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Winner of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript, Victoria Hannan’s debut is a rewarding journey.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...
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...
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...
JAMES BRADLEY Ghost Species. Reviewed by James McKenzie Watson
Ghost Species, James Bradley’s terrifyingly relevant seventh novel, is On the Beach for a globally warmed generation. Its proposed roadmap of where humankind’s false belief we’re in control will lead us is bleak but beautiful, its climate mayday embedded within a...
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