JESSICA DETTMANN Your Friend and Mine. Reviewed by Sally Nimon
The new novel from the author of Without Further Ado and How to be Second Best is a story of friendship and second chances. Margot, you’re my best friend. I will take care of you. You are going to live to be a very old lady in a horrible nursing home where your...
SUZANNE DO The Golden Sister. Reviewed by Linda Godfrey
Set on the Australian coast, Suzanne Do’s first novel is both a murder mystery and a story of grief, family and connection. Lili Berry is in her twenties, and her world is a mess of anxiety, dysfunction and pain. Compounding all her day-to-day problems in the...
KELL WOODS Upon A Starlit Tide. Reviewed by Amelia Dudley
Kell Woods blends history, folklore and fairytales in her second novel set on the French coast in eighteenth-century Saint Malo. I know what it is to cry and have no one but the sea there to listen. Lucinde de Leon has always loved the sea. Whenever she can, she...
KERRIE DAVIES Miles Franklin Undercover. Reviewed by Ann Skea
Author Kerrie Davies explores Miles Franklin’s life in the decades after the success of My Brilliant Career. A book is written in solitude and in a crowd, at night, in the early morning, on weekends, and in thoughts and in dreams. So writes Kerrie Davies in her...
FIONA HARDY Unbury the Dead. Reviewed by Karen Chisholm
Melbourne author Fiona Hardy has broken very different ground with her crime fiction debut Unbury the Dead. Hardy is well-known in crime fiction circles as a Melbourne bookseller, crime fiction reviewer and, more recently, an award-winning author of children’s...
ANDREA GOLDSMITH The Buried Life. Reviewed by Ann Skea
Each of Andrea Goldsmith’s three protagonists faces a reckoning with the past in this novel of life and death and friendship. The Buried Life begins with characters whose fates seem predictable, but Andrea Goldsmith is too good a writer to rely on clichés. Adrian...
KATE KEMP The Grapevine. Reviewed by Sally Nimon
Psychologist Kate Kemp’s debut novel opens with blood spatters and goes on to unravel the secrets of a suburban street in 1970s Australia. The time is 1979. The place (namely Warrah Place) is suburban Canberra. It’s summer and the heat is oppressive, disrupting the...
ALEXANDRA ALMOND Thoroughly Disenchanted. Reviewed by Amelia Dudley
Alexandra Almond’s cosy fantasy demonstrates why you really should be careful what you wish for. In Australian author Alexandra Almond’s debut fantasy novel, lovers Genevieve and Oliver spent a weekend in an enchanting old house – that may or may not be haunted...
SUN JUNG My Name is Gucci. Reviewed by Michael Jongen
Gucci the Dalmatian narrates this novel of lives entwined from South Korea to Sydney over multiple lifetimes. I did not expect that a novel narrated by a dog would move and astound me so much. I was not prepared for the richness of My Name is Gucci by Sun Jung. I...
INGA SIMPSON The Thinning Reviewed by Ann Skea
The new novel from the author of Understory explores what happens when mining dramatically changes life on Earth. We haven’t always lived on amber alert, ready to run. When Dianella was the photographer in residence and Dad the head astronomer, we used to have a...
CATHERINE JINKS Panic. Reviewed by Karen Chisholm
In her new novel, Panic, Catherine Jinks provides a timely take on online mobs, conspiracy theorists, and sovereign citizens. Bronte is a young woman who, along with most of her generation, records pretty much everything about her life online. One drunken rant,...
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