Our latest blog posts
Our top ten bestsellers of the week
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
This Annoying Life: A Mindless Colouring Book for the Highly Stressed by Oslo Davis
The Moroccan Soup Bar: Recipes of a Spoken Menu and a Little Bit of Spice by Hana Assafiri
Reckoning: A Memoir by Magda Szubanski
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante (translated by Ann Goldstein)
The Secret Chord by Geraldine Brooks
The Other Side of the World by Stephanie Bishop
Keating by Kerry O'Brien
Prime Minister's Literary Awards winners 2015
The 2015 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards have been announced with two categories naming joint winners.
The Prime Minister’s Literary Awards recognise and reward excellence in Australian literature and history. Award Categories are fiction, poetry, non-fiction, Australian history, young adult fiction and children’s fiction.
Congratulations to the winners in each category.
Fiction
The Golden Age by Joan London
Non-fiction
Joint winners:
Wild Bleak Bohemia: Marcus Clarke, Adam Lindsay Gordon and Henry Kendall by Michael Wilding
Our children's and YA top ten bestsellers of the week
Adam Spencer’s Enormous Book of Numbers by Adam Spencer
Laugh Your Head Off: Funny Stories for All Kinds of Kids by various authors
Grandpa’s Great Escape by David Walliams
Diary of a Wimpy Kid Book 10: Old School by Jeff Kinney
My Dog Bigsy by Alison Lester
The Bolds by Julian Clary
The Day the Crayons Came Home by Drew Daywalt and Oliver Jeffers
In My Heart: A Book of Feelings by Jo Witek and Christine Roussey
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
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…
Our favourite children's and YA prize winners this year
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…
A soundtrack to this year's best fiction
Pair…
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…
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…
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…
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…