What Am I Reading?
Dark As Last Night – Tony Birch
In true Tony Birch style, DARK AS LAST NIGHT (UQP 2021) explores themes of (toxic) masculinity, class (particularly the working class), poverty, violence and race. This collection of short stories especially focuses on semi-autobiographical stories in honour of...
Women and Children – Tony Birch
Tony Birch’s novel Women and Children (UQP 2023) is a powerful portrait of a family beset by intergenerational trauma, abuse and family violence, penned by one of Australia’s greatest living writers, an author who leaves us with characters that feel like real people...
You Must Remember This – Sean Wilson
Sean Wilson’s second novel, YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS (Affirm Press 2025) is a slim, hardback, literary meditation on aging, memory and family. Very different to his first novel (a remarkable historical crime thriller), it is nevertheless written in the same beautiful,...
Cold Truth – Ashley Kalagian Blunt
The new psychological thriller by Ashley Kalagian Blunt is a perfect crime read – I couldn’t stop obsessively turning the pages, desperate to know what happens, but I also tried to slow down my reading because I didn’t want it to end. Cold Truth (Ultimo Press 2025) is...
Lioness – Emily Perkins
Lioness (Bloomsbury 2023) by Emily Perkins is a mesmerising and intimate account of the lives of two women as they slowly unravel due to both external circumstances and their interior struggles. It’s like watching a car crash in slow motion. You can see that it’s all...
Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens – Shankari Chandran
It’s taken me a while to get to the 2023 Miles Franklin Award winner, Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens (Ultimo Press 2022) by Shankari Chandran, but I’m so glad I did! This is a stunning, immersive, wide-ranging novel with all the readability that its cute title and...
Ordinary Gods and Monsters – Chris Womersley
Chris Womersley’s coming-of age-story ORDINARY GODS AND MONSTERS (Picador 2023) has the beating heart of a thrilling crime novel. Skilfully written, with engaging characters and the familiar themes of adolescents transversing that liminal time between childhood and...
Call Me Marlowe – Catherine de Saint Phalle
I adore Catherine de Saint Phalle’s writing: astonishing, wise, engaging, insightful, warm, compassionate, intimate and always ringing with the heavy weight of a truthful bell. Call Me Marlowe (Transit Lounge 2023) is an endearing, traumatic and hopeful novel set...
A Case of Matricide – Graeme Macrae Burnet
In his third novel featuring the detective Georges Gorski, Scottish author Graeme Macrae Burnet has completed a stunning meta crime fiction series set in the small town of Saint-Louis, on the French-Swiss border. A CASE OF MATRICIDE (Text Publishing 2024) is...
Pictures of You – Emma Grey
An endearing combination of tender romance and witty comedy with an undercurrent of dark secrets, Emma Grey’s novel Pictures of You (Penguin Random House 2024) explores themes of coercive control, identity, memory, desire, friendship, trauma, betrayal, grief and...
Orbital – Samantha Harvey
The recent winner of the Booker Prize, Orbital (Penguin Random House 2023) by Samantha Harvey is not your usual doorstopper of a Booker novel, but a slim, taut and focused story of six astronauts circling the earth, the narrative divided into the 16 orbits of their...
The Blue Hour – Paula Hawkins
The Blue Hour (Penguin Random House 2024) is only my second Paula Hawkins’ book, after years ago reading her international best-selling The Girl on the Train. In this novel, The Blue Hour, I got everything I was expecting in terms of a mysterious, intriguing...