Ask Agatha: What's a book to scare my brother?

Our wise bookseller Agatha answers all your tricky questions. If you have a question for Agatha please email [email protected].


I want to read a prize winner from this year but don’t know which one! Help?

Well, well, well this question is perfectly timed! We just happen to be announcing the inaugural winner of our New Australian Writing Award this very evening. So, of course, the best place to start with prize winners is to read our winner (announced sometime between 6pm and 6.30pm today). Our New Australian Writing Award exists to recognise exciting and exceptional new contributions to local literature (it’s for an Australian author’s first or second book) so by reading the winner, you’ll not only be experiencing a wonderful piece of literature but you’re getting in early on a talented Australian author’s career.

After reading our winner, I recommend you continue with the Australian theme and read The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan (winner of the Booker Prize), All The Birds, Singing by Evie Wild (winner of the Miles Franklin) and then The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka by Clare Wright (winner of the Stella Prize.)

Ed. Note: The winner of our New Australian Writing Award is… Only the Animals by Ceridwen Dovey! Read more here.


Just wondering if you can recommend me any books that are told from a child’s point of view. I just finished Karen Russell’s Swamplandia!.

For some readers, giving a story aimed at adults a child narrator is the equivalent of being taken out for a quiet supper after a particularly stressful day at the office only to be seated right next to some precocious kid, out way past its bedtime, who loudly describes the entire evening with speech patterns and thought processes that make you want to commit hara-kiri with a soup spoon.

I’m so glad you’re not one of those.

You could try Emma Donoghue’s Room, narrated by a five-year-old boy born in captivity after his mother was abducted at 19 (the book was inspired by the Fritzl case). Or Aimee Bender’s The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, in which a nine-year-old girl discovers that she can taste the emotions of whoever prepares her food (discovering, as the title suggests, that her mother’s lemon cake tastes of despair). More brilliant but harrowing stories to follow: A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride (winner of this year’s Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction), Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones, and Golden Boys by Sonya Hartnett.

I also love the teenage narrators in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon, and How The Light Gets In by MJ Hyland. But if you want a laugh instead, you can’t go past The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole by Sue Townsend.

You might also enjoy stories with a split narrative: the child narrator who continues their story as an adult, or the child who provides one of several narratives. Try a new release like Lost & Found by Brooke Davis, or a classic from 1970, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. Finally, Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible is narrated by the wife and four daughters of an evangelical Baptist minister who takes them to a village in the Congo during the late 50s.

My brother is always telling me that books can’t be ‘as scary’ as films. What’s a book that will show him he’s totally wrong?

It all depends on what ‘kind of scary’ you think would be most effective when it comes to your brother. For example, would he be more scared by a creepy, unsettling story that fuses social issues with vampire children (Let the Right One In) or a gory tale of gleefully sadistic clowns (The Pilo Family Circus)?

If horror is what you’re looking for, Stephen King is not called the king of horror for nothing (browse his books here). Or, a new favourite horror author among Readings staff is Lauren Beukes who blends sci-fi, horror and crime: The Shining Girls is about a time-traveling serial killer; Broken Monsters is about a mystery involving part-human, part-animal corpses.

Or, looking to some of the classic scary reads, you simply can’t go past The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson which is ‘now widely regarded as the greatest haunted-house story ever written’.

Perhaps while your brother is reading the book, you can also help by creating an atmosphere conducive to fear. For example: replace the lightbulb in his room with a low wattage one for a dimming effect; slightly jar his window open so the glass will rattle in the breeze; anonymously phone him at irregular intervals to breathe down the line.


We’ll be publishing Agatha’s next column on Tuesday 11 November. All questions answered on our blog will be kept anonymous and questions will be chosen at Agatha’s discretion.

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Cover image for Golden Boys

Golden Boys

Sonya Hartnett

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