The Shameless Book Club

G’day, book clubbers! Today, we are bringing you an interview with domestic thriller novelist, Sally Hepworth. Sally is a NYT bestselling author who has sold over one million books worldwide. She’s written eight novels including The Good Sister, The Younger Wife, and The Mother-In-Law - the latter has very excitingly been optioned for a TV show by Amy Poehler. Sally’s latest novel, Darling Girls,...

Hello, everyone! Today on Stranger Than Fiction, Eilish Gilligan and Shameless Media co-founder Michelle Andrews are talking about Naomi Wolf, author of ‘The Beauty Myth’ and feminist icon turned… anti-vaxxer. Join us in the all the book chat over on our Insta, @theshamelessbookclub, and our TikTok, @theshamelessbookclub. Or, if you’re after some variety, here’s a link to record a voice message vi...

Happy first of the month, book clubbers! This month, we read ‘The Rachel Incident’ by Caroline O’Donoghue. Rachel is a student working at a bookstore when she meets James, and it’s love at first sight. James soon invites Rachel to be his roommate and the two begin a friendship that changes their lives forever. When Rachel falls in love with her married professor, Dr. Fred Byrne, James helps her de...

Hello, book clubbers! Today, we are bringing you an interview with New York Times bestselling author R.F. Kuang. At the very beginning of this month, we dropped a review episode of Rebecca’s latest and arguably buzziest book Yellowface, so this interview couldn’t have come at a better time. In this conversation, Rebecca talks about the ways the book is reflective of her own experience in the publi...

Hello, everyone! Today on Stranger Than Fiction, we’re talking about Susan Meachen, a self-published romance author who has caused quite a stir within the romance community recently.  Join us in the all the book chat over on our Insta, @theshamelessbookclub, and our TikTok, @theshamelessbookclub. Or, if you’re after some variety, here’s a link to record a voice message via our website, too. Big th...

Hello, book clubbers! Welcome to our first book review episode in The Shameless Book Club’s cosy new nook. This month, we read ‘Yellowface’ by New York Times bestselling author, R.F Kuang. Yellowface is told through the lens of our unreliable narrator - a white author named June Hayward. At the very beginning of the book, she steals the book manuscript of her friend in the industry, Chinese-Americ...

Hello! Welcome to the first episode of our new monthly series, Stranger Than Fiction. On the 15th of every month, host Eilish Gilligan will recap the most bizarre stories to rock the lit world. Today, we’re going to be talking about an author named James Frey and his interesting little book, A Million Little Pieces. Join us in the all the book chat over on our Insta, @theshamelessbookclub, and our...

Welcome, book clubbers! To The Shameless Book Club’s very own nook. We are so excited to kick off our re-launch by bringing you a special chat between New York Times bestselling author Gabrielle Zevin and book clubber Sohani Goonetillake. We actually reviewed Gabrielle’s 'Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow' in our January episode of The Shameless Book Club, so we were incredibly stoked to be abl...

Hello, book clubbers! This month, we read Monica Heisey’s debut novel: Really Good, Actually. The book is told through the eyes of Maggie - a 29-year-old whose marriage ended just 608 days after it started. Sure, she’s alone for the first time in her life, can’t afford her rent and her obscure PhD is going nowhere, but she’s reaaaally good. As Maggie throws herself headlong into the chaos of her f...

G’day, book clubbers! This month, we read Jenny Jackson’s debut novel, Pineapple Street. Pineapple Street follows three women in an old money Brooklyn Heights family: one was born with money, one who married into it, and one who wants to give it all away. Over the course of the novel we learn about the intricacies of the Stockton family’s dynamic, how they each feel about their relationship with w...

Happy Saturday, book clubbers! This month, we read ‘Vladimir’ by Julia May Jonas. This novel is told from the perspective of a deliciously incisive narrator: a popular English professor whose husband, a charismatic teacher at the same small liberal arts college, is under investigation for his inappropriate relationships with his former students. The couple has long had a mutual understanding when...

Happy Saturday, book clubbers! This month, we read ‘Alone With You in the Ether’ by Olivie Blake. The book follows our two main characters, Regan and Aldo, who meet by chance at the Art Institute. Prior to the meeting, he is a doctoral student who manages his destructive thoughts with compulsive calculations about time travel; she is a bipolar counterfeit artist, undergoing court-ordered psychothe...

Hello, book club friends! This month, we read ‘The Thursday Murder Club’ by Richard Osman. This number one best-seller takes place in a peaceful retirement village, where four unlikely friends meet up once a week to investigate unsolved murders. But when a brutal killing takes place on their very doorstep, the Thursday Murder Club find themselves in the middle of their first live case. Elizabeth,...

Happy Saturday, bookworms! This month, we read ‘Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow’ by best-selling author Gabrielle Zevin. The novel is, at its core, a love story between two brilliant gamers, but not a love story in the way you’d expect. Sadie and Sam form a friendship as children in a hospital gaming room and re-kindle as 25-year-olds years later at a train station. The natural connection tha...

Hiya, book clubbers! This month, we read You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty by Akwaeke Emezi. This is a book that flips the romance genre utterly on its head. It’s been five years since protagonist Feyi lost her husband in a car accident. Feyi isn’t ready for anything serious, but a steamy encounter at a rooftop party cascades into a whirlwind summer she could have never imagined: a luxury...

Happy Saturday, book club friends! This month, we read Coco Mellors’s best-selling debut novel, Cleopatra and Frankenstein. The book follows 24-year-old British artist Cleo, whose chance meeting with a man called Frank (who is some 20 years older than her), changes the course of both of their lives. In Frank, Cleo finds a future where she can paint, be happy and, well, land a green card. When the...

Hello, book clubbers! This month, we read Aussie author Diana Reid’s second novel, Seeing Other People. Seeing Other People follows two sisters, Eleanor and Charlie, living two very different lifestyles in Sydney after lockdown. When the novel begins, Eleanor has a corporate job and is in a relationship with Mark, Charlie is an actress living in a sharehouse with friends (namely, her long-time cru...

Hey there, book clubbers! This month, we read the debut novel from author Charmaine Wilkerson, Black Cake. Black Cake is a novel that spans 60 years in the life of one Caribbean-American family. Byron and Benny’s mum, Eleanor Bennett, has died. She has left them a voice recording in which everything Byron and Benny ever knew about their family is upended. Join us in the all the book chat over on o...

Happy Saturday, book club fam! This month, we read the incredible memoir from writer Amy Bloom, called In Love. In January 2020, Amy traveled to Switzerland with her husband Brian where he was helped by Dignitas to end his life after a diagnosis of Alzheimer's. The book details their love story, Brian’s slow decline, and Amy’s doggedness in ensuring her husband died with dignity. It’s a book about...

Oh haaaaiiiii, book clubbers! This month, we read ‘The Island of Missing Trees’ by award-winning Turkish-British author Elif Shafak. The book follows the love story between two teenagers, Kostas (a Greek Cypriot) and Defne (a Turkish Cypriot), whose forbidden romance means they can only meet at a taverna on the island between their homes. Witnessing their relationship through its ebbs and flows ov...

Happy Saturday, book club pals! This month we read ‘The Wedding Party’ by New York Times bestselling novelist Jasmine Guillory. The book follows characters Maddie and Theo, who have two things in common: they share a best friend called Alexa, and they hate each other. Yet, underneath the sharp barbs they toss at one another is a simmering attraction that builds until they can’t resist sneaking off...

Oh haaaiiii, book clubbers! This month, we read the debut novel from Aussie author Allee Richards called Small Joys of Real Life. The book follows Eva, a pretty successful local actor, who accidentally falls pregnant to a guy called Pat who she had met just a handful of times, but really, really liked. It’s just that by the time she realises she is pregnant, Pat has died, and she is forced to reck...

Happy Saturday, book club besties! This month, we read An American Marriage by Tayari Jones. The book follows newlyweds, Celestial and Roy. She’s an artist on the rise, he’s a young executive. They’re as happy as ever, until Roy is wrongfully imprisoned for a reprehensible crime. Celestial knows he is innocent, and their families and wider community trust that he is too, but Roy is still sentenced...

Good morning, lovely book clubbers! This month, we read Violeta by New York Times bestselling author Isabel Allende. This novel tells the epic story of Violeta del Valle, a woman whose life spans one hundred years and bears witness to the greatest upheavals of the twentieth century - the dissolution of a family fortune, a tempestuous marriage interspersed with love affairs, the machinations of fam...

Happy Saturday, book club fam! This month, we read If I Had Your Face by Frances Cha. The novel is set in contemporary Seoul, Korea, and follows four young women making their way in a world defined by impossibly high standards of beauty, secret room salons catering to wealthy men, strict social hierarchies, and K-pop fan mania. Today on the show, we chat about the world of plastic surgery in South...