by NRB | 26 Sep 2024 | Fiction, SFF |
Spies, magic, intrigue, and the human cost of an expanding empire all feature in Australian author Alina Bellchambers’ debut fantasy. Growing up on the run from mysterious criminals with her mother, Mira has always dreamed of having safety and stability; of being able...
by NRB | 6 Jul 2023 | Fiction |
Luke Rutledge’s debut novel is both a social comedy and a moving story of coming out. Luke Rutledge has written a delightful comedy of manners set against the backdrop of the 2017 marriage equality plebiscite. It opens at a cracking pace, introducing us to 26-year-old...
by NRB | 27 Jun 2023 | Fiction |
Debut novelist Megan Rogers has chosen the moody west coast of Tasmania as the backdrop for this dark family drama. Just as the atmosphere on the Apple Isle can often be bleak and unpredictable (characteristics that have lent themselves so well to the rise of the...
by NRB | 13 Apr 2023 | Fiction |
Kylie Needham’s debut novel contemplates what happens when a muse is also an artist. The ‘girl in a pink dress’ is Frances, a young art student who charms her tutor (twice her age) and becomes his muse. The trope of the older male artist and the younger female...
by NRB | 17 Nov 2022 | Fiction |
Alice Ryan’s debut novel puts an extended family on the trail of their missing Molly. Molly Black had disappeared … That’s why the whole Black clan – from Granny all the way to Killan on Zoom from Sydney – is huddled together in the back room of Uncle...
by NRB | 20 Oct 2022 | Fiction |
Isobel Beech’s debut novel explores the grief left behind by a father’s suicide. From the opening scene when the unnamed daughter in Sunbathing crawls into the attic to retrieve her father’s dying cat, Donna, Isobel Beech creates an intimacy with the reader, bringing...
by NRB | 13 Aug 2020 | Fiction, SFF |
Micaiah Johnson delivers a fresh take on multiple worlds and explores issues of power, nature and fate in her novel The Space Between Worlds. The idea of multiple worlds or multiple realities is a common one in science fiction. In her debut, The Space Between...
by NRB | 28 Jul 2020 | Fiction |
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...
by NRB | 17 Jul 2020 | Extracts, Fiction |
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...
by NRB | 26 Jun 2020 | Extracts, Fiction |
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...
by NRB | 11 Jun 2019 | Fiction |
Captivating, confronting and challenging, The People in the Trees is the 2013 debut novel by Hanya Yanagihara, who would go on to explode onto the international literary scene with her Man Booker shortlisted epic A Little Life in 2015. Part literary fiction, part dark...
by NRB | 1 Oct 2013 | Fiction |
This mesmerising and suspenseful novel examines isolation, trust and the vagaries of memory. Ruth Field and her cats reside in a house set among the dunes on the New South Wales South Coast. Ruth is a widow who lives a self-contained life, her hours and days filled by...
CHER The Memoir Part 1. Reviewed by Naomi Manuell16 January 2025Cher is a genuine superstar who has had an extraordinary career across music, [ … ]
PETER GODWIN Exit Wounds. Reviewed by Ann Skea15 January 2025Peter Godwin’s memoir charts a life of exile, ranging from the horror of civil [ … ]
MARK SMITH Three Boys Gone. Reviewed by Michael Jongen14 January 2025Mark Smith’s first novel for adults is both a psychological thriller and an [ … ]
NRB readers’ favourite reviews of 202419 December 2024Welcome to our most popular reviews of the year. Is your favourite among them? [ … ]