Bindi (Kirli Saunders, illus by Dub Leffler, Magabala)
Wednesday, 5 August 2020
Multi–award winning author and poet Kirli Saunders turns her talent to junior fiction with this wonderfully engaging verse novel, which won the inaugural WA Premier’s Daisy Utemorrah Award. Eleven-year-old Bindi...
Show Me Where It Hurts: Living with invisible illness (Kylie Maslen, Text)
Wednesday, 22 July 2020
Imagine living with an invisible illness. For 20 years, Kylie Maslen has been doing just that: her chronic pain and bipolar II (the latter undiagnosed until she was 35) have...
Windfall: Unlocking a fossil-free future (Ketan Joshi, NewSouth)
Wednesday, 15 July 2020
In Windfall: Unlocking a fossil-free future, renewable energy industry insider Ketan Joshi gives a teeth-gnashing account of Australia's interminable climate debates. Working as a data analyst and communicator at Infigen...
The Mother Fault (Kate Mildenhall, S&S)
Wednesday, 1 July 2020
This gripping and thoughtful novel offers a spine-tingling vision of a future Australia—eerie in its potential realism—in which citizens’ movements are tracked and climate change has decimated the country, flooding...
Revenge: Murder in Three Parts (S L Lim, Transit Lounge)
Wednesday, 17 June 2020
S L Lim’s riveting sophomore novel opens with a disturbing scene of sibling abuse. Yannie, a shy and book-loving teenage girl, lives in the shadow of her brother Shan, who...
The Hunted (Gabriel Bergmoser, HarperCollins)
Sunday, 24 May 2020
On a lonely highway in outback Australia sits a solitary service station run by the equally solitary Frank, whose teenage granddaughter has been sent to stay with him for some...
The Trials of Portnoy: How Penguin brought down Australia’s censorship system (Patrick Mullins, Scribe)
Thursday, 26 March 2020
Starting even before Federation and lasting until the early 1970s, the Australian government controlled what Australians could read. Yet today, as Patrick Mullins recounts in this scintillating account of the rise and fall of Australian...
Father of the Lost Boys (Yuot A Alaak, Fremantle Press)
Thursday, 26 March 2020
This shocking story should be better known: the attempt of more than 20,000 orphaned boys and thousands more refugee followers to survive amid the terrifying atrocities of the Second Sudanse...
Mammoth (Chris Flynn, UQP)
Friday, 28 February 2020
Chris Flynn’s third novel is an ambitious adventure back in time that recounts the folly of humanity—as told by the fossil of a 13,000-year-old mammoth. It sounds like it could...
True West (David Whish-Wilson, Fremantle Press)
Thursday, 26 September 2019
Opening on a Western Australian freeway in 1988, True West immediately introduces Lee Southern, a teenager on the run from the militaristic bikie gang in which he grew up. Such...
Nothing New: A history of second-hand (Robyn Annear, Text)
Thursday, 26 September 2019
Opportunity shops—or op shops, as they’re lovingly referred to—are a well-established and much-loved feature of the Aussie retail landscape. In this entertaining and insightful history, Robyn Annear looks at where...
Peace (Garry Disher, Text)
Thursday, 26 September 2019
In Peace, Garry Disher returns to the rural South Australian town of Tiverton and to the hero of his 2013 novel Bitter Wash Road, Constable Paul ‘Hirsch’ Hirschhausen. Hirsch has...
Fascists Among Us: Online hate and the Christchurch massacre (Jeff Sparrow, Scribe)
Thursday, 26 September 2019
In the wake of the Christchurch massacre, Jeff Sparrow turns his eye to the recent rise of far-right violence. Fascists Among Us traces the history of fascism and seeks to...
The Great Divide (L J M Owen, Echo)
Thursday, 26 September 2019
In her fourth novel, L J M Owen, author of the ‘Dr Pimms, Intermillenial Sleuth’ series, gives us Australian rural crime at its most atmospheric: mist-shrouded streets, ruined vineyards, an...
Maurice Blackburn: Champion of the people (David Day, Scribe)
Thursday, 26 September 2019
Maurice Blackburn (1880–1944) was an influential member of the Australian Labor Party and a barrister, specialising in cases defending socialist causes. He held seats at both the state and federal...
The Tiny Star (Mem Fox, illus by Freya Blackwood, Puffin)
Thursday, 5 September 2019
Individually, a new book by either Mem Fox or Freya Blackwood, both award-winners and bestselling children’s book creators, would be welcomed by their readers. This book combines the two, with...
Invisible Boys (Holden Sheppard, Fremantle Press)
Thursday, 5 September 2019
In the coastal town of Geraldton, several young men struggle with the restrictions placed on them by culture, parental expectations and peer pressure. With the threat of violence a constant,...
My Folks Grew Up in the ’80s (Robin Feiner, illus by Beck Feiner, ABC Books)
Thursday, 5 September 2019
From the first glance of this picture book, those of us (particularly Generation Xers) who grew up in the 80s know we’re in for a treat. There, on the cover,...
The Lost Stone of SkyCity (H M Waugh, Fremantle Press)
Thursday, 5 September 2019
When the princess of the terrifying, fabled Ice-People kidnaps Danam, claiming him as her prophesied protector, his friend Sunaya knows she’s the only one who can rescue him. But it’s...
Act of Grace (Anna Krien, Black Inc.)
Thursday, 29 August 2019
Anna Krien’s debut novel is an ambitious and compelling study of trauma and how it’s transferred and inherited, told through the points of view of four disparate but interconnected characters....
Womerah Lane: Lives and landscapes (Tom Carment, Giramondo)
Thursday, 29 August 2019
Tom Carment’s Womerah Lane is a lively and pensive personal history, chronicling 30 years of life and art from one of Australia’s most well-known landscape artists. Taking an episodic, essayistic...
Her Kind of Luck (Michelle Balogh, Brio)
Thursday, 29 August 2019
When Michelle Balogh’s great-grandmother Shan-Yi dies, Balogh moves into her apartment temporarily. Struggling with depression, the opportunity to live in the luxurious Sydney home provides a welcome change, but it...
Wearing Paper Dresses (Anne Brinsden, Macmillan)
Thursday, 29 August 2019
Life is tough in the Mallee in the 1950s, and when city sophisticate Elise, brimming with artistic and musical talent, is uprooted with her young children to her father-in-law’s wheat...
There Was Still Love (Favel Parrett, Hachette)
Tuesday, 6 August 2019
Favel Parrett’s third novel, There Was Still Love, is a meticulously observed and masterfully crafted immigrant story about a displaced Czech family. The novel oscillates in nearly every way—between the...
Summer Time (Hilary Bell, illus by Antonia Pesenti, NewSouth)
Thursday, 1 August 2019
Summer Time, Hilary Bell and Antonia Pesenti’s third picture book collaboration, explores ideas of time within the grand nostalgic mythology of Australian summer. On each double-page spread, a chapter-like stanza...
The Man in the Water (David Burton, UQP)
Thursday, 1 August 2019
Four years after his award-winning YA memoir How to be Happy, David Burton returns with The Man in the Water, a coming-of-age mystery novel with an undercurrent of grief and...
Angel Mage (Garth Nix, A&U)
Thursday, 1 August 2019
Recently in fantasy there has been a move away from medieval Europe settings. One of the most popular examples of this is the 17th-century-Europe-inspired ‘Flintlock Fantasy’, though it owes as...
All of the Factors of Why I Love Tractors (Davina Bell, illus by Jenny Løvlie, Little Hare)
Thursday, 1 August 2019
A little boy called Frankie, accompanied by his mother, visits the library and borrows his favourite book about tractors. He is already well versed in all the characteristics and functions...
The Glimme (Emily Rodda, illus by Marc McBride, Scholastic)
Thursday, 1 August 2019
The Glimme starts in a perfectly ordinary and dull fishing village with a boy called Finn sketching dragons and monsters. But it’s not long before Finn is standing in front...
The Woman Who Cracked the Anxiety Code: The extraordinary life of Dr Claire Weekes (Judith Hoare, Scribe)
Thursday, 25 July 2019
Australian doctor Claire Weekes found worldwide fame with her bestselling books on ‘nervous illness’ in the 1960s and 1970s—but despite gratitude from thousands of sufferers, she is almost forgotten today....
