GM Pictures/Shutterstock
In The Manic, Benjamin Labatut tells the story of the ‘smartest man of the 20th century’.
Sondem/Shutterstock
Pi O is known for his wit and irreverence. His anarchism, reflexive anti-Americanism and anti-capitalism are all part of the deal.
Christos Tsiolkas.
Sarah Enticknap/Allen & Unwin
Christos Tsiolkas’s new novel is more interested in individuals and our influences on one another than on Australia’s social problems.
Album/Alamy Stock Photo/Penguin Random House
As a diva, Streisand has consistently defied instructions not to do something by doubling up her efforts.
Fire over Tenterfield, New South Wales.
Try Liang/AAP
Jem Bendell encourages us to think about societal collapse in ways that are ‘profound and startlingly original’, with the potential to birth whole new social movements, says Tom Doig.
Yanis Varoufakis speaking in Rome, November 12, 2022.
Angelo Carconi/AAP
Traditional capitalists are still flourishing, but according to Yanis Varoufakis they are not driving the economy like they used to.
Rapids on the Franklin River, Tasmania.
Taras Vyshnya/Shutterstock
In Question 7, Richard Flanagan writes of the contingencies of history, and troubles the distinction between truth and fabrication.
Dante’s Inferno – Joseph Anton Koch, detail from Cassa Massimo fresco (c.1825).
Sailko, via Wikimedia Commons
Let Us Descend is concerned with the neglected lives of the the poor, the despised, the dark, those barely scraping a living, but cannot capture the collective experience of slavery.
Patrick Pleul/AAP
Some see Elon Musk as an idiot savant; others think of him simply as an idiot. How did an unelected citizen come to wield such power?
Alain Frechett/Pexels; Rodolfo Clix/Pexels
The narrator of Charlotte Wood’s new novel has shed her life to live with nuns. The world intrudes in the form of COVID, a mouse plague and recovered bones, delivered by someone from her past.
Portrait of James Joyce – Jacques-Émile Blanche (1934).
National Gallery of Ireland, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Gabrielle Carey’s last book, about her beloved James Joyce, also includes her own life as a reader, and makes us see things that hurt and delight her.
Brücke-Osteuropa, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
My Life as a Jew is an honest and very personal book about a growing sense of Jewish identity, but it has its contradictions.
Justin Lane/AAP
Michael Lewis’s new book tells the remarkable story of the rise and fall of a very contemporary tycoon.
Baucau, Timor-Leste.
Thomas Vuillemin/Unsplash
In The Idealist, the machinations of the Australian government become a sinister backdrop to what seems to be a story of liberation.
A young Hilary Mantel.
Jim Keenan
The book shares secrets – Mantel’s own alongside those of the writers, historical figures and places she describes.
MPIX/Shutterstock
Paradise Estate is a good-humoured depiction of the travails of share-house living, with a political edge.
Granta
Julia offers contemporary readers new ways of thinking about Orwell’s novel.
Melissa Lucashenko.
Glenn Hunt/UQP
Melissa Lucashenko’s latest novel is an epic, affirming pathways for Indigenous futures – and she gifts us with characters impossible not to invest in.
lassedesignen/Shutterstock
From haunted houses to villainous vampires, these are the spooky reads our experts just can’t forget.
A Weeping Woman– Rembrandt (c.1645)
Public domain
The latest books by Gretchen Shirm and Briony Doyle are preoccupied with the aftermaths of recent deaths.