Sand Talk: How Indigenous thinking can save the world (Tyson Yunkaporta, Text)
Thursday, 27 June 2019
Tyson Yunkaporta is a researcher, academic and arts critic. With ties to the Apalech clan in Far North Queensland, Yunkaporta combines his lived experiences and academic interests in this innovative...
Women, Men and the Whole Damn Thing (David Leser, A&U)
Thursday, 27 June 2019
Following on from his article 'Women, Men and the Whole Damn Thing', which was published in Good Weekend magazine in early 2018, journalist David Leser once again positions himself at...
Bewildered (Laura Waters, Affirm)
Thursday, 27 June 2019
Bewildered, a memoir by Laura Waters about hiking the Te Araroa Trail in New Zealand, will inevitably invite comparisons to Cheryl Strayed’s Wild. On a surface level, there are some...
Meet Me at Lennon’s (Melanie Myers, UQP)
Thursday, 27 June 2019
In her debut novel, Melanie Myers delves into an under-explored area of Brisbane history: the influx of US soldiers during World War II and how their presence affected the social...
The Rich Man’s House (Andrew McGahan, A&U)
Thursday, 27 June 2019
Andrew McGahan’s posthumously published The Rich Man’s House reads like an earlier draft of a more mature work. Though its premise of a billionaire who builds his home inside the...
Australia’s Original Languages: An introduction (R M W Dixon, A&U)
Thursday, 30 May 2019
Bob Dixon has an impressive academic and publishing career, which includes 50 years of researching Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages. Dixon’s latest book combines linguistics, colonisation history, anthropology and...
Lapse (Sarah Thornton, Text)
Thursday, 30 May 2019
Former corporate lawyer Clementine Jones is holed up in a country town where no-one knows her past, and she’s hoping to keep it that way. During her self-imposed exile she...
Storytime: Growing up with books (Jane Sullivan, Ventura)
Thursday, 30 May 2019
Storytime is a delightful collection of essays by literary journalist Jane Sullivan on her favourite childhood books, revisited as an adult. Best known as the scribe behind the Saturday Age’s...
Taking Tom Murray Home (Tim Slee, HarperCollins)
Thursday, 30 May 2019
This debut novel and winner of HarperCollins’ Banjo Prize is based on the ingenious premise of a funeral-protest that raises awareness of the pressures facing dairy farmers from banks, supermarkets...
Love and Other Battles (Tess Woods, HarperCollins)
Thursday, 30 May 2019
Tess Woods’ latest novel follows the lives of three generations of women: Jess is a flower child who falls for a soldier under the shadow of the Vietnam war; Jamie...
Guinea Pig in White Wine Sauce (Alan Rochford, Affirm)
Thursday, 30 May 2019
Guinea Pig in White Wine Sauce is the memoir of restaurateur Alan Rochford, whose cottage bistro is tucked away in the Adelaide Hills. Told as a series of anecdotes, the...
Fortune (Lenny Bartulin, A&U)
Thursday, 30 May 2019
Lenny Bartulin—who cut his teeth with the Jack Susko crime series—made a dramatic shift with his rollicking 2013 historical novel Infamy. But the visceral energy and dirty, real descriptions that...
The Yield (Tara June Winch, Hamish Hamilton)
Thursday, 30 May 2019
The Yield unpicks intergenerational trauma and redacted histories in prose that glimmers. The word ‘yield’ has a dual meaning: in English it refers to the harvest reaped from the land...
A Constant Hum (Alice Bishop, Text)
Thursday, 30 May 2019
Alice Bishop’s debut is a collection of short stories linked by the central theme of bushfire, specifically Victoria’s 2009 Black Saturday fires, which killed and injured hundreds of people, decimating...
The Warming (Craig Ensor, Ventura)
Thursday, 30 May 2019
There’s a lot of climate change-inspired fiction around at the moment—sci-fi, apocalyptic, hopeful and despairing. The Warming has elements of all these but it’s really just about people. People who...
Something to Believe In (Andrew Stafford, UQP)
Thursday, 30 May 2019
This memoir is rock journalist Andrew Stafford’s first book since his 2004 milestone Pig City, which mapped Brisbane music ‘from the Saints to Savage Garden’. Named after a Ramones song,...
Fake: A startling true story of love in a world of liars, cheats, narcissists, fantasists and phonies (Stephanie Wood, Vintage)
Thursday, 30 May 2019
In 2017 journalist Stephanie Wood penned a piece for Good Weekend magazine in which she detailed a relationship she’d had with a man she met online. The relationship went awry,...
Split: True Stories of Leaving, Loss, and New Beginnings (ed by Lee Kofman, Ventura)
Friday, 26 April 2019
Author and editor Lee Kofman sent a callout for personal essays about breaking up. The essays could be about any kind of separation: with people, objects, whatever. Split: True Stories...
The Nancys (R W R McDonald, A&U)
Friday, 26 April 2019
In the poky New Zealand town of Riverstone—home of bad interior design, dull news cycles and not much else—11-year-old Tippy Chan’s mother is about to go on holiday. Tippy’s flamboyant...
The Electric Hotel (Dominic Smith, A&U)
Friday, 26 April 2019
Dominic Smith’s The Electric Hotel is a sensory delight, retelling the life story of a former film director—known as ‘the Frenchman behind the viewfinder’—with the rich vocabulary of cinema. Claude...
Allegra in Three Parts (Suzanne Daniel, Macmillan)
Friday, 26 April 2019
In this impressive debut novel, 11-year-old Allegra finds herself torn between the three adults in her life: her two grandmothers and her father. They live on adjoining blocks and adore...
Fish Song (Caitlin Maling, Fremantle Press)
Friday, 26 April 2019
Fish Song is Caitlin Maling’s third full-length collection after her 2015 debut Conversations I've Never Had (shortlisted for the Dame Mary Gilmore Award and in the WA Premier's Book Awards)...
Hitch (Kathryn Hind, Hamish Hamilton)
Friday, 26 April 2019
Kathryn Hind was the recipient of the inaugural Penguin Australia Literary Prize in 2018 for Hitch, a contemporary novel set in Australia. The protagonist, Amelia, is a naive young woman...
After She Left (Penelope Hanley, Ventura)
Wednesday, 27 March 2019
After She Left is an exploration of feminism in relation to the arts, domestic life and the cultural ramifications of non-traditional motherhood. It spans six decades and the lives of...
A Lovely and Terrible Thing (Chris Womersley, Picador)
Wednesday, 27 March 2019
A Lovely and Terrible Thing is novelist Chris Womersley’s debut short story collection, and his first book since 2017’s City of Crows. Of the 20 stories in the collection, 17...
Race, Islam and Power: Ethnic and Religious Violence in Post-Suharto Indonesia (Andreas Harsono, Monash University Publishing)
Wednesday, 27 March 2019
After the collapse of the authoritarian Suharto regime in 1998, journalist Andreas Harsono spent almost three years travelling across Indonesia. Race, Islam and Power, which chronicles this journey, is a...
Daughter of Bad Times (Rohan Wilson, A&U)
Wednesday, 27 March 2019
Vogel Award-winning novelist Rohan Wilson is back with another gripping page-turner, this time in the form of a dystopian tale set 50 years in the future. Sea levels have risen,...
The Lost Arabs (Omar Sakr, UQP)
Wednesday, 27 March 2019
Omar Sakr’s second poetry collection is an assured and vibrant exploration of doubt and faith. Following on from his Kenneth Slessor Prize-nominated debut These Wild Houses, this collection explores the...
Attraction (Ruby Porter, Text)
Wednesday, 27 March 2019
Auckland-based writer Ruby Porter’s debut novel Attraction, winner of the inaugural Michael Gifkins Prize for an unpublished novel, is a melancholic and haunting meditation on postcolonial guilt and the stories...
Fled (Meg Keneally, Echo)
Thursday, 28 February 2019
Having co-written the ‘Monsarrat’ historical fiction series with her father, Meg Keneally makes her solo debut with the gripping tale of one extraordinary woman’s life-long battle for survival. Following an...
