Picked from a shortlist packed with incredible stories, the Small Press Network has announced its Book of the Year. The SPN Book of the Year Award recognises the literary greatness of books published by small publishers in Australia each year. The winner this year was Gravidity and Parity by Eleanor Jackson, a poignant and intricate collection of…
Read More
If you’ve been looking for a book that has the booksellers raving then its time to check out the Dymocks Book of the Year winners. On Monday 28 November, the Dymock’s team announced the 2022 Book of the Year and Young Readers Book of the Year as voted for by Dymocks staff across the company….
Read More
There are echoes of The Lovely Bones in Joanna Morrison’s debut novel, The Ghost of Gracie Flynn. Narrated by Gracie, the story is told as if her ghost is talking directly to the infant daughter of one of Gracie’s university friends, Sam. Gracie, Sam, Robyn and Cohen were a tight knit foursome, once upon a time, but…
Read More
The protagonist of Adriane Howell’s debut novel, Hydra, has a very distinctive voice. An antiquarian with dreams of becoming a specialist at the auction house where she works; Anja has developed her own taxonomy of classifying objects based on the way they make a person feel rather than on where they are from, who made them…
Read More
One of Britain’s most beloved bakers — and someone who lights up our screens regularly here in Australia — Nadiya Hussain, has another cookbook coming out, Nadiya’s Everyday Baking. The 2015 Great British Bake Off winner infuses her new cookbook with the usual trademark shortcuts while encouraging home bakers to use their oven every day…
Read More
Dr Lachlan McIver has had an extraordinary career. An Associate Professor, he has worked with Médecins Sans Frontières and the World Health Organisation, specialising in tropical diseases and rural medicine. Life & Death Decisions takes readers into high-stakes environments: natural disasters and civil war zones where the term ‘life and death decisions’ really counts. This…
Read More
In Brooke Dunnell‘s Fogarty Award-winning debut novel, The Glass House, Julia Lambett returns to her childhood home in Perth to move her father into care. The timing, as is usually the case in such novels, couldn’t be worse. Julia and her husband Rowan have taken to sleeping in separate beds; with some sort of unspoken issue…
Read More
Debra Dank’s We Come With This Place is an outstanding and remarkable book. It’s an unforgettable read, packed with rich detail regarding Dank’s own family history; but also the broader story of Country and people. It is a vivid and profound story that is told with great honesty and depth. I have never before felt…
Read More
Growing Up Wiradjuri, published earlier this year, is a new junior non-fiction anthology from Magabala Books. Edited by the prolific and acclaimed Wiradjuri writer and activist Dr. Anita Heiss, the anthology collects the personal stories of eight elders. Each of the eight included writers are Uncles and Aunties who came of age in New South…
Read More
Steven Rowley’s The Guncle is a great read – funny, and with loads of quirky moments. Hollywood star, Patrick or Gay Uncle Patrick (GUP) escapes from the rat race from Hollywood, instead hiding away in Palm Springs to help get over a big loss in his love life. Patrick doesn’t have much time to wallow…
Read More
Philippa Gregory, best known for her worldwide hits The Other Boleyn Girl and The White Queen is a recognised authority on women’s history. With a slew of awards and recognitions for her contributions to literature, including a CBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours in 2020, her latest saga, The Fairmile Series, spans the years of 1648-1685. The…
Read More
In her latest book, author Joan Beaumont brings us fresh insight into a major part of Australian history. Australia’s Great Depression offers a comprehensive history of a fledgling nation, shattered by the Great War, and how it survived the worst economic crisis of its history. In telling this story Beaumont uncovers the sources of resilience…
Read More
We all have it. But how much do we know about it? Writer and publisher, Phillipa McGuinness offers us a comprehensive text about skin in her latest book. Across twelve chapters, she covers many different topics in what can feel like a tad dense read at times. This is a well-researched book and McGuinness is…
Read More
Question: What do you get if you mash up Charlotte Wood‘s The Natural Way of Things, Anna North’s Outlawed and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale? Answer: Kathryn Hore’s latest novel, The Stranger. Set in an unspecified frontier-like future on an unnamed continent, in a small, gated town called Darkwater, The Stranger is a twist on the classic story prompt, a stranger comes…
Read More
The Dymocks Book of the Year award was first introduced in 2018 to recognise and continue to support literary talent. Voted on by Dymocks staff across the country, the winners will be announced on Monday 28 November at the Dymocks flagship store on George St, Sydney. The shortlist for the Dymocks 2022 Book of the…
Read More
The Three Lives of Alix St Pierre treads familiar territory for seasoned Natasha Lester readers, namely the streets of Paris during and immediately after the Second World War. The novel opens with Alix about to leave her Swiss finishing school to pursue her dream of working in fashion. She is devastated to leave her closest…
Read More
It was twenty years ago that many of us first saw author Nigel Marsh at play. Back then Marsh was the self-proclaimed “Fat, Forty & Fired” corporate type whose career had derailed. Many people could relate, so he followed up his debut with Fit, 50 & Fired Up. Another decade on, and he comes to…
Read More
– With pull quotes on its cover from the likes of Charlotte Wood, Tony Birch and Laura Elvery, Anne Casey-Hardy’s debut collection of short stories, Cautionary Tales for Excitable Girls promises to be something special – and it does not disappoint. Often exploring themes of coming of age, motherhood, loss and friendship, these stories are about…
Read More
In his memoir What Goes Unsaid, critically acclaimed Mexican author Emiliano Monge has turned his attention to his own family tree and decided that it’s time to write about his grandfather’s deceit, and the affect it had on his family. In March 1958, Carlos Monge McKay drives to a quarry and fakes his own death. Four…
Read More
Shehan Karunatilka‘s story of a war photographer who wakes up dead in a celestial visa office and has ‘seven moons’ to try and solve the mystery of his own death has taken out the 2022 Booker Prize. The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (published by Sort of Books) is Karunatilka’s second novel and was announced…
Read More
In 1925, Perth woman Audrey Jacob shot dead her former fiance, Cyril Gidley in the middle of the ballroom at Government House in front of hundreds of witnesses. Yet she did not go to jail for her crime. Now, almost one hundred years later, historian and author Leigh Straw has delved into this case for…
Read More
October 8th was Love Your Bookshop Day and The AU Review book team took to their local bookshops to snap up an entire haul of titles to top up their TBR piles. Two of the team even went on a whole bookshop crawl to share the love with as many of their local indie bookshops…
Read More
Terry Pratchett: A Life with Footnotes is the long awaited biography of the heralded fantasy author Terry Pratchett, written by his PA and close friend of several decades, Rob Wilkins. It is a captivating and in-depth account of Pratchett’s early life, family, (often reluctant) schooling, career before books, career during books, and many achievements over…
Read More
We’re now edging ever closer to Christmas. That means we’re now entering into some of the busiest weeks in the world of publishing and book selling. Expect to see lots of gift books and themed releases on the shelves in the next few weeks. With so many books being released each month, we in the…
Read More
If it’s seemed this year like Ultimo Press are the ones to watch, then this latest novel by Eliza Henry-Jones is no exception. Pick it up for its gorgeous, moody cover, but stay for the complex and well thought-out plot and its cast of intriguing characters who almost seem to walk off the page. Salt…
Read More
Off the coast of a tiny forgotten town called Elston-Fright, lies a rock-that-doesn’t-exist. On that rock live three wicked child-snatching children. But someone else lives there too. A ghost. She’s fashioned a body made of wax with seaweed for hair and abalone shells for eyes. She’s found a friend, a huntsman spider named Simon. And…
Read More
My Heart is a Little Wild Thing is the sophomore novel from Australian writer, Nigel Featherstone. It is the story of Patrick, the beleaguered youngest son of a family from country New South Wales who has suppressed his own needs and desires for most of his life. Now the only member of his family in…
Read More
Author Chris Flynn was the mastermind behind my favourite novel of 2020, Mammoth. Now he’s back with a new collection of short fiction/stories, Here Be Leviathans. And, it’s quite probably my favourite book of 2022. Collected over a period of ten years, the stories in Here Be Leviathans show an author who is full of…
Read More
The curse on Lakesedge and its young lord has been lifted. But it has come at a great cost. Leta, desperate to save the boy she loves, has made a deal with the Lord Under. Sacrificing herself to mend the Corruption that has ravaged Lakesedge, she is damned to walk the world Below. Yet her…
Read More
Portable Magic, the latest book by Shakespeare scholar Emma Smith, is more than just a book about books. Or rather, it’s not exactly what you would expect from a book about books. Instead of being a cultural history of books, reading and publishing, it’s a thematic account of books as physical objects. Divided into chapters about…
Read More
