Award-winning novelist Amitav Ghosh turns to non-fiction to chart the greed and racism at the heart of British and American opium sales to China. In researching his Ibis Trilogy novels – Sea of Poppies (2008), River of Smoke (2011) and Flood of Fire (2015) – which...

The author of Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone returns with another witty homage to the Golden Age of crime fiction. There’s a whiff of unseriousness around some whodunnits. Many readers still think of the form as stuck in detective fiction’s Golden Age with...

Part memoir, part guidebook, part history, Twenty-Two Impressions shows the strangeness and wonder of the tarot. In 1442, an apprentice beats sheets of gold leaf out of a coin, 100 sheets to the florin, as dictated by the guild. This gold, together with paints made...

Eric Beecher’s vital new book provides a history of world journalism, good and bad, with a pessimistic view of the future. Beecher knows his territory. In his youth he was an investigative journalist at the Melbourne Age during the glory days of Graham Perkin’s...

Tim Winton’s new novel dives into a post-climate-change world where violence seems the only solution. The opening of Tim Winton’s new novel Juice cannot help but put readers in mind of Cormac McCarthy’s seminal work The Road. A man, possibly an ex-soldier, and a young...