The latest novel by twice Miles Franklin winner Alex Miller traces one woman’s journey from self-absorption and isolation, to generosity and friendship.
Tracey Lien’s debut novel investigates a murder of a model student in a Cabramatta restaurant. Anh Nguyen Austen says it brilliantly conveys the complexities of the Vietnamese refugee experience.
Desire’s story of loss and longing is threaded with moments of hope, like a ‘dangerous but invigorating’ ocean swim.
Mickael Gresset/Unsplash
Jessie Cole’s memoir traces a love affair: a long-distance relationship with an unnamed, older lover. It’s set against layers of thinking about love, desire, bodies and ecological disaster.
Lachlan Murdoch speaking at the annual Sir Keith Murdoch Oration, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne, October 2014.
Julian Smith/AAP
It’s the 20th anniversary of Best Australian Political Cartoons – and it has been quite a year. From Putin to Dutton to Albanese, our cartoonists have been hard at work skewering the powerful.
The Unfolding is fiction: a made-up story of American politics. But just like in the real United States, the lines between truth and fantasy in this novel are perilously thin.
Donald Trump likes books about as much as he does germs, but more than 100 have been written about him. Journalist Maggie Haberman conducted 250 interviews for hers, including three with Trump.
Ian McEwan has forged his own genre – crisply realist surfaces mixed with sudden excursions into the darkest corridors of the mind. In Lessons, the central character reveals a writerly consciousness.
Major plot points explode like hand grenades in Adrianne Howell’s Hydra, which is ‘never dull’, but implausible. And Alice Nelson’s Faithless, about love and literature, operates in a rarefied world.
Workers disinfect Istanbul’s Suleymaniye Mosque in 2020.
Tolga Bozoglu/EPA
Nights of Plague is set on a fictional island in the early 20th century. Is it an allegory of empire’s fall; a contemplation on corruption and East-West tension or a reflection on pandemic life?
In a series of discussions with journalist Sean O'Hagan, we meet an older, reflective theologically-probing musician, drawn to the Christian qualities of mercy, atonement and forgiveness.
Lucrezia de Medici – Alessandro Allori (1560).
Public domain
Clive Hamilton’s memoir of 40 years in activism is most of all a narrative of ideas in action. He argues for the power of provocation – and against the left, the right and China.
Douglas Rushkoff’s Survival of the Richest is less about tech billionaires and their ‘bonkers’ escape plans than it is an entertaining primer on the various ills of late capitalism.