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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...