The Bookshelf

Kate and Cassie read award-winning Australian author Michael Mohammed Ahmad’s bold new novel Bugger, while reviewers Hannah Kent and Tom Wright take on Jennette McCurdy’s provocative new book Half His Age — from the former child actor whose memoir I'm Glad My Mom Died shook readers worldwide — and Nina McConigley’s How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder...does it live up to the name? BOOKS  Michael M...

Kate and Cassie are back for a big year of books, beginning with Booker-Prize winner Julian Barnes' Departures, a novel about looking back, facing the future, and coming to the end of life. Plus, regular reviewers Tony Birch and Beejay Silcox join us for discussions on This, My Second Life by British novelist Patrick Charnley, and Iluka, by Australian author Cassie Stroud. BOOKS Julian Barnes, Dep...

Novelist and memoirist Maggie O'Farrell in conversation with Kate Evans at the 2025 Sydney Writers Festival. Her nine novels include After You'd Gone, the Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, This Must be the Place, Hamnet and the Marriage Portrait . . . and her extraordinary memoir is I Am I Am I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death.

Kate and Cassie on stage at the 2025 Brisbane Writers Festival with authors Eric Puchner, Toni Jordan, Patrick Holland, and Zeynab Gamieldien, discussing their most recent novels and the books and writers who inspire them. This discussion was recorded in front of a live audience, just ahead of our Top 100 Books of the Century. It was first broadcast on Friday 17 October 2025 GUESTS Eric Puchner, n...

The Bookshelf's Kate Evans and the Book Show's Claire Nichols joined forces onstage at the 2025 Sydney Writers Festival — with a panel of international writers — to talk favourite and influential books from the 21st century, in the lead up to the inaugural Top 100 Books countdown of the twenty-first century. This live broadcast happened in May 2025 — with Emirati poet Afra Atiq, English chronicler...

Why aren't you reading more poetry? Perhaps you don't know where to begin — in which case, listen here, for a guide. 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 and author Daniel Browning, and best-selling author and journalist Julia Baird to discuss and read some of the poems...

Colm Tóibín onstage at the 2025 Sydney Writers Festival with The Bookshelf's Kate Evans — on fiction, fridges, rain, hinges, melodrama, reading, and why he can't write American dialogue so every character he writes has to be Irish (except, of course, when they're Thomas Mann and family). This is a conversation that begins in his hometown of Enniscorthy, site of his novels Nora Webster, The Blackwa...

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 from The Bookshelf, with Scott Stephens from Radio Nation...

It's Christmas, 1962, and a baby is born . . . and left behind, in Ireland. This all takes place in the fictional town of Faha, a place created by write Niall Williams in his novels History of the Rain, This is Happiness and (his latest, and the one featuring said baby) Time of the Child. Niall Williams spoke to The Bookshelf's Kate Evans onstage at the 2025 Adelaide Writers Week. (A longer versio...

Whodunnit, whydunit, and where in time was all of it done — in an historical crime fiction special for our Summer Bookshelf. Kate Evans, onstage at the 2025 BAD Sydney Crime Festival, with novelists Nilima Rao (the story of an Indian police officer in Fiji in the 1910s), Michael Burge (religious communities and Jenolan caves in the 1850s), and Lainie Anderson (women policing Adelaide in the 1910s)...

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...