 June 2015
Critically acclaimed author Honey Brown takes an unexpected turn from crime fiction with Six Degrees, an anthology that perfectly captures the essence of rural romance. Connected tenuously by a life-changing...
Catherine De Saint Phalle’s ‘On Brunswick Ground’
Wednesday, 3 June 2015
Catherine De Saint Phalle’s novel takes Jill Meagher’s rape and murder in 2012 as the basis for a meditation on grief. The story follows five women in the Melbourne suburb...
Aaron Blabey’s ‘The Bad Guys: Episode 1’
Wednesday, 27 May 2015
Award-winning picture-book author Aaron Blabey turns his hand to junior chapter books with hilarious effect. Mr Wolf, one of the original bad guys from fairy legend, is tired of being...
Bill Neidjie and Mark Lang’s ‘Old Man’s Story’
Wednesday, 20 May 2015
Old Man’s Story will appeal to many readers, particularly those interested in the environment and Indigenous culture. It gives the reader a wonderful sense of both the man and his...
Antonia Hayes’ ‘Relativity’
Tuesday, 12 May 2015
Antonia Hayes’ debut novel Relativity is magnetising. Its highly original plot artfully reveals the mysteries behind a family rupture, at the heart of which is adorable 12-year-old protagonist Ethan, a...
Gideon Haigh’s ‘Certain Admissions’
Wednesday, 6 May 2015
One evening in December 1949, young Beth Williams accepted an invitation to dinner from John Bryan Kerr, a former radio star she originally met in her native Tasmania. Later that...
Andrew Fuller’s ‘Unlocking Your Child’s Genius’
Wednesday, 29 April 2015
Don’t let the title mislead or deter you: ‘genius’ is perhaps too loaded a term; a better one is ‘potential’. The subtitle in fact is a bit more accurate: ‘How...
Matt Nable’s ‘Guilt’
Wednesday, 22 April 2015
Switching between 1989 and 2009, Matt Nable’s book follows a group of teenagers in a beachside town and a single event that fractures their lives. Not unlike Christos Tsiolkas’ The...
Monica Dux’s ‘Mothermorphosis’
Wednesday, 15 April 2015
Australian women writers, including Kathy Lette, Kate Holden, Jo Case and Catherine Deveny, have contributed essays on their experiences of motherhood and birth to this collection. Edited by Monica Dux,...
Steve Toltz’s ‘Quicksand’
Thursday, 9 April 2015
This long-awaited follow-up to A Fraction of the Whole, Steve Toltz’s 2008 Booker Prize-shortlisted debut, is similarly full of larrikin philosophers, artists and eccentrics hatching schemes and generally failing at...
Paddy O’Reilly’s ‘Peripheral Vision’
Wednesday, 1 April 2015
This near-perfect short-story collection from Paddy O’Reilly is so blackly comic and bitingly clever that it makes you wonder what it feels like to live with such a masterful command...
Rod Jones’ ‘The Mothers’
Wednesday, 25 March 2015
With depth and insight, Jones explores maternal-filial love, whether biological or not, and the inner worlds of women faced with a surprise pregnancy: the hardships of their lives, the torture...
Peter Singer’s ‘The Most Good You Can Do’
Wednesday, 18 March 2015
Forty years on from Animal Liberation, Peter Singer is still challenging our complacency with his advocacy for new ideas and movements. ‘Effective altruism’—doing the most good with the available resources—is...
Karen Lamb’s ‘Thea Astley: Inventing Her Own Weather’
Thursday, 12 March 2015
Inventing Her Own Weather is the first full literary biography of one of Australia’s best writers of the second half of the 20th century. It is an important resource for...
Lisa Gorton’s ‘The Life of Houses’
Wednesday, 4 March 2015
Gorton’s ability to describe the inner worlds of her characters creates moments of breathtaking insight on almost every page. The writing is graceful and accessible, and Gorton’s skill with plot is particularly...
Patti Miller’s ‘Ransacking Paris’
Wednesday, 25 February 2015
This delightful recollection of the rewarding year that writer Patti Miller spent in Paris completing a challenging manuscript is that rare object—a book for anyone who believes we don’t need...
Ramona Koval’s ‘Bloodhound: Searching for My Father’
Wednesday, 18 February 2015
Journalist Ramona Koval has carved a reputation as a consummate book critic and interviewer. Her passion for storytelling and sharp analysis is turned inwards in Bloodhound: Searching for My Father,...
Josephine Moon’s ‘The Chocolate Promise’
Wednesday, 11 February 2015
The Chocolate Promise offers a Tasmanian twist on the movie Chocolat; its heroine Christmas Livingston—who is more fairy godmother than seductress—runs a boutique chocolate shop outside of Launceston. Staunchly single,...
Jen Craig’s ‘Panthers and the Museum of Fire’
Wednesday, 4 February 2015
The year 2015 is only in its early days, but already I know that Sydney writer Jen Craig’s novella, Panthers and the Museum of Fire, will be among my top...
James Bradley’s ‘Clade’
Thursday, 29 January 2015
In his first novel in 10 years, James Bradley writes about the members of an extended family in a soft-dystopian near-future, where violent climate events have brought rapid changes to...
Charles Hall’s ‘Summer’s Gone’
Wednesday, 21 January 2015
Summer’s Gone, a debut novel by Melbourne writer Charles Hall, is a coming-of-age story set in the 1960s that mingles nostalgia with tragedy; Beatles-mania with backyard abortions. Its protagonist Nick...
