What Am I Reading?
If You Go – Alice Robinson
In all three of her novels, Alice Robinson demonstrates a keen curiosity about the natural world and how it is changing; an analysis of the tremendous cost and the absolute joy of parenting; and a sharp and original (often dystopian or futuristic) psychological...
Wild Dark Shore – Charlotte McConaghy
I adore Charlotte McConaghy’s writing and if you haven’t yet read MIGRATIONS or ONCE THERE WERE WOLVES, I suggest you seek them out. Her latest book WILD DARK SHORE (Penguin Random House 2025) is once again everything you could want in a novel: lyrical prose,...
The Sun was Electric Light – Rachel Morton
Sometimes a novel is not so much a book as a contemplation, a meditation, a prayer. Rachel Morton’s debut THE SUN WAS ELECTRIC LIGHT (UQP 2025) is a poignant, painful, spare, literary portrait of grief, loss and aching yearning. Written in the most simple prose, this...
Safe Haven – Shankari Chandran
In her novel SAFE HAVEN (Ultimo Press 2024), author Shankari Chandran combines a crime story with the themes that characterised her previous book, CHAI TIME AT CINNAMON GARDENS, winner of The Miles Franklin Award. Those themes include refugees, displacement,...
My Heart is a Little Wild Thing – Nigel Featherstone
Amongst a slew of books published two or three years ago were many that I hoped to read but were put aside by life circumstances. What a pleasure now to scour my TBR pile and find books I was so looking forward to reading at the time but am only getting to now. One of...
I AM I AM I AM – Maggie O’Farrell
Maggie O’Farrell’s memoir I AM I AM I AM: Seventeen Brushes With Death (Tinder Press 2017) is an account of the author’s many near-death experiences from when she was a child to a mother. In beautiful literary prose, she recounts an almost unbelievable list of near...
My Brother Jaz – Gideon Haigh
Author Gideon Haigh wrote the slim memoir MY BROTHER JAZ in a frantic 72-hour stretch and first published it on his Substack. The immediate, urgent and resonate response by readers encouraged Melbourne University Press to release the work (complete with photographs)...
Nightingale – Laura Elvery
Laura Elvery is an author of unbridled curiosity, able to take a single spark of inspiration and create an entire world that is based in fact but simultaneously enriched, enlarged and enlightened by her fictional skills. With two collections of award-winning short...
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo – Taylor Jenkins Reid
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo (Simon and Schuster 2017) by Taylor Jenkins Reid is one of those books that I bought ages ago (actually YEARS) and had sitting in my TBR pile for so long, hearing great things about it but never getting to it. I’m so glad I finally...
The Stranger at the Table – Cassie Hamer
Author Cassie Hamer is known for her dark domestic dramas, filled with the minutiae of family life immediately recognisable to anyone with small people in their orbit, every book touched with secrets, scandal, betrayal or regret. Her latest novel THE STRANGER AT THE...
First Lie Wins – Ashley Elston
FIRST LIE WINS (Hachette Headline 2024) is a propulsive, page-turning psychological thriller by Ashley Elston. The opening premise is simple but preposterous: you meet a stranger at a party who looks uncannily similar to you, and even shares your name; soon one of you...
You Could Make This Place Beautiful – Maggie Smith
Award-winning poet, author and teacher Maggie Smith shot to international fame with her short poem ‘Good Bones’ and the last line of that poem is the title of her much-anticipated memoir, YOU COULD MAKE THIS PLACE BEAUTIFUL (Simon and Schuster Canongate 2024), a...