Tinkering: The Complete Book of John Clarke by John Clarke

Force of Nature by Jane Harper

A Long Way from Home by Peter Carey

The Travelling Cat Chronicles by Hiro Arikawa (translated by Philip Gabriel)

Stories by Helen Garner

True Stories by Helen Garner

First Dog On the Moon’s Guide to Living Through the Impending Apocalypse and How to Stay Nice Doing It by First Dog on the Moon

5 Ingredients: Quick & Easy Food by Jamie Oliver

Mythos by…

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It’s summer time which means it’s time for some serious reading. Here, we share what’s on our own TBR piles…

Ellen Cregan, bookseller at Readings Doncaster

Girl Through Glass by Sari Wilson

Made for Love by Alissa Nutting

The Best Australian Stories 2017 edited by Maxine Beneba Clarke

The Stranger by Melanie Raabe (translated by Imogen Taylor)

Suburbia by Jeremy Chambers

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

The Best of The Lifted Brow: Volume Two

Sour Heart by Jenny…

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Over the past few weeks, we’ve been compiling a host of gift guides to help you with your Christmas shopping. Here are some suggestions for those of you who are feeling slightly passive aggressive this gift-giving season…

For the person you simply can’t stand…

Try… Prick by Gynelle Leon

For your forgetful partner…

Try… How to Develop a Brilliant Memory Toolkit by Dominic O'Brien

For your forbidding and prim relative…

Try… How to Swear by Stephen Wildish

For your younger…

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The winners of this year’s Prime Minister’s Literary Awards have been announced.

The Prime Minister’s Literary Awards celebrate outstanding literary talent in Australia and the valuable contribution Australian literature and history makes to the nation’s cultural and intellectual life.

Congratulations to the winners in each category.

Fiction

Their Brilliant Careers by Ryan O’Neill

Poetry

Headwaters by Anthony Lawrence

Non-fiction

Quicksilver by Nicolas Rothwell

Prize for Australian History

Atomic Thunder: The Maralinga Story by Elizabeth Tynan

Young adult fiction

Words in…

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Each week we bring you a sample of the books we’re reading, the films and TV shows we’re watching, and the music we’re listening to.

Ellen Cregan is reading Louise Erdrich and Alissa Nutting

I’ve just finished reading two excellent books.

The first is Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich. Initially, I’d planned on reading a couple of chapters, but ended up finishing the whole thing in one sitting. If you liked The Handmaid’s Tale, you…

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Carlton bookseller George Delaney shares five books escaped into during 2017.

Cool For You by Eileen Myles

Eileen Myles’s third autobiographical novel has been out of print for a while but returned in an Australian edition this year, right on time for me to continue making my way through her incredible body of work. Though she is largely known as a poet, Myles does something wonderful with her fiction, telescoping with time and memory. Cool For You follows Chelsea Girls…

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Staff share their favourite book covers of the past year.

‘ Who thought this was a good idea? has to be the most apt book cover this year. The funny, informative, and (let’s celebrate it) gossipy memoir of Obama’s former deputy chief of staff has a cover that has kept me ruefully chuckling for months now.

In terms of beauty I can’t go past the covers of Ali Smith’s Seasonal quartet. The second book, Winter, has just been released…

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This year we invited our customers to vote for there favourite books, music, film and tv of the past year. Here are their picks, listed here in order of most voted for.

A huge thank you to everyone who voted! We loved seeing your picks for the year.

FICTION

1. Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
2. Force of Nature by Jane Harper
3. Anything is Possible by Elizabeth Strout
4. Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman…

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Schools and library liaison Ann Le Lievre shares the books she’s hoping to get stuck into over summer.

I spent four weeks in London earlier this year and it was a life-changing experience. It was my first overseas trip for a very long time, and the simple act of walking the city streets brought me into contact with views of the landscape, buildings and history in ways that I cannot begin to explain. My summer reading stack is inspired by…

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Our staff share some of their favourite translated books from the past year.

‘I have been collecting titles from the Penguin China Specials and The Hong Kong Penguin Specials series fanatically! Some of these bitesize books are translated and some are written in original English.

A translated favourite is Dung Kai-Cheung’s Cantonese Love Stories – a collection of 25 short stories so brief they can best be described as sketches. Dung Kai-Cheung’s writing fits within classical Chinese traditions of pithy…

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