Bigambul and Wakka Wakka author Melanie Saward’s Burn is structured around three fires. It bears witness to the role institutions play in exacerbating trauma associated with colonialism.
Andrew Leigh at the Royal Australian Mint in Canberra, October 5, 2023.
Mick Tsikas/AAP
Mykaela Saunders’ Indigenous speculative fiction collection Always Will Be, published in the year following the failed referendum, is a very timely endeavour.
A protestor before a burning barricade during a clash at Taksim Square in Istanbul, Turkey, June 11, 2013.
Sedat Suna/AAP
A new biography tells the story of Hillsong and its leader Brian Houston. How did Hillsong come to dominate Australian Pentecostalism – and Australian Christianity? What can we learn from its decline?
Conservative critics argue the ‘social responsibility’ of business lies in increasing profits. But values have always been tied up with money-making, from the welfare state to colonialism.
Robyn Davidson as a young woman in Alice Springs.
Bloomsbury Publishing
At 27, Robyn Davidson trekked through the Australian outback with four camels and a dog. In her long-awaited memoir we come closer to knowing why she made this journey.
Cover detail of the book Guerrillas and Combative Mothers.
UKZN Press
Georgia Blain’s final, posthumous collection offers clear-eyed, calm compassion – and a capacity to live with, and alongside, damage, trauma and unspeakable loss, and a way of staying human.
Kiley Reid’s follow-up to her Booker longlisted debut is a novel about money. But it’s most interesting when it explores the gap between our imagined selves and what our actions reveal.
Palestinians arrive in the southern Gaza town of Rafah after fleeing an Israeli ground and air offensive in Khan Younis on January 29.
Fatima Shbair/AP
Stephanie Land’s sequel to her mega-successful debut memoir Maid works as hard as she does – but while its details of low-income single-parent life as a student are valuable, it suffers by comparison.
Since 2020 there has been exponential rise in ‘virus fiction’ by a new COVID generation of authors who came out of isolation having experienced a pandemic in real time.
Menelaus holding the body of Patroclus – Diana Mantuana (1535-1587).
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons