The Bookshelf

A new interview with Elizabeth Strout about Oh, William! and the Bookshelf that Made Her; and favourite review discussions from the year about Jane Austen, Joan Silber and Kevin Barry with readers Ruth Wilson and Michael McGirr

Writers and their bookshelves. Sarah Winman's Still Life moves between England and Florence, while Nick Earls' Empires travels from Brisbane to Alaska, London, Vienna and Hong Kong. But what are the books that shaped these novels and these writers?

What are the books that have shaped these writers and (in particular) their latest works? Ken Follett, Rose Tremaine, Amie Kaufman & Jaclyn Moriarty

Reading recommendations from writer and critic Beejay Silcox, crime writer Christian White and memoirist Lech Blaine. What are the books they have especially admired this year?

Actor Claudia Karvan speaks to Kate Evans about her reading life and the Books That Made Us

Reading John Hughes' The Dogs and Kate Grenville's The Secret River with historian David Hunt and writer and philosopher Michael McGirr

Introducing Classic Australian Novels. A collection of interviews from the ABC Archives with Australian authors about their most significant work. In 2007 Alexis Wright won the Miles Franklin Award for her epic novel Carpentaria, set in and around the mythical town of Desperance in Queensland’s Gulf Country.

Introducing Classic Australian Novels. A collection of interviews from the ABC Archives with Australian authors about their most significant work. In True History of the Kelly Gang Peter Carey took a mythic Australian story and turned it into a Booker Prize winning novel.

Introducing Classic Australian Novels. A collection of interviews from the ABC Archives with Australian authors about their most significant work. With his first two novels Richard Flanagan had already garnered a reputation as great author. But then in 2001 the Tasmanian writer consolidated his literary reputation, and his gift for great titles, with Gould's Book of Fish.

Introducing Classic Australian Novels. A collection of interviews from the ABC Archives with Australian authors about their most significant work. The politics and philosophy of tourism are at the core of Michelle de Kretser’s book Questions of Travel which charts the lives of two characters living worlds apart.

Introducing Classic Australian Novels. A collection of interviews from the ABC Archives with Australian authors about their most significant work. Monkey Grip ushered in a new voice in Australian Literature. Released in 1977 it was Helen Garner’s first novel and the first time Australians had read such a frank account of bohemian life in Melbourne's inner north.

Introducing Classic Australian Novels. A collection of interviews from the ABC Archives with Australian authors about their most significant work. That Deadman Dance was published in 2010 and is the third novel from Miles Franklin winner Kim Scott. Set in the Western Australian whaling port of Albany in the early 1800's it's an exploration of culture, first impressions, and the so called 'friendly...

Introducing Classic Australian Novels. A collection of interviews from the ABC Archives with Australian authors about their most significant work. Kate Grenville's The Secret River released in 2005 became an instant classic, inspiring a sequel, a television series, and a theatre production.

Reading recommendations from writers Emily Gale and Tristan Bancks (both of whom write for both teens and younger readers); and the Books That Made Us Youth Fiction Prize. (Part 2 of our best reads recommendation on 10 December)

On Christos Tsiolkas' 7 ½: A Novel, Violet Kupersmith's Build your House Around my Body and Jason Mott's Hell of a Book with comedian and writer Matt Okine and writer and producer Sheila Ngọc Phạm

Reading Polish Nobel Prize winning author Olga Tokarczuk's The Books of Jacob and Marisa Fazio's novella Piazza Garibaldi with writers Amanda Lohrey and Bram Presser; and novelist and essayist Ann Patchett on These Precious Days and the bookshelf that shaped her

Join us for a road trip book club, with actor and director Jeremy Sims and novelist and academic Intan Paramaditha. Travel on foot, in a car, on a train, into both ravaged and familiar landscapes

Reading Michelle de Kretser's Scary Monsters, Richard Powers' Bewilderment and Jay Kristoff's Empire of the Vampire with guest reader reviewers food writer Adam Liaw and novelist Hannah Kent

Reading Hannah Kent's much-anticipated new novel, Devotion, Katie Kitamura's Intimacies and Mary Lawson's A Town Called Solace, with guest reader reviewers actor Geraldine Hakewill and novelist Graeme Simsion

Reading Emily Bitto's Wild Abandon, Karl Ove Knausgaard's The Morning Star and Elizabeth Strout's Oh William! with musician Tim Rogers and novelist Pip Williams.

Reading Jonathan Franzen's novel Crossroads and Ruth Ozeki's The Book of Form and Emptiness, with actor Marta Dusseldorp and writer and provocateur John Safran

Smalltown England in the 1830s and a city within a city in the early 1960s: stories of lives and loves, dramas and small moments well told. Reading Colson Whitehead's Harlem Shuffle and George Eliot's Middlemarch with poet Miles Merrill and literary academic Margaret Harris

On the significance of English writer D H Lawrence and Alison MacLeod's novel, Tenderness; and reading Australian novels Bodies of Light by Jennifer Down and Hannah Bent's When Things Are Alive they Hum; with guests Patrick Carey and Assoc Prof Fiona Morrison

On Colm Tóibín's The Magician (a fictionalised life of Nobel Prize winning author, Thomas Mann), Silvia Moreno-Garcia's Velvet Was the Night and Sarah Bailey's The Housemate with guests Paige Clark and Mark Sutton

Novelist J P Pomare and memoirist Ianto Ware join Kate and Cassie, and the books discussed today are Sally Rooney's Beautiful World, Where Are You, Paula Hawkins' A Slow Fire Burning and Pascal Janovjak's The Rome Zoo