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...

Wednesday, 25 November 2020
Christy Collins’s The Price of Two Sparrows is an elegantly structured study of migration and community in Australia. A burgeoning Muslim community on the outskirts of Sydney has made plans...

Wednesday, 25 November 2020
Outsider art, as critic Roger Cardinal once wrote, is ‘immune to the polarisations of culture and the copycat spirit of cultural art’. It’s fair to say that Fiona McGregor’s new...

Wednesday, 11 November 2020
I learned a lot about cancer treatment from Kirsty Everett’s memoir Honey Blood: that chemotherapy can make you very sensitive to smells, that jellybeans are helpful for the taste of...

Wednesday, 11 November 2020
Sisters Shannan and Tayla Stedman, children’s entertainers turned authors, try their hands at junior fiction with Lola Online, which comes after the 2018 release of their picture book Harlow and...

Wednesday, 11 November 2020
In Sydney’s western suburbs, the summer air thick enough to slice with a switchblade, Johnny Novak’s family reels from the murder of Ivan, his older brother. Their father, a notorious...

Thursday, 5 November 2020
Rebecca Starford’s debut novel is a beautifully written espionage thriller that bookends the world-changing period of WWII. Its meticulously researched narrative draws the reader into the early life of Evelyn...

Wednesday, 28 October 2020
The Women and the Girls follows three mothers as they walk away from their unhappy marriages and move their children into a share house in Sydney. Against a backdrop of...

Wednesday, 28 October 2020
In Dingo Bold, Rowena Lennox wrestles with the emotionally laden subject of the human–wild divide through the lens of the policies managing the dingoes on K’gari (Fraser Island). Along the...

Wednesday, 28 October 2020
It’s 1976, a time of change and cultural shifts. The town of Repentance perches on the edge of the Great Dividing Range: the old families cut timber and the new...

Wednesday, 21 October 2020
Meg has taken in three strangers—Nerine and her two small daughters—in a bid to hide them from Nerine’s abusive ex-husband. The house is secluded, safe, but Nerine can’t shake the...

Wednesday, 21 October 2020
This deeply unsettling book bravely attempts to interpret, chronicle and reflect on the nightmarish events of this year. While I relished the opportunity to try to make sense of 2020,...