Our latest blog posts

Longlist for the Indie Book Awards 2016

Congratulations to all the authors longlisted for the Indie Book Awards 2016.

Each year, independent booksellers from around the nation get together and vote for their favourite titles in four different categories, as well as their favourite book overall. Here are the longlistees for each category.

Fiction

A Guide to Berlin by Gail Jones

Close Your Eyes by Michael Robotham

Hope Farm by Peggy Frew

Quicksand by Steve Toltz

The Lake House by Kate Morton

The Natural Way of Things

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What we're reading: Patricia Highsmith, Lindsay Hunter and Lauren Groff

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.

Nina Kenwood is reading Vendela Vida and Lauren Groff.

President Obama has just revealed his favourite book of the year to be Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies (which is also one of our top ten fiction books of the year), so it seems a relevant time for me to mention I…

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Our favourite children's and YA prize winners this year

by Holly Harper

Holly Harper rounds up our top picks for prize-winning children’s and YA books in 2015.

Winner of the Readings Children Book Prize 2015

Rivertime by Trace Balla

Rivertime was the magnificent winner of our very own Readings Children’s Book Prize this year. It was an incredibly strong shortlist, but Trace Balla’s graphic novel-style tale of a boy and his uncle’s journey up the Glenelg River blew our judges away. They said, ‘It is unique, we love its artistry and it…

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A soundtrack to this year's best fiction

by Bronte Coates

Pair…

Preparation for the Next Life

by Atticus Lish

With… Carrie and Lowell by Sufjan Stevens

Because… With its exquisitely crafted, stripped-back prose that leaves utter devastation in its wake, Atticus Lish’s story about the relationship between Zou Lei, an illegal Chinese immigrant and Brad Skinner, an Iraq War veteran, is a stunning debut. The book goes perfectly with Sufjan Stevens’ latest album, which is sparsely instrumental and equally heartbreaking; its songs were inspired by the death of Stevens’ mother…

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Road-testing our best cookbooks of the year

We invited our staff to test out recipes from our top ten cookbooks of the year for an office Christmas lunch. Here are the results…

Lian Hingee made ‘Best-Ever Cheesecake’ from David Herbert’s Best Home Cooking

I’m a big fan of David Herbert. I give his Complete Perfect Recipes to every teenager I know who’s moving out of home because the recipes are straightforward, familiar, and foolproof. His recipe for ‘best-ever’ cheesecake certainly lived up to its name – it…

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The books we'd gift every 16-year-old in Australia

Every 16-year-old in Sweden will soon be receiving a copy of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s We Should All Be Feminists as part of a campaign to open up conversation about gender.

Here are the books we’d gift to every 16-year-old in Australia – if we could!

If I was going to get every 16-year-old in Australia a book, it’d probably be something practical like a cookbook – Complete Perfect Recipes by David Herbert has every recipe you could ever want, from…

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Books that gave us nightmares in 2015

Our staff share the books that gave them nightmares this year.

Monsters by Emerald Fennell. This book gave me nightmares, not that monsters were out to get me, but that I was the monster. I woke up with a start and tears in my eyes as the face of my latest murder victim (in the dream!) faded away. I loved it! – Dani Solomon, children’s specialist at Carlton

I asked my colleague Holly if I was a total baby for…

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Books that made us laugh in 2015

Our staff share the books that made them laugh this year.

The 65-Storey Treehouse by Andy Griffiths and Terry Denton made me laugh and giggle like an idiot. As an adult it’s hilarious and irreverent, plus it’s definitely good for your soul. Griffiths and Denton’s sensibility is an all encompassing kind of funny – the same way Pixar films make adults laugh. I say bring on The 78-Storey Treehouse. – Dani Solomon, children’s specialist at Carlton

I read Virginia…

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On food and fiction

by Chris Gordon

From an early age, books would whet my appetite. I would read glorious descriptions of food and immediately start dreaming of it.

I imagined myself high on a cliff above the seas with the sky a glorious blue and a Famous Five-inspired feast before me: hard boiled eggs, pickled ham sandwiches, slabs of cake, and lashings of ginger beer. I also thought frequently of the food in Enid Blyton’s The Magic Faraway Tree. The characters who populated that…

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