Australia has doesn’t seem to have had the plethora of famous serial killers that America has. As a result, few characters loom larger in the Australian consciousness than Ivan Milat – the so-called ‘Backpacker Murderer’. Milat’s crimes were uncovered when bodies were found in the Belanglo State Forest a few hours south of Sydney. In…
Tracy Chevalier, best known for her novel The Girl with the Pearl Earring, takes readers to Venice in her new novel The Glassmaker. Or more precisely to the island of Murano, home to an ancient and world-renowned tradition of glass making. This novel is a kaleidoscopic journey through the history of Murano, its glassmaking and…
Shadow City is Natalie Conyer’s follow up to her award winning debut Present Tense. Present Tense was set in South Africa and focussed on South African issues. In Shadow City, Conyer brings her Cape Town police detective Schalk Laurens to Sydney in search of a missing girl, allowing her to dig into more global concerns….
Epistolary novels are always a bit of a tightrope. How do you explain, particularly in this day and age, why people are writing lengthy letters to each other with pen and paper. In her latest novel The Sleepwalkers, Scarlett Thomas walks this tightrope, mostly successfully, to deliver an unsettling, gothic mystery that holds its secrets…
Science fiction author Cory Doctorow has taken a stand against big corporations, in particular the use of Digital Media Rights to lock people into particular companies. So much so that the audio version of his new book, The Bezzle and the previous book in this series, are being offered through Kickstarter rather than through Audible…
Margaret Hickey hit the Australian crime fiction scene with Cutter’s End, the first of a (so far) three book series featuring South Australian detective Mark Ariti (also Stone Town and Broken Bay). In her latest book, The Creeper, Hickey is giving both Ariti and South Australia a rest as she moves the action to the…
There’s only one word to describe award winner crime writer Chris Whitaker’s new novel All the Colours of the Dark: epic. It is an intimate epic, focussing on two characters from a small town in the United States. But the narrative ranges over forty years of their lives and the investigation into a series of…
Australian playwright Finegan Kruckemeyer’s debut novel The End and Everything Before It is a swirling, interconnected tale about a place and the community that formed around that place. But it is much more than this. The deeper meanings and connections between characters only come clear slowly and are both enlightening and quietly devastating. The first…
What is there to say about a book that has the name of action movie star Keanu Reeves and multi-award winning new-weird fantasy writer China Miéville (known for The City and The City, Embassytown and Perdido Street Station among others) on the cover? No matter what the subject matter, The Book of Elsewhere is a…
Former Australian journalist Michael Brissenden’s third novel Smoke (after The List and Dead Letters) was inspired by the devastating bushfires that ravaged the Australian east coast in late 2019 and early 2020. But rather than setting his story in that time and place, Brissenden takes the action to another fire flashpoint – the forests of…
