by NRB | 10 Jul 2020 | Extracts, Fiction |
This week we’re delighted to bring you an extract from Dani Powell’s debut novel Return to Dust. As the title suggests, it is a novel about grief, but it is also a vivid and intimate portrait of the landscape and people of central Australia. Of long road trips with...
by NRB | 3 Jul 2020 | Extracts, Fiction |
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...
by NRB | 26 Jun 2020 | Extracts, Fiction |
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...
by NRB | 19 Jun 2020 | Extracts, Fiction |
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beautiful and powerful debut novel A New Name for the Colour Blue, winner of the Adelaide Festival Award for an Unpublished Manuscript and now published by Wakefield Press.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...
by NRB | 12 Jun 2020 | Extracts, Fiction |
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...
by NRB | 5 Jun 2020 | Extracts, Non-fiction |
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,...
by NRB | 29 May 2020 | Crime Scene, Extracts, Fiction |
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...
by NRB | 22 May 2020 | Extracts, Fiction |
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...
by NRB | 15 May 2020 | Extracts, Fiction |
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...
by NRB | 8 May 2020 | Extracts, Fiction |
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...
by NRB | 1 May 2020 | Extracts, Non-fiction |
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...
by NRB | 24 Apr 2020 | Extracts, Non-fiction |
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...
TIM WINTON Juice. Reviewed by Robert Goodman24 October 2024Tim Winton’s new novel dives into a post-climate-change world where violence [ … ]
EMILY TSOKOS PURTILL Matia. Reviewed by Ann Skea22 October 2024Emily Tsokos Purtill’s debut novel ranges across continents to tell the stories [ … ]
STEVEN HAMILTON and RICHARD HOLDEN Australia’s Pandemic Exceptionalism. Reviewed by Braham Dabscheck17 October 2024Australia’s Covid response may have had problems, but Steven Hamilton and [ … ]
ELIZABETH STROUT Tell Me Everything. Reviewed by Michael Jongen15 October 2024Pulitzer-winner Elizabeth Strout explores themes of isolation and connection in [ … ]