Good Reading Podcast

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...

Dame Nellie Melba was Australia's first international superstar, taking Europe and America by storm with a voice that thrilled the world. Most Australians imagine an imperious Dame dressed in furs and large hats, but behind the public facade lies a story of a young woman struggling to overcome social expectations in pursuit of a dream. After surviving an abusive marriage she found true love w...

Pip doesn't like going home anymore. Her Mum isn't the same since her new boyfriend moved in and to cap it off her best friend Mika has moved away. When she finds an injured baby dragon that needs her care she starts to believe anything is possible. In this charming story of love, loss and survival, Karen Foxlee weaves a magical tale exploring what it really means to love and nurture whi...

Born evil or simply mad? Frederick Bailey Deeming was known and reviled across three continents. He spent years travelling under various aliases, preying on the innocent, the gullible and the desperate. The Devil's Work raises fresh questions about Deeming's role in the Whitechapel murders and the identity of Jack the Ripper. In an era when spiritualism and a fascination with the afterli...

In this series of interconnected essays Delia Falconer explores how it feels to live as a reader, a writer and a lover of nature in a era of unprecedented change. From an 'unnatural' history of coal to the effect of a seal turning up in a park just below her apartment Delia embarks on a searching and poetic examination about the meaning we can find in the change that is all around us. In...

As a child growing up in country Queensland Lisa Millar dreamed of having a big life. Now with years on the road as an ABC Foreign Correspondent behind her, she shares her moments of joy among the reporting on grief and tragedy. Lisa battled a debilitating fear of flying that threatened her life and career but only now has she been able to reflect on a joyful childhood, the journey that brought he...

Back after suspension, Detective Sergeant Robert Cardilini is immediately tasked with solving domestic violence cases. To complicate matters, his new partner is the eager and idealistic young Detective Lorraine Spencer. When a young woman is found bleeding and tied to a chair it leads to a sinister game of exploitation reaching the highest echelons of society. When Spencer goes out on a limb to un...

Josie de Bray was a brothel madam who owned most of Roe Street, Perth from WWI up to the 1940s. This immensely readable social history uses the life of Josie de Bray as conduit into the lives of her friends and competitors – the many women who paraded in their petticoats on the verandas of Roe Street, and who were kept from the public view and were secret keepers themselves in the seamier side of...

Australia has been directly involved in the nuclear industry for decades: from the establishment of the Australian Atomic Energy Commission in 1953 to the secret tests at Maralinga and the decision to export uranium in the 1970s and 1980s. Whether we like it or not we are part of the global nuclear industry and bear a moral obligation as guardian of around 30% of the world's uranium deposits....

Three housemates. One dead, one missing and one accused of murder. Melbourne journalist Olive 'Oli' Groves is obsessed with the 'Housemate Homicides' a story that set career in motion nine years earlier. When the one missing housemate suddenly turns up dead the whole story comes flooding back for Oli. Paired with enthusiastic and tech-savvy millennial Cooper Ng to reinvestigate...

Tori Swyft wakes up in a Barcelona hotel room to a gruesome murder scene. With a splitting headache and no memory of the night before, her world is in turmoil. Could she really have done such a thing? If she didn't then who did? A man known only as The Voice phones her with revelations of a shocking video proving Tori is the murderer. Set within the seedy world of global politics and counter-...