VICTORIA HANNAN Kokomo. Reviewed by Jessica Stewart
Winner of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript, Victoria Hannan’s debut is a rewarding journey. Victoria Hannan’s Kokomo takes us deep into the conundrum of love, with its heartbreak and trauma. In this, her first...
SL LIM Real Differences. Reviewed by Ann Skea
SL Lim’s debut won this year’s UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing at the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and explores questions of race, religion and culture. Nick, who tells this story, is a rather disengaged white Australian man who, as he tells us, ‘graduated...
IMBI NEEME The Spill: extract
This week we’re delighted to bring you an extract from Imbi Neeme’s debut The Spill, winner of the 2019 Penguin Literary Prize and published just last month. It’s an absorbing novel about two sisters, and how differently each remembers the past. When Nicole was 11 and...
LAURA JEAN MCKAY The Animals in That Country. Reviewed by Kurt Johnson
Laura Jean McKay’s novel asks us to see the world through animals’ eyes. It was just past Goulburn on the Hume Highway, heading back to Sydney last Christmas. The Southern Highlands were aflame, and a southerly had pushed up smoke clouds as thick as a...
TRUDI CANAVAN Maker’s Curse: Millennium’s Rule Book Four. Reviewed by Amelia Dudley
Trudi Canavan provides a suitably epic final instalment to her Millennium’s Rule series with Maker’s Curse. ‘All you can do is make sure you only have enemies because you are a good person.’ The bestselling author of four previous series, including...
JESSIE TU A Lonely Girl is a Dangerous Thing: extract
This week we’re thrilled to bring you an extract from Jessie Tu’s novel A Lonely Girl is a Dangerous Thing – an exhilarating, disturbing, unputdownable debut about music, sex, and, yes, loneliness and connection. Jena Lin was a musical child prodigy, touring the great...
ELLIOT PERLMAN Maybe the Horse Will Talk. Reviewed by Ann Skea
Elliot Perlman’s latest novel is a timely chronicle of lawyers and sexual harassment. Stephen Maserov has problems. He is a 32-year-old second-year lawyer at the prestigious Melbourne law firm Freely Savage Carter Blanche, where he lives ‘in a collapsible...
DANI POWELL Return to Dust: extract
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...
JASPER FFORDE The Constant Rabbit. Reviewed by Robert Goodman
In his latest novel Jasper Fforde departs from his famous Tuesday Next series and explores themes of fear and prejudice in Britain. It is not very far into The Constant Rabbit that readers familiar with Jasper Fforde’s work will know, without doubt, they are in a...
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...
ANNA DOWNES The Safe Place. Reviewed by Ashley Kalagian Blunt
Anna Downes’s first novel is a thriller that poses uncomfortable questions about families. The Safe Place begins with a dreamlike escape. A young Londoner in a Ramones T-shirt and worn sneakers boards a private jet and arrives in France, where a chauffeur...
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