Known as ‘Sensible Emily’ at the ABC, where she is an award-winning journalist specialising in business and finance, Emily Stewart released her first book in July 2025 – a clever piece of scheduling, as July is when many people start to panic about money as they start to work on their tax returns! Emily championed…
Marion Taffe‘s debut work of historical fiction, By Her Hand, released earlier this year, is already sporting comparisons to literary heavyweights like Geraldine Brooks and Lauren Groff. Set in 10th Century Mercia, AKA England before it was actually England, the story follows Freda, a young woman whose fascination with learning, stories, and the power of…
Recently divorced phys-ed teacher Makayla is about to turn thirty and is determined to make up for lost time by having as many of the quintessential experiences that she missed out on in her twenties as possible. She makes a list. It includes such things as: go skinny-dipping, get a tattoo, and, the first cab…
Assassins, gorgons, greyhounds and calico cats all feature in this quarter’s most anticipated list, with characters across the board witnessing their own personal versions of hell (and the very literal hell in one case). But amongst these monsters and trials and conflicts are also moments of peace, moments of solidarity, and moments of personal growth….
2022 has been a great year for settling in with a good book and escaping the world outside. We’ve reached that part of the year where we all start agonising over our ‘lists’ –best albums, best films, and of course best books. We in the Books team have looked back over the year’s releases and…
The back cover of Barry Divola‘s debut novel Driving Stevie Fracasso makes some lofty claims. It promises High Fidelity meets The Big Lebowski meets The Darjeeling Limited; it promises Nick Hornby, David Nicholls and Jonathan Tropper vibes. Picking it up, I thought to myself that this one novel could not possibly live up to all that. But here’s the thing,…
Happy New Year everyone. Now we’ve packed away the Christmas decorations and finished the last of the festive treats, we in the book review team at the AU thought it’d be a good time to look back at some of our favourite books of the last year. A veritable smorgasbord of great books were released…
Jeffrey Eugenides, best known for his novels The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex, has earned a reputation as somewhat of a heavyweight in American literature. His last book was The Marriage Plot, published in 2011, a novel which followed three college students during the year 1982. Many parts of that novel were loosely based on the…
October has been good to book lovers, with a bumper collection of new releases. So here, as promised, are five more books we think you need to be reading. Three of the five books are highly anticipated sequels, prequels and follow-ups, though some are more long-awaited than others. Included on this list is a nice…