Thursday, 26 March 2020
Patrick Allington’s second novel takes place in an allegorical dystopia following an ambiguous apocalypse.  The cities of Rise and Shine have emerged from these ashes thanks to the efforts of...

Friday, 28 February 2020
The Drop-Off is a cheerful depiction of parenting culture, told through the alternating points-of-view of three parents and set in a middle-class primary school in the Eastern suburbs of Melbourne....

Friday, 28 February 2020
Night Lessons in Little Jerusalem is an impressive and gripping debut that blurs the line between memoir and fiction. Based on the wartime diaries of the author’s father, the novel tells...

Friday, 28 February 2020
James Bradley’s latest novel tells the story of Eve, a genetically engineered Neanderthal brought into life as part of a scheme for mitigating the environmental degradation of climate change. In...

Friday, 28 February 2020
In 1989 academic Hayley Katzen moved from apartheid South Africa to Australia. In Sydney she taught and worked in law and enjoyed the comparative safety and community of the city...

Monday, 3 February 2020
Sheerwater begins when a plane falls out of the sky. The accident—a light aircraft crash-landing in a field off the Great Ocean Road—is witnessed by Ava, a young woman on...

Monday, 3 February 2020
In Below Deck, 21-year-old Oli gives up a high-flying internship to work on the ocean after meeting an enigmatic older couple and sailing with them to the Coral Sea. Four...

Monday, 3 February 2020
Twenty-five-year-old sex worker Rita Therese’s debut memoir is dark, funny and extremely candid—but her unsanitised tales of the sex industry are not for the faint-hearted. Come invites the reader into...

Monday, 3 February 2020
Set on a remote fictional island off the coast of Western Australia, Catherine Noske’s debut novel grapples with questions of familial obligation, complicity, remorse and the fallibility of memory. Noske...

Monday, 3 February 2020
Dimple and Ruthie Travers are farmers in a tough time. Drought has seen them reduce their cattle herd and hold off sowing crops. Money is tight, rain is always forecast...

Monday, 3 February 2020
In Torched, the town of Brunton, Victoria is devastated by a bushfire with the force and malevolence of Black Saturday, and in turn Phoebe Wharton’s life is destroyed by the...

Monday, 3 February 2020
Fourteen is the factual account of one year in the life of a gay high-schooler in the small central Queensland town of Yeppoon. Journalist Shannon Molloy uses clear, concise language...

Monday, 3 February 2020
J P Powell’s debut novel—named for an alleged WWII-era government plan to abandon Northern Australia in the event of a Japanese invasion—is an exploration of tension and corruption amid the...

Thursday, 31 October 2019
In the middle of another stifling summer in suburbia and in desperate need of a ‘tree change’ Georgie Brooks and her young family decide to make the bold move to...

Thursday, 31 October 2019
Dominic Carew sketches masculinity faltering or in crisis in his short story collection No Neat Endings. In these snapshots of manhood, Carew depicts male kinship and identity fraught with the...

Thursday, 31 October 2019
The stories in this debut collection from Melbourne writer Sean O’Beirne are written as fictional, often funny monologues, letters, speeches, interviews, texts and emails, diary entries, official reports and online...

Thursday, 31 October 2019
It is a truth universally acknowledged that Jane Austen re-imaginings are an uneven offering. Some are brilliant; some less so. The fundamental challenges of this niche, however, remain constant: that...

Thursday, 31 October 2019
The eponymous character in Rose Hartley’s debut is introduced in the blurb as thoroughly relatable and a counterpart to Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag. While the comparison feels true on the surface—both...

Tuesday, 15 October 2019
Ellena Savage’s debut collection of essays, Blueberries, is a breathtaking interrogation of the self in the world; the self within structures of power and oppression. Each essay examines a memory,...

Tuesday, 15 October 2019
As the rolling apologies for forced adoptions swept Australia in 2012 and 2013, it was too late for Robert Tickner’s mother—she had died, taking her secrets to the grave. But...