LUKE HORTON The Fogging: extract
This week in our series of extracts from recent Australian books, we’re delighted to bring you an extract from Luke Horton’s debut novel The Fogging. The fogging of the title refers to the routine spraying of insecticide around hotels in Bali, and it is during the...
KATHRYN HIND Hitch: extract
This week’s extract is from two-time prize-winner Hitch, the debut novel from Australian author Kathryn Hind. Hitch was the inaugural winner of the Penguin Literary Prize (you can read more about the prize and the 2020 winner, Sophie Overett, here) and published...
ANNETTE MARNER A New Name for the Colour Blue: extract
This week we’re delighted to bring you an extract from Annette Marner’s beautiful and powerful debut novel A New Name for the Colour Blue, winner of the Adelaide Festival Award for an Unpublished Manuscript and now published by Wakefield Press. Annette Marner writes...
CARMEL BIRD Field of Poppies: extract
We’re thrilled to continue this series of extracts from recent Australian books with an extract from award-winning author Carmel Bird’s latest novel Field of Poppies. What lies beneath the poppy field? There are rich and varied layers to Field of Poppies, which ranges...
ASHLEY KALAGIAN BLUNT How to be Australian: extract
This week we bring you an extract from Ashley Kalagian Blunt’s memoir How to be Australian: An outsider’s view of life and love Down Under. In 2011 Ashley convinced her husband Steve to leave their native Canada – specifically, the city of Winnipeg,...
LEAH SWANN Sheerwater: extract
This week’s extract is from Leah Swann’s novel Sheerwater, a gripping story of missing children. When it opens, Ava is on the Great Ocean Road, driving to a new life in the little town of Sheerwater with her two young sons, Max and Teddy, her car jammed with their...
LAURA JEAN MCKAY The Animals in That Country: extract
How could Laura Jean McKay know that her novel about a pandemic would be published during an actual pandemic? Unlike Covid, however, the pandemic in her debut novel gives sufferers bright pink eyes and an ability to understand the language of animals. Jean Bennett is...
JULIE JANSON Benevolence: extract
This week we’re delighted to bring you an extract from Julie Janson’s new novel Benevolence. In this vivid and very moving novel, Indigenous author Julie Janson takes us back to the early days of Sydney and reveals them to us through the eyes of a young...
CHRIS FLYNN Mammoth: extract
In the storeroom of an auction house in New York in 2007, a mammoth and a dinosaur settle in for a chat … At least, their bones do. This unlikely conversation is the premise of Chris Flynn’s entertaining and thought-provoking new novel that ranges from prehistory to...
SYLVIA MARTIN Sky Swimming: extract
What makes a biographer? How do you approach writing a biography? Having run an extract from a biography last week – Cathy Perkins’s The Shelf Life of Zora Cross – it seems fitting this week to explore the work of a biographer with an extract from award-winning writer...
CATHY PERKINS The Shelf Life of Zora Cross: extract
This week’s extract is from Cathy Perkins’s biography of Australian poet Zora Cross. Largely unknown today, she was a sensation when, still in her 20s, she published the bestselling Songs of Love and Life in 1917. Frankly erotic by the standards of...
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