Published...Or Not

Alex Miller explores those inner voices that sustain us in his latest novel, 'A Brief Affair' where Fran learns of the person who previously occupied her office when it was an asylum cell. A lost notebook speaks of a life nearly lost but brought to life again.‘Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here’ is deeply personal collection filled with reflections on love, death, creativity, and healing, dealing with...

Sean Wilson’s novel, ‘Gemini Falls’, is set in the Great Depression era of the 1930’s where a murder has been committed. Thirteen year old Morris and his friends investigate going behind the scenes where his detective father cannot go, discovering parts of the family history as well as who perpetrated the crime. Brooke has many anxieties about her own abilities and over thinks other people‘s actio...

Philip Salom challenges us to re-evaluate notions of identity in an age where algorithms predominate in his latest work, ‘Sweeney and the Bicycles’.Three sisters are aware of their frailties, addictions and bossiness, but will they reconnect if they could control or even value these characteristics in each other, in Peggy Frew’s ‘Wildflowers’.

Craig Silvey takes us on a delightful journey of identity and friendship as Annie and her stray dog take on the world in 'Runt'. Petronella McGovern has linked many issues such as teenage activism, toxic masculinity, female ambition and whales into ‘The Liars’, part crime novel part history book but all round very good read.

A novelist is thinking about environmental damage, but in researching and writing about Leonard and Virginia Woolf, she sees the parallels between their lives with wars, pandemics and politics getting more right wing and what is happening now. ‘This Devastating Fever’ is the book the novelist wants to write, Sophie Cunningham did.                  When Josh disappears, Mila and Kyle have their own...

Else Fitzgerald has written over 20 connected short stories through the grief of drought, fire and floods and into the uncertain future where humans have become genetically adapted to cope, but what about their own desires and hopes in ‘Everything Feels Like the End of the World’.         ‘The Settlement’ is Jock Serong’s fictional account of true historical events when George Augustus Robinson at...

Sexual assault can happen anywhere, but in a small town how hard is it to prove and to get justice. Vikki Petraitis won the Allen and Unwin Crime fiction Prize with her book ‘The Unbelieved’. ‘Decadence’ demonstrates Thuy On’s delight in playing with language, words and even grammar in poems that are both playful and, at times, evocative.

Geraldine Brooks provides a sweeping account of America’s past by following the horse, Lexington, in a book simply titled, ‘Horse’. What is revealed are links to slavery, the art world and how history is preserved today but there are also echoes of the past in the current day attitudes of its citizens. Three generations are looking for inspiration and guidance to find out how to love and live. Fro...

The past of witches and the present of beached whales, male violence and grief affect all those on a Scottish island in Eliza Henry-Jones, ‘Salt and Skin’.Paul Daley examines the question of indigenous dispossession in ‘Jesustown’ looking closely at the changing European attitudes over several generations and the need to alter the discourse.

Food and culture come together in unexpected ways in Jess Ho’s memoir, ‘Raised By Wolves’. Parisian society, pre WW2 with sumptuous parties, couture fashion, bohemian wine bars, plenty of secrets and a murder. ‘The Paris Mystery’ is the start of a new crime series by Kirsty Manning and an introduction to Charlie James, foreign correspondent for The Times.   

John Kinsella has begun a retrospective of his collected poems. Volume 1, ‘The Ascension of Sheep’ covers the period from 1980 to 2005 and details his engagement with landscape, fauna and Australian identity. Is medicine a caring profession or a cut throat culture? Neela Janakiramanan has a woman, facing many obstacles, while training to become a surgeon in ‘The Registrar’.

Christine Balint won the 2021 Viva La Novella Prize with ‘Water Music’, about the possible life choices for a female violinist in eighteenth century Venice.  J. P. Pomare provides us with a fatal car accident, a jaded private investigator and several spurned women who all have a grudge against the deceased who was one of the last people to have contact with two missing girls in ‘The Wrong Woman’....

Pirooz Jafari has written an interwoven saga spanning Australia, Iran and Sweden in ‘Forty Nights’. It explores love, loss, migration and dispossession across centuries. Jay Carmichael details the journey of a young homosexual man as he comes to terms with his identity and relationships. Set in the 1950’s, the novella, ‘Marlo’, details some of the impositions and assumptions of a society that hadn...

Set in Ireland ‘Family Matters’ has the importance of family, sisterhood and motherhood at its heart and Ellie O’Neill has written with humour about the age old desire for matchmaking .‘Denizen’ explores the psychological landscape of truth as Parker confronts his childhood in a remote NSW town when he returns to go camping with former school friends. Only when an accident occurs does the reality...

Scott McCulloch's 'Basin' is a dystopian novel a character known as Figure is revived after a suicide attempt and has to taransverse a bleak landscape and his own sense of identity. Matthew Spencer's 'Black River' is a murder mystery thriller where the potential psychyopathy of a possible serial killer is explored before he kills again. The interplay between Adam Bowman, a struggling journalist, a...

Like a hydra with nine heads, our own demons can get the better of us and such is the case in the novel ‘Hydra’ by Adriane Howell where Anja, the narrator, has to face the character flaws that have brought about her undoing. Anna Mandoki has written about a slightly futuristic Melbourne, of human connection in an increasingly fragmented world and where three very different women’s lives become ent...

How well can we remember events  from our past? Matilda agonises over things said and unsaid, looking for the truth in ‘A Place Near Eden’. The Australian/Vogel Literary award winner for 2022 by Nell Pierce.'Our Members Be Unlimited' is Sam Wallman's account of the rise and significance of unionism. As a graphic artist, the message is conveyed pictorially which has as much impact as the words maki...

Claire Coleman explores the bubbles of thinking and attitudes within society and the dangers of living within gated expectations in her latest novel, "Enclave".Their father's car accident brings adult siblings home and they question what they know about their father and what they know about each other and themselves in Matthew Ryan Davies, "Things we Bury".

What happened inside the Russian Revolution and what were its effects on Melbourne in the 1950's? Maree Roberts has given us Olga and a light hearted, well researched look in 'The Impossible History of Trotsky's Sister'.Brenda Colley takes us on a phantom train journey in 'The Signal Line'. A mystery train appears in Hobart on rail lines that no longer exist.

The history and the how of doing standup comedy along with the difficulty it has been for women, are written about by Justine Sless as she takes us around a department store and on to the stage in 'Mistress of Mirth’s Comedy tour'.

A different court case, ten years apart and both involving kidnapping, but who was the perpetrator and who was the victim in ‘Release’, Lucy Christopher’s psychological drama. Jared Thomas challenges stereotypes in his coming of age novel, ‘My Spare Heart’, whose antagonist, Phoebe, comes to terms with her indigenous heritage. 

Zadie Ma is 11 years old with the super power of having her stories come alive.  Will this help her to get a dog and be allowed to keep it? Gabrielle Wang is Australia’s Children’s Laureate and ‘Zadie Ma and the Dog who Chased the Moon’ is her latest book. Establishing an identity and fathoming the challenges of different cultures as a young girl lie at the heart of ‘The Cuckoo’s Song’ by Amra Paj...

‘Apollo and Thelma’: he was constantly seeking fame as the world’s strongest man and his sister owned a pub in remote Northern Territory. Jon Faine writes about his links to them through his own legal and media background and what it taught him about Australia’s colonial history. In ‘Bad Art Mother’, Edwina Preston profiles the life of a troubled poet and the relationship she has when her art and...

Steve Tolz explores a fictional afterlife constrained by similar concerns to that which we would find on earth in his comic and confronting novel, ‘Here Goes Nothing’. ‘The View Was Exhausting’ is an inside look at how the rich and famous may live and perhaps an insightful look at the control the publicity plays in their lives, co-written by Mikaella Clements and Onjuli Datta.      

 Hidden within the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community lies dark secrets that have a profound influence on the lives of those whose world is determined by the religious beliefs that give them a sense of belonging in Ashley Goldberg’s novel, ‘Abomination’. Scott Pearce has written about two very different families in The Rider on the Bridge, a boy finds his in a share house of drug addicts in Fazed Yel...