What Am I Reading?
My Friends – Fredrik Backman
What an absolute delight to read another Fredrik Backman novel, MY FRIENDS (Simon and Schuster 2025). Backman writes with such grace, humour, wisdom, curiosity, tenderness and vulnerability; his characters are flawed, haunting, outlandish, eccentric, unique and...
The Buried Life – Andrea Goldsmith
THE BURIED LIFE (Transit Lounge 2025) by Andrea Goldsmith is a literary work of poetic beauty, brilliant craft, meaningful themes and characters with whom we become deeply invested. The novel features three main protagonists who form an unlikely but inseparable...
Heartsease – Kate Kruimink
What an unexpected delight is HEARTSEASE (Picador 2024) by debut author Kate Kruimink, a beautifully captured tale of grief, family, sisterhood, love, memory, life and what comes afterwards. Sisters Lot and Nelly, eight years apart, grew as close as siblings can be...
Theory and Practice – Michelle de Kretser
The winner of The 2025 Stella Prize, THEORY AND PRACTICE (Text Publishing 2024) is an interesting and eclectic work from author Michelle de Kretser which combines fiction, memoir, autofiction, essay and literature theory to create a hybrid tale that shapeshifts from...
Little World – Josephine Rowe
Author Josephine Rowe’s latest novella LITTLE WORLD (Black Inc 2025) is a literary gem with sparkling and evocative prose, nuanced and unforgettable characters and a suitable amount of ambiguity and complexity to encourage deep thought about profound and universal...
The Remarkable Truths of Alfie Bains – Sarah Clutton
A warm, sweet hug of a book, THE REMARKABLE TRUTHS OF ALFIE BAINS (Allen and Unwin 2025) by Sarah Clutton is narrated by the endearing, precocious and curious Irish nine-year-old Alfie Bains, who is determined to discover the reason his mother has been lying to him...
Red Dirt Blue Lights – Tess Merlin
RED DIRT BLUE LIGHTS (AndAlso Books 2025) is a slim novel by ex-policewoman Tess Merlin that provides an important insight into life in the community of Cherbourg in the 1970’s. The novella is prefaced by a Foreword from Uncle Eric Law AM and informed by Merlin’s past...
The End and Everything Before It – Finegan Kruckemeyer
THE END AND EVERYTHING BEFORE IT (Text Publishing 2024) by Finegan Kruckemeyer is a lyrical, profound, poignant, ethereal, mysterious, amusing, tender, warm, devastating, wise novel about the beginnings and endings of our lives, how each life intersects with the lives...
Sarah Evans – Bernice Barry
What a surprising treasure to discover Bernice Barry’s novel SARAH EVANS (Echo Publishing 2024). While I found the cover (and title) disappointingly banal, once I opened the pages I was immediately entranced by the beautiful literary prose, the complex characters and...
The Thinning – Inga Simpson
Inga Simpson’s award-winning writing orbits several themes and interests, including the environment, the natural world, climate change, human damage to the planet, First Nations sovereignty, photography, species diversity and familial relationships. Her latest novel...
Rapture – Emily Maguire
RAPTURE (Allen and Unwin 2024) by Emily Maguire is a searing indictment of religion, a profoundly beautiful celebration of life, a wondrous reimagining of history and an exploration of what it means to be human. Maguire gifts us a compelling, engaging, page-turning...
The Sunbird – Sara Haddad
THE SUNBIRD (UQP 2024) by Sara Haddad is a crystal-clear, sharp and resounding clarion call, a demand for justice, a cry for compassion and peace, a nuanced and intimate portrait of one Palestinian woman’s experience both now and in the past, all distilled into a...