Our latest blog posts

Our 2016 Oscar Predictions

The Oscars are due to be announced on 28 February. Here are our predictions of who will take out this year’s top awards. (You can view the full list of nominees

Nina Kenwood, Marketing manager

Best Picture: Mad Max: Fury Road
Best Actress in a Leading Role: Cate Blanchett, Carol
Best Actor in a Leading Role: Leonardo DiCaprio, The Revenant
Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Kate Winslet, Steve Jobs
Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Sylvester Stallone, Creed
Best

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Leigh Hobbs is the new Australian Children's Laureate

Author and illustrator Leigh Hobbs has been named the new Australian Children’s Laureate! The role of the Australian Children’s Laureate is to promote the importance of reading, creativity and story in the lives of young Australians.

Hobbs is known as the creator of such iconic characters as Old Tom, Mr Chicken and Horrible Harriet and over the past two decades has won the heart of many a young fan with his dark humour and distinctive drawing style. The interplay between…

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What we're reading: Madeleine St John, Rajith Savanadasa and Michael Robotham

Each week we bring you a sample of the books we’re reading, the films we’re watching, the television shows we’re hooked on or the music we’re loving.

Ed Moreno is reading The Queen of the Night by Alexander Chee

Historical fiction doesn’t usually grab me but Alexander Chee’s novel made for obsessive reading. I’m a fan of nineteenth-century French realism (especially Émile Zola) so the time and setting appealed, but the subject matter (opera) was new to me. However, the…

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Booksellers reflect on guilty pleasures

Booksellers reflect on their favourite ‘guilty pleasures’ in books, and whether they agree with this term at all.

My mum is a fan of the ol’ bodice ripper, but she also has a tendency to shove said bodice ripper underneath the couch to hide it whenever people come over to the house. While I find this pretty amusing, I don’t really believe in guilty pleasures. I think if you enjoy something, you should just hold your head up high and…

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Booksellers reflect on pretending to have read books

Booksellers reflect on the realities and ethics of telling some white lies about which books they’ve read – or haven’t read.

I don’t feel like I studied any of the same books in high school as most other people did – I’ve still never read To Kill A Mockingbird, The Catcher in the Rye or Great Expectations. While I’ve subsequently caught up on some ‘classics’, there are a large number of them that have passed me by, but…

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Meet four talented international authors in February

We’re delighted to have some very special international guests visiting us this month.

Meet Virginia Reeves…

Virginia Reeves is a graduate of the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. Work Like Any Other is her first novel.

This debut has been stacking up praise from all over the place. National Book Award finalist Kevin Powers described it as an ‘exceptional and starkly beautiful debut’, while Stella Prize shortlisted author Fiona McFarlane said: ‘Thick with dread…

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Best new crime books in February

by Fiona Hardy

NEW CRIME FICTION

Rain Dogs by Adrian McKinty

The fifth book in the Sean Duffy trilogy proves yet again that we should be grateful that McKinty went into literature and not maths. I’ve yet to meet a reader who wasn’t thrilled by Duffy’s company – he’s the kind of down-on-his-luck but quick-on-the-uptake character you love to spend time with, always losing girlfriends for various reasons and colleagues to the general danger that is Northern Ireland during the Troubles. Here, Duffy…

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Reimagined visions of Australia in YA books

by Bronte Coates

Last week, Marlee Jane Ward’s Welcome to Orphancorp was named the winner of the Prize for Writing for Young Adults as part of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. Set during Mirii’s last few days at an industrial orphanage, this punchy genre-busting debut presents a dystopian vision of our nation that is terrifying in its familiarity and fascinating in its strangeness. Ward’s re-positioning of the Australia we know is of the best kind – considered and complex, alien yet still…

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