Good Reading Podcast

Treasure House is the story of the Stewart Dawson dynasty: watchmakers and jewellers, Australian pioneers of Jazz Age popular culture and entertainment, property tycoons and philanthropists. They counted stars of stage and screen, earls and princes among their connections. It's also a story of marital duplicity and deception, hubris and abuse of privilege, hedonism, fraud, and criminal violen...

Elaine Pearson is the Asia Director at Human Rights Watch and a board member of the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women. Elaine has spent a lifetime defending human rights around the world. From human trafficking in in Nepal to the 'drug war' in the Philippines, to the treatment of detainees in Papua New Guinea and in Australia and her experiences in Sri Lanka and Nigeria. Chasing W...

When climate scientist Joelle Gergis set to work on the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change's (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report, the research she encountered kept her awake at night. The evidence gathered by the world's top climate scientists showed that impacts on our climate were occurring faster than anyone had predicted. Joelle Gergis takes us on a journey through...

Salama Kassab was a pharmacy student when the cries for freedom broke out in Syria. Now, with her parents and brother both killed in a vicious civil war, Salama volunteers at a hospital in Homs, helping the wounded who flood through the doors. Salama is thinking about leaving, but who will help the people of her beloved country? With her heart so conflicted, her mind has conjured a vision to spur...

When Lucia and her dad come to stay for a week, Idris hadn't prepared himself. Lucia loves spying and is convinced that Idris' mum is a spy. But even Idris has to admit that there is something unusual about their family trip to the zoo. Were his eyes playing tricks on him but did someone secretly drop something into his Mum's bag? And who is the Countess and what's happened to...

London 1937. Two sisters, Ida Cook, a budding romance novelist and Louise, an ordinary typist for the civil service  share a passion for opera. They use their meagre savings to travel to Germany and Austria to hear their favourite opera stars, many of them Jewish. On the eve of World War II these middle-aged spinsters became part of a network that outwitted the unsuspecting Nazis and helped twenty...

Hidden deep in the jungles and mountains of the Southwest Pacific during World War II were Australia's secret army – a group of men and women who reported every movement of the Japanese invaders to Allied intelligence. The Coastwatcher organisation was formed from a group of volunteers – plantation owners, policemen, missionaries and government officers living in New Guinea and the Solomon Is...

At the age of twenty-eight Ben Bravery found himself facing the terrifying spectre of stage three colorectal cancer. As a scientist, Ben understood the seriousness of the condition but what he didn't expect was how being a patient would make him feel. After difficult and complicated surgery and months of chemotherapy he decided he needed a change – and to make change. The intense medical trai...

Nilesh Makwana is the CEO of the global award-winning business illuminance Solutions . This memoir is a vivid, honest and often hilarious look back on a life full of challenges, of good luck and bad and all the things Nilesh learnt along the way. It's a blueprint for how to succeed at university, in business, and how to bounce back after failure. Nilesh Makwana has forged his own path and sha...

Winter has come to North Carolina and Temperance Brennan is content to dote on her daughter Katy, finally returned to civilian life from the army. One night, they find a box on the back porch. Inside: a very fresh human eyeball. GPS coordinates etched into the eyeball lead to a Benedictine monastery where an equally macabre discovery awaits. More bodies turn up to complicate matters and each mimic...

Daryl Van Tongeren has been researching social psychology and the virtue of humility for over ten years. As the first book on humility in the field of psychology, Humble is a milestone in the exploration of the benefits of humility to the individual and to society. This remarkable book shares the foundational research and new ideas about why humility is important, how to nurture it for personal an...

Things are getting messy for Stella Prentice: her husband is away; she's juggling a full-time job with family that includes a demanding four-year-old and a tricky stepdaughter. Stella reluctantly hires an au pair in the hope that she will help lighten the load. Elise, a staunch feminist and Stella's mother-in-law thinks this is a terrible idea but promises not to meddle. Ava, the much-an...

Sam Vincent was a twenty-something writer working in Canberra when he gets a call from his mother – his father has got his hand caught in a wood chipper. When Sam returns to the family farm to help out, it is the beginning of a process that leads him to think differently about the farm, his father and his relationship with both. Sam's farming apprenticeship is an education in grit and shit bu...

Vince Reid left the small town of Manson a decade ago, promising never to return. But now an insurance company wants him to investigate a claim on a suspicious car crash and he is forced to relive all that drove him away from the place he grew up. As Reid's investigation unfolds, nothing is as it seems: rumours are swirling about the popular woman who crashed the car, killing her husband - th...

In August 1925, Audrey Jacob shot dead her former fiance Cyril Gidley in full view of hundreds of guests at a charity ball in Perth's Government House. This was supposed to be an open shut case of wilful murder – until lawyer Arthur Haynes is assigned to her defence. Haynes' ability to find the right legal angle and to play the press and the jury, led to a sensational result.  In this ep...

Teacher and single Mum Alex is escaping the city in search of new start with her young daughter; Bellbird River matriarch Victoria finds herself at a crossroads when globe-trotting, opera-singing cousin Gabrielle moves back home; town baker and Bellbird River fixture, Janine is confronting her past and her present; and newcomer Debbie is trying to leave a painful past behind and create something n...

Jason Bourne has faced many killers in his time but none more dangerous than the assassin that calls himself Lennon. Bourne believes this elusive killer has a new employer called the Pyramid. The only clue to the group's agenda is a young German woman whose identity turns out to be a lie and who now lies dead in a Washington D.C. Park. Finding the truth about this woman may be Bourne's o...

To the first European colonists, Australian wildlife was bewildering. Marsupials, monotremes and the vast array of birds and snakes were strange and hostile. A bustling animal trade soon developed in both directions. While rabbits, foxes and starlings were unleashed on the Australian landscape, native animals soon found themselves as stuffed or live specimens in zoos and private collections around...

As liberating Allied forces surged towards Paris following the D-Day landings of 1944 a group of downed airmen were being held in the infamous Fresnes Prison. Amid great secrecy, 168 airmen – including several from Australia and New Zealand – were evacuated to the notorious Buchenwald concentration camp, accompanied by orders for their execution. At Buchenwald they witnessed such extreme depravity...

Meet Carol, Sofia and Bonnie whose lives have been intertwined since primary school. Their hopes, dreams and heartaches have been shared for decades. Through the observant eyes of journalist Melissa, we witness the pressures that threaten to unravel some long-held secrets that have never been shared.  Together they are the Tap Cats, a Queensland-based tap-dancing group facing unexpected challenges...

Young journalist Jules Roth is handed an intriguing assignment: to find a painting stolen by the Nazis 75 years ago. Little does she know that ruthless art dealer and powerful heiress, Margaux de Laurent, is on the same mission. De Laurent gets everything she wants and has the money and resources to back it up. Their goal is to locate Ernst Engel's expressionist masterpiece that has deep fami...

Dean is a small-time thief funding a drug habit. Sarah is a junior police officer on extended stress leave. Mary, a former school teacher, is an alcoholic living on the edge. Their paths cross at the local leagues club when Dean's grand plan for an armed robbery comes undone. Now irreversibly linked, each must decide who to betray, who to trust and who to protect. What they choose to do will...

Twenty years ago, Cyrus Haven's family was murdered by his paranoid schizophrenic brother Elias. Now Elias is being released from a secure psychiatric hospital and the question of forgiveness is on Cyrus' mind. As Cyrus prepares for the Elias' homecoming two women go missing and one man is dead. Evie Cormac, now the ward of Cyrus, has an incredible gift for spotting a liar and witne...

In Telltale , Carmel Bird seizes on the enforced isolation of the pandemic to re-read a rich library of books from her past and to reconnect with people, time, place, myth, image and the whole experience of her writing life. In this episode Gregory Dobbs chats to Carmel Bird about the reading rules she set for herself during pandemic lockdowns, how an early memory was sparked by a fascination with...

A discarded nineteenth century painting depicting a magnificent horse and its proud black groom is the starting point for Geraldine Brooks' deep dive into one of the darkest periods in American history.  Kentucky 1850. Enslaved groom Jarret, forges a close bond with a foal that will carry it to the highest echelons of thoroughbred racing in America. On the eve of the Civil War an itinerant yo...