River of Salt (Dave Warner, Fremantle Press)
Thursday, 28 February 2019
After fronting a rock band in the late 1970s and later writing for film and TV, Dave Warner now taps a rich seam of character-driven crime novels. His 2015 book...
The Place on Dalhousie (Melina Marchetta, Viking)
Thursday, 28 February 2019
Melina Marchetta writes masterfully about messy relationships, whether they are familial or romantic, and her new novel is no exception. When Rosie Gennaro meets Jimmy Hailler, the two enter into...
Unconditional Love: A Memoir of Filmmaking and Motherhood (Jocelyn Moorhouse, Text)
Thursday, 28 February 2019
When Jocelyn Moorhouse’s film Proof was released in 1991, it created excitement—here was a new Australian writer-director with a startlingly original eye. International success quickly followed, but then she disappeared...
Eight Lives (Susan Hurley, Affirm)
Thursday, 28 February 2019
Former refugee David Tran has invented a wonder-drug that could transform immunology. With the first human trial about to take place, David, the new Golden Boy of Australian medical research,...
The Gift of Life (Josephine Moon, Michael Joseph)
Thursday, 28 February 2019
In her latest novel, Josephine Moon poses the question, ‘How much of the original donor travels with their donated organs?’ The story follows Gabby, the recent recipient of a heart...
City of Trees: Essays on Life, Death and the Need for a Forest (Sophie Cunningham, Text)
Thursday, 28 February 2019
In this poignant and timely collection of essays, Sophie Cunningham touches on matters private and political, historical and current, beautiful and terrifying—but always coming back to her obvious adoration of...
Robert Menzies: The Art of Politics (Troy Bramston, Scribe)
Thursday, 28 February 2019
Journalist and former political advisor Troy Bramston’s new biography of Robert Menzies, Australia’s longest serving prime minister, aims to refocus the historical lens. Too often Menzies is written off as...
Growing up African in Australia (ed by Maxine Beneba Clarke, Black Inc.)
Thursday, 28 February 2019
Growing up African in Australia is a new anthology edited by Maxine Beneba Clarke with Ahmed Yussef and Magan Magan. The anthology is a mixture of experienced and emerging writers’...
Exploded View (Carrie Tiffany, Text)
Friday, 1 February 2019
The name of Carrie Tiffany’s third book, Exploded View, refers to the type of diagram found in technical manuals that shows the spaces between each individual part and how they...
Hare’s Fur (Trevor Shearston, Scribe)
Friday, 1 February 2019
Russell Bass is a professional potter in his seventies, leading a quiet and solitary life in the Blue Mountains following the death of his wife. While gathering basalt for his...
Black is the New White (Nakkiah Lui, A&U)
Friday, 1 February 2019
Black is the New White is the play script of a contemporary romantic comedy written for the stage by Gamillaroi and Torres Strait Islander woman Nakkiah Lui. Young couple Charlotte...
Stranger Country (Monica Tan, A&U)
Friday, 1 February 2019
At first it’s hard to know how to interpret Monica Tan’s intention to discover ‘the Australia lying beyond her hometown’ and to ‘learn about Aboriginal Australia’ as she travels on...
Islands (Peggy Frew, A&U)
Friday, 1 February 2019
Peggy Frew shows her trademark flair for bringing complex domestic lives to the fore in her latest novel Islands. At first the book seems to have more in common with...
Unlike the Heart: A Memoir of Brain and Mind (Nicola Redhouse, UQP)
Friday, 1 February 2019
Unlike the Heart is a quest to understand a mind, from the mind governing it, and offers much to appeal to different interests. Nicola Redhouse relates her troubled pregnancies and...
Into the Fire (Sonia Orchard, Affirm Press)
Thursday, 29 November 2018
Sonia Orchard’s second work of literary fiction, Into the Fire, is a distinctly Australian novel. Descriptions of smoky blue-green gums that paint a vivid picture of rural Victoria are balanced...
Driving into the Sun (Marcella Polain, Fremantle Press)
Thursday, 29 November 2018
At the centre of Marcella Polain’s second novel is 11-year-old Orla, whose flawed-yet-beloved father, a man with his own thwarted hopes and dreams, is a figure with whom she is...
Fridays with My Folks (Amal Awad, Vintage)
Thursday, 29 November 2018
In her fifth nonfiction book, journalist Amal Awad investigates ageing in Australia from her perspective as an adult daughter grappling with a parent’s decline. Woven into her analysis is the...
Rapture’s Roadway (Virginia Jealous, Peter Bishop)
Thursday, 29 November 2018
Author Virginia Jealous is a travel writer for Lonely Planet and a published poet in her own right, but in Rapture's Roadway, she pursues her late father’s lifelong obsession with...
Accidental Feminists (Jane Caro, MUP)
Thursday, 29 November 2018
Jane Caro grew up in Australia in the 1960s and 1970s—the heyday of second-wave feminism. In her latest work of nonfiction, she paints a picture of the everyday women and...
Invented Lives (Andrea Goldsmith, Scribe)
Thursday, 29 November 2018
On the streets of St Petersburg in 1985, Galina bumps into Andrew, an irrevocably shy Australian artist. Soon, she is on a plane to Melbourne in search of freedom. As...
Fusion (Kate Richards, Hamish Hamilton)
Thursday, 1 November 2018
Kate Richards burst onto the literary scene in 2013 with her award-winning Madness: A Memoir, which described her decade of living with psychosis. She returns now with her first novel,...
Star-crossed (Minnie Darke, Michael Joseph)
Tuesday, 30 October 2018
Star-crossed is a charming rom-com centred on an aspiring journalist whose attempts to influence fate lead to unintended—and at times hilarious—consequences. When Justine Carmichael finally gets a promotion at the...
Call Me Evie (J P Pomare, Hachette)
Thursday, 25 October 2018
What do you do when you can’t remember the incident that changed your life? Seventeen-year-old Kate—now using the alias ‘Evie’ to protect her identity—is being held captive in a remote...
Half Moon Lake (Kirsten Alexander, Bantam)
Thursday, 25 October 2018
In July of 1913 Sonny Davenport, the four-year-old son of a prominent family in America’s Deep South, goes missing. The father puts his political ambitions on hold to chase up...
Beyond Words: A Year with Kenneth Cook (Jacqueline Kent, UQP)
Thursday, 25 October 2018
On the face of it, Jacqueline Kent’s memoir feels like a simple story, a May to December romance between editor Kent and author Kenneth Cook. Like most of us, Kent...
Man at the Window (Robert Jeffreys, Echo)
Thursday, 25 October 2018
In the mid 1960s at a boarding school in Western Australia, a boarding master is shot dead. The shooting is deemed an accident and Detective Cardilini is sent in to...
Saving You (Charlotte Nash, Hachette)
Thursday, 25 October 2018
Following The Paris Wedding and her series of romantic rural medical dramas, Charlotte Nash’s novel Saving You features a woman crossing the US on an emotionally fuelled odyssey to find...
I Can’t Remember the Title but the Cover Is Blue (Elias Greig, A&U)
Thursday, 25 October 2018
Sydney bookseller Elias Greig thought writing down his customer interactions would make for a nice creative outlet in between part-time work and his PhD thesis. The resulting book, similar in...
The Finest Gold (Brad Cooper, Scribe)
Wednesday, 24 October 2018
Australian swimmer Brad Cooper won gold at the Munich Olympic Games in 1972. The Finest Gold is a coming-of-age memoir that looks at Cooper’s teenage years and the amazing route...
The Spite Game (Anna Snoekstra, HQ Fiction)
Thursday, 27 September 2018
Anna Snoekstra's thriller The Spite Game opens with protagonist Ava confessing to the cops everything she knows about the disappearance of her former high school friend Mel, beginning with when...
