The year is 1926, and American model Lee Miller has arrived in Paris. Leaving behind a successful career at Vogue, she’s ready to take her place behind the camera, rather than in front of it. After convincing surrealist Man Ray to take her on as his assistant, she begins her education, but soon finds herself…
Rohan Wilson’s latest novel, Daughter of Bad Times is a novel with an extremely global outlook, but this may just be its problem. The novel follows two protagonists, Rin Braden and Yamaan Ali Umair, two lovers from very different circumstances. Rin is the daughter of Alessandra Braden, the CEO of Cabey-Yasuda Corrections, a company which owns…
The town that makes up the main setting of Tony Birch’s new novel The White Girl is a fictional one, but it could have been anywhere in Australia. The novel tells the story of Odette Brown, an Indigenous woman who was raised on the mission in Deane separated from her family, and in particular her father. She lives on…
Pioneering French filmmaker Claude Ballard has lived at the Hotel Knickerbocker for almost half a century. It’s a quiet existence, by Hollywood hotel standards at least, and Claude fills his days taking photographs and keeping an eye on the hotel’s more vulnerable residents. But when an enthusiastic young film student arrives, keen to discover the…
A suburban family finds a prehistoric egg. A lonely woman aids a fallen angel. An American woman plots to take the Parisian honey industry by storm. These are just a few of the moments captured in Bindy Pritchard‘s stunning short story collection Fabulous Lives. Curious, yet always relatable, Pritchard’s vignettes are filled with the sort of…
The year is 1930. With talkies on the rise, the age of silent cinema is coming to a close, and it seems there’s someone on the Berlin streets who’s not quite ready to let it go. Cinema starlets are showing up dead at an alarming rate and, as if Inspector Gereon Rath doesn’t already have…
In October 2017 when the hashtag #MeToo went viral, a lot of the popularity was chalked up to some rich, white celebrities speaking out. What these media reports failed to acknowledge however was that the movement’s true founder was Tarana Burke. This new anthology, #MeToo: Stories from the Australian Movement, is broadens #MeToo’s scope, whilst…
The body count is high in Amanda O’Callaghan’s debut short story collection, This Taste for Silence. From the very first story, death, murder and unexplained disappearances emerge as a dominant theme in this collection which has been described by Ryan O’Neill as ‘utterly haunting.’ Brisbane-based author O’Callaghan is an internationally acclaimed writer of short (and very…
Jocelyn Moorhouse knows how to spin a great yarn. The Dressmaker director has had a rich career in film, and this forms part of her memoir, Unconditional Love. This book looks at her brilliant career, including her collaborations with filmmaker husband, PJ Hogan (Muriel’s Wedding). But, Moorhouse’s most intriguing chapters are about her experiences with…
Omar Sakr’s The Lost Arabs was one of my most anticipated new releases for the year. It has more than lived up to expectations, which isn’t always the case. It’s intimate, vibrant, beautifully composed and engages creatively and powerfully with a whole host of concerns and themes intrinsic to understanding the modern world. The Lost…
Little Stones might be the debut novel from Australian writer Elizabeth Kuiper, but it won’t be her last. The novel, of which an early version was long listed for the Richell Prize, published in Award Winning Australian Writing and received the Express Media Prize for the best work of fiction, marks the arrival of a new voice in Australian writing. One…
I’ll have what she’s having. Or will I? When it comes to “Happy Ever After” many of us believe we all want the same things. But Paul Dolan’s latest book, Happy Ever After, challenges us to think otherwise. He does this with some myth-busting and some clear-eyed, intellectual arguments. Paul Dolan, as Professor of Behavioural Science…
Practice. Journalism, Essays and Criticism collects and distills the writings of journalist Guy Rundle. An intricate, clever yet funny, and mostly convincing take on all the big politicians, and some sordid Americans along the way, Practice is compiled from his work for Crikey, and various magazines and newspapers, over the years. Opinions on topics ranging…
Meg Keneally may have a literary giant for a father, but her career speaks for itself. Beginning her working life as Junior Public Affairs Officer at the Australian Consulate-General in New York, she has worked as a sub-editor and freelance features writer in Dublin, as a journalist at the Daily Telegraph in Australia, as a talkback…
Some people read books to escape their lives. For other readers, they want to consume a story that mirrors their own. Author, Melina Marchetta certainly fits into the latter camp. Her latest novel – the third in her Inner West trilogy, set in the suburbs of Sydney – is a close examination of the issues…
The Shining Wall, the gripping debut novel from author Melissa Ferguson, is an exploration of scientific possibility through the lens of feminism and fiction. The novel tells the frightening story of the orphaned Alida and her younger sister Graycie, who are left along following the death of their mother in the Demi-Settlements outside the wall. …
It is rare that at the age of eighty and after publishing sixteen books – a mixture of novels, short story collections, and non-fiction – that an author comes into the light of the public consciousness and begins to find notoriety. But the works of Gerald Murnane have begun to garner considerable interest in recent…
Edited by Maxine Beneba Clarke, with Magan Magan and Ahmed Yussuf, Growing Up African in Australia is a new anthology from Black Inc., following on from Alice Pung’s Growing Up Asian in Australia, Benjamin Law’s Growing Up Queer in Australia and Anita Heiss’ Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia. Whilst, Carly Findlay, who also contributed to this…
If there were a title for Grand Master of narrative fiction then the undisputed champion would be Janet Malcolm. This American author has been writing since the 1960’s when she first began with The New Yorker. The author of several books, her latest one, Nobody’s Looking At You, focuses on recent times by drawing together…
David Cullen, author of the definitive bestseller Columbine, returns with a second book, this time detailing the story of the events surrounding the Parkland, Florida school shooting in February 2018, the extraordinary teenage survivors and the March For Our Lives (MFOL) campaign that followed. In Parkland, Cullen takes the readers inside the school in the…
Melina Marchetta’s novels are often about the boy or girl who lives next door. Her book, Looking for Alibrandi, was a perfect example of this and continues to find new audiences, some thirty years after it was released. Marchetta’s latest novel, The Place on Dalhousie, takes a leaf out of her previous works by reprising…
The unnamed protagonist of Carrie Tiffany’s new novel, Exploded View, lets us into her life by increments. Immediately, as readers, we are welcomed into her interior world– a place where the only things that make sense are cars, and engines. It is the late 1970’s, and the girl and her brother watch things like Hogan’s Heroes on the TV, careful…
Relationship advisor Zoë Foster Blake takes us on an enthusiastic journey through matters of the heart and offers a fresh perspective in her new reference guide: Love! The book offers hints, solutions and ideas on how to deal with many of the issues us women experience when dating, whilst also giving some insight into why we…
Washed ashore on the island of Janda Baik, sisters Muni and Satki have no memory of their former lives. Mak Genggang, the region’s foremost witch, knows a curse when she sees it and in the mortal Muna and the magical Satki, it’s clear as day to her what has happened. Unable, or unwilling, to answer…
Underdog is a collection of short stories, collected from upcoming and unpublished Australian YA fiction writers. Edited by (and featuring contributions from) Tobias Madden and Sarah Taviana, Underdog celebrates a uniquely Australian genre, one as diverse and emotive as the country in which it is written. Featuring twelve short stories, Underdog is the first #LoveOzYA…
Art dealer Alex Clayton is back, and conservator best friend John Porter and faithful hound Hogarth aren’t too far behind either. Invited to preview a new exhibition at the Melbourne International Museum of Art, they’re present to see museum staff unveil a supposedly cursed painting. But when one of the workers collapses and damages the…
Monica Tan’s first novel, Stranger Country, will take you on a 30,000km journey of discovery around selected parts of Australia. Tan is Chinese Australian, but at thirty-two, felt that she didn’t know as much about Australia’s history as she did about China’s. In a bid to change that, Tan embarked on a journey around parts…
1917. At Blackwater Abbey in Devon, a storm is brewing. Lord and Lady Highmount invite renowned mediums, bereaved parents, and one troubled young soldier into their home, all in the hopes of contacting their sons, lost to the war ravaging Europe – much of it powered by the Highmounts’ own armaments. Thrust unexpectedly into their…
The year is 1936 and inside the Buckingham Hotel’s Grand Ballroom, the party is in full swing. But it’s more than dancing partners and waiters armed with fresh champagne doing the rounds here. With Britain keeping one eye firmly on the rising European fascists, the business of buying and selling secrets is booming – and…
Eccentric, heartbreaking and hilarious- this is how Debra Adelaide‘s latest book of short stories is described on the cover by her Picador stable-mate, Jennifer Mills. The book is Zebra and Other Stories, a collection comprised of fourteen stories, divided into three sections: First, Second and Third. These sections refer to the point of view taken in the stories. Adelaide covers a…
