Good Reading Podcast

Vivian Walker is dying but that's NOT on her list of things to do. Being terminally ill is frustratingly routine but Vivian is determined to prepare for D-day by making lists of things to do. The Very Last List of Vivian Walker is the darkly funny debut novel that will make you laugh, cry and wonder if you've crossed out all those things on your own lists of things to doIn this episode G...

Have you ever wondered how we can live a more ethical life? Michael Schur has all the answers to the questions we've been asking ourselves for thousands of years. By sifting through centuries of hard work and introspection by some of the smartest people ever known and eliminating the dull and migraine-inducing parts, Michael Schur has produced the ultimate guide to navigating the ethical dile...

During the darkest days of the Holocaust, Leo and Mina Fink rallied all the forces at their disposal to rescue the Jewish survivors of Nazi death camps. Together they initiated welfare programs, provided urgent relief and resettled thousands of Jewish settlers in faraway Melbourne. In this episode Gregory Dobbs chats to Margaret Taft about the Jewish diaspora in Melbourne, what led Leo and Mina Fi...

Dr Michael Mosley presents the latest scientific research explaining how the ketogenic diet works and why it is good for you. This new approach helps you lose weight safely, improve mood and reduce blood pressure, inflammation and blood sugars. The Fast 800 Keto is a dynamic new weight loss program that combines a ketogenic diet with low-calorie intermittent fasting to give you the key to long ter...

F Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is an icon of American literature. But what if this timeless classic was told from a completely different perspective? Jillian Cantor reimagines the glittering world of the Jazz Age through the eyes of three of Fitzgerald's female characters, Daisy Buchanan, Daisy's best friend Jordan Baker, and Catherine McCoy, a suffragette fighting for women&...

Amalia and Alex fist set eyes on each other at an Oxford college bar. What begins as a friendship soon follows the tricky path to romance. But love comes at a cost – its intensity is both thrilling and terrifying when it threatens the most perfect of friendships. Set across four years and five cities, 28 Questions is suffused with music, literature, art, sex, philosophy and the exquisite pleasure...

When Sylvia Beach opens an English-language bookshop on the bohemian Left Bank, Sylvia cannot know she is making literary history. Shakespeare and Company soon becomes the meeting place for emerging writers and a second home for the American Lost Generation living in Paris. Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound are frequent visitors and profound friendships blossom within the welcoming a...

Gabe Ahern makes his living trapping wild dogs in the remote rangelands of Western Australia. When he stumbles upon a gang of people smugglers about to execute one of their victims, Gabe's solitary life is thrown into turmoil. When he rescues young Afghan refugee Amin from certain death, Gabe is reluctantly drawn into a vicious game where he becomes the hunted. Confronting crooked police, wil...

Freak Out is the story of how we as a nation were dragged into global culture by the unstoppable momentum of rock and pop music. The music of the sixties spoke to young people, encouraging them to engage with the world in a new way and to embrace the changes all around them. The sixties witnessed an explosion of musical styles that crossed musical borders and changed minds. From The Beatles to Bob...

Ray Vialoux is in big trouble and he needs Marshall Grade's help. Over dinner in a Brooklyn restaurant the conversation is cut short by a gunshot that leaves Ray Vialoux dead on the floor. As Marshall investigates, he discovers there's more to the murder than meets the eye. Exit.45 is the third book in the Marshall Grade series and takes us into the depths of the murky world of NYC drug...

In this collection of essays Ann Patchett steps outside the world of fiction into the general mess of life. Exploring themes of family, friendship, marriage, failure and success, These Precious Days is a personal meditation on the universal themes that affect us all. In this episode Gregory Dobbs chats to Ann Patchett about the easy joy of the essay, getting your house in order, and how a late nig...

This monumental collaboration between award-winning author John Hughes and internationally-acclaimed painter and printmaker Marco Luccio breathes new life into ancient stories. A work of art in itself, this magnificent limited edition, individually signed and numbered book brings together Hughes' unique gift for storytelling and Luccio's bold and energetic images in the media of charcoal...

Jock Serong is the winner of 2021 Historical Novel Society's ARA Prize for Historical Fiction for the second book in a three part trilogy exploring the history around the Furneaux group of islands off the north-eastern coast of Tasmania. Eliza Grayling reluctantly sets off from Sydney Cove on the Danish schooner Moonbird in search of the wreck of the Howrah, lost in the islands of the Bass St...

Christine Manfield's love affair with India and Indian food goes back more than thirty years. Extensive travel and a brilliant culinary mind, marked by an insatiable curiosity has culminated in a book that goes beyond what we think of as Indian food. Indian Cooking Class brings together everything Christine has learned and all recipes she has collected into a guide to Indian cuisine that open...

Following on from David Hunt's first two volumes of The Unauthorised History of Australia, Girt and True Girt, Volume 3 takes a humorous look into the people that laid the foundations of a nation and our cultural identity. It's an epic tale of charlatans and costermongers, of bush bards and even bushier beards and ladies who just weren't going to take it anymore. Meet Alfred Deakin,...

Lynne McGranger is the longest serving female cast member of a television soap opera in Australia, having starred as Irene Roberts on Home and Away for over twenty-eight years. But before Home and Away, there was a varied career in the theatre and in the playground at Lugarno Public School as a Grade 4 teacher. In this hilarious and heart-warming memoir, Lynne talks about her early family life, su...

Oscar is out and about looking for the best place to skateboard when he comes across two other kids who reckon they've found it. Holding a mirror at just the right angle gives you a one-way ticket to the world's greatest skate park. Through a crack in reality, Oscar finds himself on an urgent quest, along with the Mettlestone-Staranise sisters, to unlock a silver spell that's trappe...

Fear has led Rachel to a reclusive life on the land with only occasional contact with the outside world. Her solitude is interrupted by a hammering on the door. Before her stand a mother and a baby. They are running for their lives from a mysterious sickness sweeping Australia. Rachel is faced with a difficult choice: to bring these strangers to safety in a world she has completely rejected or con...

When we think of great Australian explorers, Sir Hubert Wilkins isn't a name that immediately comes to mind. Despite this, there have been few Australians to have seen more of planet earth and thrived in more hostile environments than Wilkins. From humble beginnings in rural South Australia, Wilkins' early career was in cinematography but his capacity for acquiring skills together with a...

In the summer of 1989, a local teen goes missing from the idyllic suburb of Camp Hill. As rumours of Satanic rituals swirl, schoolteacher Tom Witter becomes convinced he holds the key to the disappearance. As dark secrets are revealed and consequences to past actions are faced, Tom learns that the only way out of the darkness is to walk deeper into it. Wild Place peels back the layers of suburbia,...

'We Are Wolves' is the winner of the 2021 Historical Novel Society's ARA Historical Novel Prize in the Children's and Young Adult category. Behind this incredible work of fiction lies the true story of thousands of German children left to fend for themselves in the forests of East Prussia at the end of the Second World War. Liesl, Otto and Mia are leading a perfectly contented...

When they are still little girls, Cibi, Magda and Livia make the promise to their father that they will always stay together. When Cibi and Livia are ordered to Auschwitz-Birkenau labour camp by the Nazis, Magda manages to hide out for a time in a neighbour's attic near her family home. Eventually the sisters are reunited in Auschwitz where they renew that promise, this time to each other. To...

Tess is a single mother with a three-year-old daughter Poppy but being an overprotective mother is complicating all of her personal relationships. When Tess finds a dark and disturbing drawing among Poppy's other colourful drawings she is convinced Poppy has witnessed something terrible. But's it's only a child's drawing – isn't it? While Tess will do anything to protect h...

Celeste is having a very bad summer. Her parents are off travelling the world and she's left with little sister Esme and they're both desperate for adventure. When a magical flying bus crash-lands in their front yard carrying cousin Ferd, they get just want they needed. Wherewithal Way is Ferd's house and while it looks like an ordinary house it's really a portal to magical rea...

Having worked in Afghanistan and Mexico, Damien Cave thought he understood something about the subject of risk. When he brought his young family to Australia to set up the New York Times' Australian bureau he was unexpectedly confronted with an entirely new approach to managing risk. Instead of being eliminated or romanticised he found a culture that respected and even embraced the idea. Foll...