The author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel travels through time in her new novel. If there’s pleasure in action, there’s peace in stillness. Emily St John Mandel takes us on a delightfully strange journey through time in her latest novel. In...
Set in the 1950s, Jay Carmichael’s second novel is a window onto Australia’s queer history. In the closing paragraph of the author’s note to Marlo, Jay Carmichael tells us that for him, ‘the task of the historical novel’ is to fill the...
The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist demonstrates there is little she doesn’t know about human nature. Anne Tyler’s most recent novel, her twenty-fourth, French Braid covers familiar territory. If this was said about any other novelist...
Paul M Clark employs the tropes of ‘folk horror’ in this tale of a 16th-century witchfinder. Samuel was the most experienced witchfinder north of London. Until he’d met Douglass. Now he felt like an infant learning how to walk. Trying...
Cameron K. Murray and Paul Frijters reveal how Australia is run by the ‘Game of Mates’, the cosy relationships at the centre of power. Given current discussions about a federal ICAC, and a continuing avalanche of corruption allegations against...
Do animals have consciousness? And if so, to what degree? Professor Peter Godfrey-Smith investigates in Metzoa. A scene in André Brink’s anti-apartheid novel An Act of Terror begins with a team of labourers processing recently caught crayfish. They...
