Books

The Burrow is at once candid and soothing in its quietly focused portrayal of the stasis of grief and the mess of family life ...

Chinese Postman is a dramatisation of changing terms and the exact conditions under which they change, no matter how fragmented or contradictory ...

Strangers at the Port recognises the strife wrought by small differences of opinion, occupation and wealth ...

To describe reading Nicolas Pages is difficult ...

In Brat there is no attempt at self-modification, no clear- out, no sense of a rescue, just someone fatiguing of their own obsessions ...

Literary awards seem to make the task of a review obsolete. Are the books good? Yes, according to a panel of judges anyway ...

The colonial literary imagination will always be limited and so too will white-led nonfiction platforms ...

Santilla Chingaipe’s debut work of ‘Australian’ history is a work of rigorous research that reframes the historical narrative of the continent, reminiscent of the cultural reckoning brought on by the publication of Dark Emu in 2014 ...

Evie Wyld’s The Echoes ultimately ends up reinforcing what it might claim to challenge ...

Taken as a whole, Dusk is another terrific work ...

The novel’s basic plot could seem a familiar or even clichéd coming-of-age arc, but in de Kretser’s hands it is electric and complex ...

In Translations, Jumaana Abdu’s astounding debut novel, self-anointed ‘uncitizens’ Aliyah and Sakina alight upon a ruinous farm in Shepherd’s Mill as they embark on a new life ...

It is refreshing to read a piece of nature writing so firmly grounded in the Australian landscape ...

Is writing a messianic pursuit? In The Degenerates, yes ...

A kind of urgency accompanies climate fiction. Often produced with a resolve to be morally compelling, the cli-fi novel is the reinvigoration of ideas already jostling around public discourse ...