This insider’s satire of university life is no advertisement for an academic career. The premise of John Dale’s new novel is simple, age-old even: ambitious young thing gets dream job – but discovers that, in reality, it’s closer to a nightmare....
Jessica Johns’ debut novel does not discount the importance of dreams and the persistence of spirits. Jessica Johns claims that she wrote her horror-inspired novel Bad Cree ‘as a form of revenge’. The revenge was against what could be described as...
The fourteenth instalment of Barry Maitland’s groundbreaking Brock and Kolla crime series is also the last. Scottish-born, English-raised and, since 1984, Australian-based, Barry Maitland published the first Brock and Kolla novel, The Marx Sisters,...
Fiona McFarlane’s story of a lost child reveals a cross-section of colonial Australia. ‘The boy met a god by the hollow tree.’ So begins Fiona McFarlane’s second novel, The Sun Walks Down, and so begins a kaleidoscopic tour through the social...
In unearthing the story of a 19th-century thoroughbred, Pulitzer Prize-winner Geraldine Brooks examines racism then and now. Geraldine Brooks takes on a mighty task in her latest novel, Horse, covering events leading up to the American Civil War...
In this month’s Flashback Friday, Anna Verney assesses Deborah Levy’s 2018 memoir The Cost of Living. As readers of South African-born British writer Deborah Levy’s literary fiction will know, it always has an unsettlingly allusive...
