What Am I Reading?
The Crying Room – Gretchen Shirm
The fact that the novel The Crying Room (Transit Lounge Publishing 2023) by Gretchen Shirm has cover endorsements from Helen Garner and Tegan Bennett Daylight gives you an indication of the quality of the prose and the skilled crafting of the writing. Luminously...
Forbidden Doors – edited by Bianca Milroy
Forbidden Doors (Lorikeet Ink 2023) is the second anthology of short stories by a group of writers who met at GenreCon 2019 and have once again collaborated on a collection of stories from a range of genres including speculative fiction, historical fiction, fantasy,...
The Last Woman in the World – Inga Simpson
Author Inga Simpson is one of Australia’s finest nature writers, her works imbued with a deep thoughtfulness and insightful consideration of the environment, its history and our place in it. Her novel The Last Woman in the World (Hachette 2022) is a departure from her...
The Luminous Solution – Charlotte Wood
Charlotte Wood’s classic guide to ‘Creativity, Resilience and the Inner Life’, THE LUMINOUS SOLUTION (Allen and Unwin 2021) is a book that every creator and artist should read, whether they are painting, writing, sculpting or composing. It is not a book about writing...
Birnam Wood – Eleanor Catton
Eleanor Catton is an extraordinary writer and her second novel Birnam Wood (Granta Publications 2023) is a compelling, complex and layered work of fiction. Her debut The Luminaries won the Booker Prize and I enjoyed Birnam Wood even more – it is more accessible,...
Drowning – T.J. Newman
Drowning (Simon and Schuster 2023) by T.J. Newman is the follow-up suspense thriller to her international bestselling novel Falling. An ex-airline steward, Newman’s insider knowledge of all things aviation – especially the safety and risks aspects – informs her...
The Terrible Event – David Cohen
I adore David Cohen’s inane sense of humour and in his latest collection of short stories The Terrible Event (Transit Lounge Publishing 2023), he is absolutely on fire with sparkling wit, strange, outlandish and mesmerising tales, stories of hilarity and sardonic,...
Traced – Catherine Jinks
Author Catherine Jinks’ latest crime novel Traced (Text Publishing 2023) is a gripping, page-turning thriller told in two timelines that covers themes of family violence, abuse and stalking. This well-constructed and pacey narrative explores serious issues while...
Feast – Emily O’Grady
I opened Feast (Allen and Unwin 2023), the second novel by author Emily O’Grady, after the launch, expecting to read a few pages and return to it later, but I couldn’t put it down. It is exactly the kind of reflective, quiet, meditative, introspective, literary novel...
Salonika Burning – Gail Jones
Gail Jones is one of Australia’s finest literary writers and her latest novel Salonika Burning (Text Publishing 2022) is another example of her masterful control of language and her beautiful prose. Set in WWI, the four main characters navigate the (true) historical...
A Kind of Magic – Anna Spargo-Ryan
Anna Spargo-Ryan is known for her successful writing career (two novels, winner of the inaugural Horne Prize Essay, Non-Fiction Editor at Island Magazine), but it is her most recent endeavour, the memoir A Kind of Magic: A memoir about anxiety, our minds, and optimism...
Lessons in Chemistry – Bonnie Garmus
Why, oh why has it taken me so long to read this wonderful book? Lessons in Chemistry (Penguin Random House 2022) by debut author Bonnie Garmus is one of those books that is a number one global bestseller and you (or maybe it’s just me) avoids reading it because ‘it...