This year’s Melbourne Writers Festival is hosting a series of super special book clubs that will see festival guests host a discussion about one of their own favourite books. Here is the list of all the book club picks throughout the festival. You can find the full program for the 2018 Melbourne Writers Festival here. Tickets go on sale at 9am on Friday 20 July. Irvine Welsh on PostCapitali…

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Open House Melbourne Weekend: 2018 program The Nowhere Child by Christian White The Barefoot Surgeon by Ali Gripper Dark Emu (New edition) by Bruce Pascoe Dunera Lives by Ken Inglis, Seumas Spark and Jay Winter, with Carol Bunyan Less by Andrew Sean Greer Teacher by Gabbie Stroud The Power of Hope by Kon Karapanagiotidis Marcia Langton: Welcome to Country by Marcia Langton Boy Swallows Universe …

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The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner

Romy Hall is at the start of two consecutive life sentences, plus six years, at Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility. Outside, there is San Francisco; also the Mars Room strip club where she once gave lap dances for a living; and her seven-year-old son, Jackson, now in the care of her estranged mother. Inside is a new reality. Romy sees the future stretch out…

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Open House Melbourne Weekend: 2018 program The Fireflies of Autumn by Moreno Giovannoni The Nowhere Child by Christian White The Trauma Cleaner by Sarah Krasnostein Boy Swallows Universe by Trent Dalton Teacher by Gabbie Stroud Marcia Langton: Welcome to Country by Marcia Langton The Barefoot Investor (2018 updated edition) by Scott Pape Less by Andrew Sean Greer The Power of Hope by Kon Karapan…

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CRIME BOOK OF THE MONTH The Nowhere Child by Christian White

One rainy Melbourne evening, photography teacher Kim Leamy is approached in the cafeteria by a man who has news that will knock Kim right out of her orbit: he believes that she is not Kim Leamy, but in fact Sammy Went, who disappeared twenty-eight years earlier from her home in Manson, Kentucky. Two-year-old Sammy’s disappearance …

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Teacher: One Woman’s Struggle to Keep the Heart in Teaching by Gabbie Stroud is a powerful new memoir about Australia’s education system and what it is really like to work within it. You can read an edited extract from the book here.

By this time in my career, I had come to understand that staff meetings were a special kind of torture. Without a judicious Principal or Assistant Principal or mi…

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The Nowhere Child by Christian White The Power of Hope by Kon Karapanagiotidis Open House Melbourne Weekend: 2018 program (available 27 June) Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman Marcia Langton: Welcome to Country by Marcia Langton Less by Andrew Sean Greer Dead Right (Quarterly Essay 70) by Richard Denniss Teacher by Gabbie Stroud Eggshell Skull by Bri L…

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Winter is here at last. As I write, it’s pelting rain, an Antarctic gale is blowing, and I couldn’t be happier. I love the drama of Melbourne’s weather, which confounds and annoys my friends from interstate no end. But really, there could be no better incentive to stay indoors and read until your eyes will read no more.

This July you must begin with our Fiction Book of the Month, Boy Swallows Un…

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We love historical fiction and many of our favourite Australian reads in this genre are set in rural areas – such as Alexis Wright’s expansive and inventive Carpentaria and Lucy Treloar’s vivid and immersive Salt Creek. Here we share a collection of historical reads that transport readers way back into the earlier days of the country’s cities. Melbourne, Victoria

The Portrait of Molly Dean …

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Dead Right (Quarterly Essay 70) by Richard Denniss Warlight by Michael Ondaatje Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe Less by Andrew Sean Greer Marcia Langton: Welcome to Country by Marcia Langton Open House Melbourne Weekend: 2018 program (available 27 June) Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman Crime Scene Asia by Liz Porter The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Heather Morris The Subtle Art of Not …

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