The Bookshelf

Trent Dalton (Gravity Let Me Go, Boy Swallows Universe), Heather Rose (A Great Act of Love, Bruny) and Garry Disher (the Peninsula Crimes and Hirsch series) name some of their favourite books, and the titles may delight and surprise you. Hosted by Kate and Cassie as part of this year's Canberra Writers' Festival. TRENT DALTON'S PICKS Geraldine Brooks, Year of Wonders Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the...

The best books of 2025 as selected by Cassie McCullagh, Kate Evans and a panel of bookish guests - Jason Steger, Jon Page and Robert Goodman. Keep scrolling for a full list... GUESTS  Jason Steger, arts journalist. Former book editor of the Age & SMH, and panellist on ABC TV’s Book Club  Jon Page, long time bookseller with Pages and Pages bookshop, former General Manager of Dymocks Sydney – an...

Superstars of the literary and musical world this week: Margaret Atwood’s new memoir; Hannah Kent’s critical readings; Stuart Coupe’s musical knowledge; Bob Dylan . . . OK, well he’s not exactly on the show, but he’s the subject of MUCH literary speculation in a buzzy new release by New Yorker Sam Sussman. Also – the voice of the wind howls, laughs and taunts its subjects, in an inventive piece of...

Short story collections reveal the fragile beauty of human experience in Salman Rushdie’s The Eleventh Hour, Liadan Ní Chuinn’s Everyone Still Here, Morgan Talty’s Night of the Living Rez, and Tony Birch’s Pictures of You. Then we shift gears and crank up the suspense with a look at some new crime fiction, including the icy new instalment in the phenomenally successful The Girl with the Dragon Tat...

This week, Cassie McCullagh and Jonathan Green take a look at Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket - a cryptic plunge into paranoia and power, where nothing is quite what it seems. Plus, Olivia Laing’s The Silver Book, a shimmering meditation on the cinema scene in 1970s Italy, and Jeanette Winterson’s One Aladdin Two Lamps, which re-imagines duality and the stories we tell ourselves. BOOKS Shadow Ticke...

Stories of love, friendship, and the ties that bind - with a dash of dirt and darkness in three new works of fiction...Madeleine Gray's Chosen Family, a sharp exploration of friendship, love, and what it means to grow up when life gets messy; Chris Kraus' The Four Spent The Day Together, an autofiction-ish journey through a fractured America; and Graeme Macrae Burnet's Benbecula, where secrets unr...

Kate and Cassie are back in the studio, introducing a line-up of October releases that span continents, centuries, and genres, kicking off with an Australian story set in the world of print journalism in Andrew Pippos' The Transformations. Then, we head to India with Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, a grand tale shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize. And finally, we travel back...

Join us for a lively Top 100 Books of the 21st Century after-party! Following last weekend’s extraordinary two-day countdown , this event recaps the results of over 288,000 votes cast by readers across Australia. Kate, Cassie, and special guests will unpack the trends, surprises, and insights that reveal what Australians are reading — and why.  Plus, the countdown is not over. We're revealing the...

Joining Kate and Cassie on stage at Brisbane Writers Festival, authors Eric Puchner, Toni Jordan, Patrick Holland, and Zeynab Gamieldien discuss their most recent novels and the books and writers who inspire them. With voting cast for our Top 100 Books of the Century , these writers make the case for their favourites. GUESTS Eric Puchner, novelist, academic, and short story writer, whose books inc...

We look at some compelling new memoirs, including Mandy Sayer’s No Dancing in the Lift, a tribute to her jazz drummer father, capturing the grit of Kings Cross and the grace of caregiving. Elizabeth Gilbert’s All the Way to the River recounts her intense love story with Rayya Elias, confronting addiction and devotion. Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me reflects on her formidable mother’s lega...

What are your favourite poems of the last 25 years? The ones that you turn to, couplets memorised and shared, the lines that leapt from the page or stage. Poetry that both defined and defied space and time, whether it rhymed or not. Join Kate Evans, as she is joined by acclaimed author and poet Maxine Beneba Clarke, Stella Prize-winning poet and academic Sarah Holland-Batt, much-loved broadcaster...

This week’s episode explores three new books. First up, Patricia Lockwood’s Will There Ever Be Another You, a third-person autofiction-ish tale that includes a family trip to Scotland, grief and fairies. Then we head to the American frontier for blood-soaked vengeance and vampires in Stephen Graham Jones’ The Buffalo Hunter Hunter. Finally, Nell Stevens’ The Original takes us into a world of art f...

We get stuck into some new fiction, starting with Ian McEwan’s What We Can Know, a meditation on a future shaped by climate disaster and memory. We’re joined by Australian authors Madeleine Gray and Gretchen Shirm to take a look at Miranda Darling’s Fireweather, a poetic story of breakdown and resistance,  and Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk’s House of Day, House of Night, a dreamy blend of folk...

In the year of Jane Austen’s 250th birthday, this lively and thought-provoking discussion explores her life, legacy, and literary brilliance — her novels are charming, sure, but also radical, political, witty, and entertaining. Presented in partnership with the State Library of NSW, this event brings together Kate Evans and Cassie McCullagh with Scott Stephens from Radio National's The Minefield,...

Australian poet, artist, hip hop musician and author, Omar Musa, tells a story of Australia and Borneo, forests and fathers, in his new novel Fierceland.  An American saga of love, war, and complicated families in Patrick Ryan’s Buckeye, and experimental British author Geoff Dyer returns with Homework, a look back on his childhood and coming of age in sixties and seventies England. BOOKS  Omar Mus...

An Australian story of the tender, eager lives of greyhounds and their owners in Tenderfoot by Australian author Toni Jordan. Dark academia in Yellowface author R.F. Kuang’s new fantasy novel, Katabasis. Sport, miracles, and the Amish, in Ron Rindo’s Life, and Death, and Giants. BOOKS  Toni Jordan, Tenderfoot, Hachette  R.F. Kuang, Katabasis, Harper Voyager  Ron Rindo, Life, and Death, and Giants,...

The Bookshelf continues to explore new fiction, beginning in this episode with Ruins by Amy Taylor, a plunge into holiday chaos during a simmering summer in Greece. Maria Reva’s Endling takes us to Ukraine, where an eccentric scientist is breeding rare snails. And, Leif Enger’s I Cheerfully Refuse...dystopia with a twist. BOOKS  Amy Taylor, Ruins, Allen & Unwin  Maria Reva, Endling, Virago  Le...

Kate and Cassie discuss Vera, or Faith, Gary Shteyngart’s new novel about a ten-year-old Korean-American girl growing up in a dystopian United States. Alongside guest critics, they also look at The Bombshell by Darrow Farr, which traces the radicalisation of a young French woman in Corsica, and The Slip by Lucas Schaefer, the story of a missing teenage boy and the transformative power of boxing. B...

Australian author Rhett Davis re-imagines the everyday in his novels. In his latest, Arborescence, ordinary people begin transforming into trees. Is it a cult? Performance art? Or something else entirely? Also on the show: Guest reviewer Roanna Gonsalves discusses Saraswati, the debut novel by Gurnaik Johal, which winds its narrative around a sacred and possibly mythical river in North India. And,...

A critical assessment of the shortlist and winner of Australia’s most prestigious literary award, The Miles Franklin Literary Award. Kate and Cassie are joined by guests, scholar and literary biographer (and former judge of the MFLA) Bernadette Brennan; and critic and publisher, Geordie Williamson. BOOKS Brian Castro, Chinese Postman, Giramondo Michelle de Kretser, Theory & Practice, Text Winn...

Parties, scandals, sex, love, families, friendship, death – these books have, as they say, all the things. Nell Zink’s Sister Europe moves through one night in Berlin, while Amy Bloom’s I’ll Be Right Here sweeps through 80 years of history, and in James Frey’s Next to Heaven, the beautiful and rich fall apart rather spectacularly. BOOKS  Nell Zink, Sister Europe, Penguin Viking  Amy Bloom, I’ll Be...

Stories of the sea – and a great white whale in Xiaolu Guo's Call Me Ishmaelle; Hungry ghosts and kitchen mishaps in Daria Lavelle's NYC set novel Aftertaste; and the latest Australian crime fiction (of which there is a lot!) BOOKS  AUSTRALIAN CRIME FICTION:  Mark Brandi, Eden  Paul Daley, The Leap  Sam Guthrie, The Peak  Angie Faye Martin, Melaleuca   Michael Robotham, White Crow  Tanya Scott, St...

What’s the state of fiction today? Four brilliant minds—Samantha Harvey (UK), Rumaan Alam (USA), Torrey Peters (USA), and Robbie Arnott (AUS)—tackle the question live at the 2025 Sydney Writers’ Festival. Expect bold takes, big ideas, and a few surprises.

The same question is at the heart of three very different international novels on The Bookshelf this week, “What really happened”… To a WWI soldier who has forgotten his name and identity in The Remembered Soldier by Dutch author Anjet Daanje? To a fortune teller for the elite class in Ben Okri’s Madame Sosostris and the Festival for the Broken-hearted? When four high achieving American boys enter...

What would make a great Australian sporting novel? Our guests discuss translating the love of the game, footy nicknames, and intense team culture in ex-AFL player Brandon Jack’s Pissants. And making sport of the Melbourne literary scene, Dominic Amarena’s debut novel I Want Everything is a clever, celebratory satire.  Kate and Cassie also review the 2025 International Booker Prize winner Heart Lam...