Wednesday, 10 February 2021
Pop culture representations of hoarding tend to paint a picture of unrestrained excess. Perhaps this is why, when Emily Maguire introduces Nic, a 45-year-old who loves her job at the...

Wednesday, 3 February 2021
In 2009, 17-year-old Lech Blaine and six of his friends were driving home together in Toowoomba. The driver swerved and was hit by an oncoming car. Blaine, who was sitting...

Wednesday, 3 February 2021
Melissa Manning’s debut short story collection is an evocative and sometimes heartbreaking exploration of family, home and what it takes to build a fulfilling life. Bookended by two longer works...

Thursday, 28 January 2021
It’s 1969 in small-town Australia and new mother Louise can barely leave her own house or step beyond the shadow of her controlling mother, Gladys. With a constantly crying baby,...

Wednesday, 20 January 2021
Anyone who enjoyed Rick Morton’s memoir One Hundred Years of Dirt will want to read My Year of Living Vulnerably. Under a disparate set of headings—The Self, Forgiveness, Animals, Touch,...

Wednesday, 20 January 2021
When I was in primary school, on the occasion that foreign travellers or tourists would come to visit, our conversation would inevitably turn to Australia's famous fauna and flora—to snakes...

Wednesday, 20 January 2021
When Hannah meets fellow Australian traveller Deven in the lobby of a hostel in Thailand, her trip quickly gains a sense of purpose. Hannah’s drawn to the fiery, charismatic Deven...

Wednesday, 13 January 2021
This suburban thriller, set on Sydney’s North Shore, explores what happens when unresolved grief turns into obsession. After experiencing a horrific tragedy, Kate develops some bad habits, including an alcohol...

Wednesday, 13 January 2021
The Missing Among Us is instantly enthralling. Erin Stewart profiles a number of missing persons cases, deftly and confidently straddling the line between reportage and personal response. Balancing the interviewees'...

Wednesday, 9 December 2020
This young adult thriller starts as a post-collapse story and then takes a supernatural turn. It begins with ‘the pulse’, a solar flare that shuts down all electronics, pitching the...

Wednesday, 2 December 2020
Martin McKenzie-Murray’s fiction debut is a fun but sometimes frustrating book that nevertheless delivers plenty of laughs along the way. The story is told by Toby—an aspiring speechwriter whose hyper-ambition...