KIM KELLY Walking. Reviewed by Jessica Stewart
Kim Kelly’s newest novel is a story of love, ambition and prejudice in the medical world. When Kim Kelly stumbled across the true story of how a brilliant German–Australian orthopaedic surgeon, Dr Max Herz, had been interned as an enemy alien during World War I,...
SOPHIE HARDCASTLE Below Deck. Reviewed by Ann Skea
Sophie Hardcastle’s second novel explores the lure of the sea, and the cost of violence. It starts below deck. Olivia (Oli) has been kidnapped. Well, not actually kidnapped but rescued late at night, in a drunken stupor, by Mac, an old man who now needs to...
EVIE WYLD The Bass Rock. Reviewed by Linda Funnell
Evie Wyld won the Miles Franklin Award for her last novel, All the Birds, Singing. Her latest, set on the coast of Scotland, contains both beauty and violence. The Bass Rock opens with a small girl, who we will shortly meet as the grown-up Viv, finding the body of a...
LILI WILKINSON After the Lights Go Out. Reviewed by Amelia Dudley
An outback mining town is the setting for the apocalypse in Lili Wilkinson’s novel. In a parallel universe, a version of me gets to have a normal life, where ‘being prepared’ means bringing a cardigan… Pru’s father is a doomsday prepper. She and her twin sisters...
MELISSA LUCASHENKO Too Much Lip. Reviewed by Suzanne Marks
Melissa Lucashenko’s latest novel reveals the impact of history on contemporary Indigenous lives, and richly deserves its Miles Franklin Award. In telling the truth about the reality of many Aboriginal families’ lives, Melissa Lucashenko has created a...
PETRONELLA MCGOVERN Six Minutes. Reviewed by Sally Nimon
Petronella McGovern’s debut thriller contains a lesson for the digital age. Six Minutes. A lost child. That’s it in a nutshell. As the world witnessed in horror the unfolding of the infamous James Bulger case in the early 1990s, or Madeline McCann’s...
TANYA HEASLIP Alice to Prague and YONGEY MINGYUR RINPOCHE with HELEN TWORKOV In Love with the World. Reviewed by Ann Skea
These two memoirs of travel and dislocation present contrasting approaches to venturing into the unknown. Alice to Prague and In Love with the World are very different books with contrasting styles and perspectives and different stories to tell. Yet, fundamentally,...
JUDITH BRETT From Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage: How Australia got Compulsory Voting. Reviewed by Bernard Whimpress
Australian politicians might rank low in public esteem but as this incisive book from Judith Brett reveals, our system of voting is admirable compared to the rest of the world’s democracies and certainly superior to those of the United Kingdom and the United States....
SALLIE MUIRDEN Wedding Puzzle. Reviewed by Jessica Stewart
Sallie Muirden’s fourth novel explores love and life choices. How does anyone ever manage to choose a partner for life? Given the imperfections of every choice, given that we are all complicated individuals with our own distinct bundles of neuroses, Muirden asks...
SUZANNE DANIEL Allegra in Three Parts. Reviewed by Sally Nimon
The adults seem determined to make the world a baffling place for Allegra. Suzanne Daniel brings the 1970s to life in this debut novel. Sometimes when I get information from secretly listening in to the adults, it feels as though growing up is not so much about...
Marvellous Monday Giveaway
This Monday we’re giving away two very different novels about life outside Australia’s cities: Jennifer Mills’s Dyschronia, set in a small coastal town and longlisted for the 2019 Miles Franklin Award, and previous Miles Franklin winner Sofie...
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