Good Reading Podcast

Helen Fitzgerald vividly portrays small town life, and a woman and a land in crisis in her latest thriller 'Ash Mountain'.Fran vowed she'd never return to Ash Mountain but circumstances draw her back to a blisteringly hot summer in the rural town of Ash Mountain. Confronting the past and dealing with future are sidelined by an impending disaster – a mega-fire is roaring towards Ash...

After World War II, Sydney experienced a crime wave that was chillingly calculated. Discontent mixed with despair, greed with callous disregard. Women who had lost their wartime freedoms headed back into the kitchen with sinister intent and the household poison thallium, normally used to kill rats, was repurposed to kill husbands and other inconvenient family members. Yvonne Fletcher disposed of t...

Susan Johnson exposes the truths and deceptions in relationships amid a blossoming online friendship between two women in 'From Where I Fell'.Pamela and Christhani live on different continents, but through a series of email exchanges the two women begin sharing the stories of their lives. Although temperamental opposites they soon establish a connection based on the common ground of grie...

Nora Fawn's daughter Hope disappeared four years ago and only maintained contact through her big sister Joy. But last night Hope rang Nora to say, 'I'm coming home, I'm getting married, the wedding is in three weeks and it's your job to organise it.'Desperate to regain her daughter's love and prove her worth as a mother Nora accepts the challenge. Through the med...

Bec and Kate are sisters, but they couldn’t be less alike. Bec lives the domestic dream with her surgeon husband Stuart and three perfect children. So why is she so attracted to free-spirited Ryan? Kate’s life is hardly a dream. But when she meets Adam – tall, kind, funny – things start looking up. Until she finds out he’s been keeping secrets from her. Then there is the incident both sisters are...

A young woman gets ready to go to a party. She arrives, feels overwhelmed, leaves, and then returns. Minutely attuned to the people who come into her view, and alternating between alienation and profound connection, she is hilarious, self-aware, sometimes acerbic, and always honest. And by the end of the night, she’s shown us something radical about love, loss, and the need to belong. In this epis...

Michael Brissenden's second crime thriller Dead Letters brings counter terrorism expert Sid Allen into the sordid and complicated world of Canberra politics. From the seedy backstreets of 1980s Sydney to the corridors of power in contemporary Canberra, Sidney Allen must pursue the truth behind a baffling crime. Dan LeRoi, rising star of politics and Chair of the Joint Committee on Intelligenc...

We're more connected that ever before says Maggie Hamilton and yet feelings of loneliness and isolation have never been more prevalent. We are now more affluent and busier and yet we are leaving our homes less and less as we become more dependent on technology to communicate. 'We've become strangers, exiled from people and situations that are meaningful to us.' says MaggieWhen...

In secluded Devlins Reach, on the shores of the Hawkesbury River, three bodies are unearthed in an excavation site. When a wilderness expert, Park Ranger Taylor Bridges, is called in to assist local police, he soon discovers the town has an unsettling history – one to match Taylor's own haunted past. But the quiet location and picturesque beauty of The Reach are hiding something darker than T...

Aaron Smith's new memoir holds up a unique mirror to Australia. What he sees is at once amazing, disturbing and revealing. The Rock explores the failings of our nation's character, its unresolved past and its uncertain future from the vantage point of its most northerly outpost, Thursday Island. Smith was the last editor, fearless journalist and the paperboy of Australia's most nort...

Australian and New Zealand crime and thriller writing is booming globally, with antipodean authors regularly featuring on awards and bestseller lists across Europe and North America, and overseas readers and publishers looking more and more to tales from lands Down Under. Hailing from two sparsely populated nations on the far edge of the former Empire - neighbours that are siblings in spirit, vast...

It is 1953 and Melbourne society is looking forward to coronation season, the grand balls and celebrations for the young queen-to-be. Tilly Dunnage is, however, working for a pittance in a second-rate Collins Street salon. Her talents go unappreciated, and the madame is a bully and a cheat, but Tilly has a past she is desperate to escape and good reason to prefer anonymity. Meanwhile, Sergeant Far...

Tim Flannery’s new book 'The Climate Cure: Solving the Climate Emergency in the Era of Covid-19' marks a change in attitude toward those in government and the lack of action in the fight against climate change. 'The Federal Liberal/National Party is the last blockage in the fight against climate change,' says Tim Flannery. While state governments and local councils are doing gr...

Ground-breaking music educator Dr Anita Collins' new book The Music Advantage draws on the latest international neurological research to reveal the extraordinary and surprising benefits of children learning music. Music plays an important role in brain development that promotes learning, concentration and the ability to persevere with challenging tasks. Gregory Dobbs talks to Anita about the...

Sergeant Nick Chester has dodged the Geordie gangsters he once feared and is out of hiding and looking forward to the quiet life. But gold fever is creating ill feeling between prospectors, and a new threat lurks in the form of trigger-happy Americans preparing for doomsday by building a bolthole in the valley. As tensions simmer, Nick finds himself up against an evil that knows no borders and no...

As the owner of a successful events company, throwing away huge volumes of leftover food at the end of the day came with the territory. But when Ronni Kahn hit midlife, she found herself no longer able to turn a blind eye to her food waste problem. Hand delivering the untouched food to homeless shelters around Sydney became her renegade solution. Little did she know that fixing her small problem a...

Heather Morris, author of the internationally bestselling novels The Tattooist of Auschwitz and Cilka's Journey, grew up on a farm in rural New Zealand. On her way back across the paddocks from school, Heather would visit her great-grandfather and listen to his experiences of war - stories he told only Heather. From a young age Heather discovered that people would tell her their stories if sh...

In 1907, Alice Mitchell was arrested for the murder of five-month-old Ethel Booth. During the inquest and subsequent trial, the general public was horrified to learn that at least 37 infants had died in Mitchell's care in the previous six years. It became clear that she had been running a 'baby farm', making a profit out of caring for the children of single mothers and other 'u...

Manchester, 1867 Stephen Doyle arrives in Manchester from New York. He is an Irish-American veteran of the Civil War and a member of the Fenians, a secret society intent on ending British rule in Ireland, by any means necessary. Now he has come to seek vengeance. James O'Connor has fled grief and drink in Dublin for a sober start in Manchester as Head Constable. His mission is to discover and...

Conscripted into the Polish army as Hitler’s forces draw closer, Jewish soldier Tolek Klings vows to return to his wife, Klara, and son, Juliusz. However, the army is rife with anti-Semitism and Tolek is relentlessly tormented. As the Germans invade Poland, he is faced with a terrible dilemma: flee home to protect his family – and risk being shot as a deserter – or remain a soldier, hoping reports...

Every evening, Allison watches her husband's new house, desperate to find some answers. Every morning, she puts on a brave face to teach kindergarten. She's a good teacher, everyone says so - this stalking is just a tiny crack in her usual self-control. A late enrolment into her class brings little Gracie. Allison takes the sick girl under her wing, smothering Gracie with the love she ca...

In 1820 Sarah McCaffrey, fleeing arrest for her part in a failed rebellion, thinks she has escaped when she finds herself aboard the Serpent, bound from London to the colony of New South Wales. But when the mercurial captain's actions drive the ship into a cliff, Sarah is the only survivor. Adopting a false identity, she becomes the right-hand woman of Molly Thistle, who has grown her late hu...

Mim’s husband is missing. No one knows where Ben is, but everyone wants to find him – especially The Department. And they should know, the all-seeing government body has fitted the entire population with a universal tracking chip to keep them ‘safe’.But suddenly Ben can’t be tracked. And Mim is questioned, made to surrender her passport and threatened with the unthinkable – her two children being...

A family favour their son over their daughter ... Shan attends university before making his fortune in Australia while Yannie must find menial employment and care for her ageing parents. After her mother’s death, Yannie travels to Sydney to become enmeshed in her psychopathic brother’s new life, which she seeks to undermine from within …Revenge is a novel that rages against capitalism, hetero-supr...

Drawing on his experiences as a child of Burmese migrants fleeing a military junta and his evolution from a naive law clerk, too shy to speak, into a lawyer whose ponytailed flamboyance and unbridled willingness to speak truth to power riled many within the legal establishment, Andrew Boe delves into cases he found unable to leave behind. These cases have shaped who he has become. Taking us from a...