Our staff reflect on the work of six terrific Australian authors who have new books out this month.

Amy Vuleta recommends Michelle De Kretser

I’m dying to get my hands on Michelle De Kretser’s new novella, Springtime: A Ghost Story, because what I love the most about De Kretser’s writing is how utterly haunted it is – all of her stories are ghost stories. She has a way of writing characters and situations that are at once present and…

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I’ve been thinking a lot about the body lately, about consciousness and embodiment and the ways we relate to them. The mind and body are often distinguished from each other, drawn as two parts of a whole: the mind an essence and the body a vessel. I’ve been questioning why we maintain such a distinction, what the repercussions of that distinction are, and what writing and actively thinking about the body can do.

These questions are how I came to…

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The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan

Plenty More by Yotam Ottolenghi

Only the Animals by Ceridwen Dovey

Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s ‘Learned’ by Lena Dunham

Amnesia by Peter Carey

Yes Please by Amy Poehler

Private Bill: In Love and War by Barrie Cassidy

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (including film tie-in edition)

The Rosie Effect by Graeme Simsion

Merciless Gods by Christos Tsiolkas

This week in Australian…

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In addition to being an international supermodel, Robyn Lawley is a self-confessed foodie, and her new cookbook, Robyn Lawley Eats is an inspiration to girls who just love to eat. Here, she shares two recipes from the book.

CHERRY RIPE SLICE

Preparation time: 50 minutes
Cooking time: 45 minutes
Makes: 15-20 squares

Ingredients (base):
11/2 cups plain flour
3 tbsp Dutch (dark) cocoa powder
¾ cup caster sugar
½ tsp baking powder
100g salted butter, chopped and softened
50ml cold…

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This month marks the retirement of Peter Blake, the Sales Director of Penguin Books Australia. Peter’s name may not mean much to you but he’s probably touched your life in some way. Text publisher Michael Heyward called Peter a publishing genius for his simple yet brilliant idea of repackaging backlist titles in the distinctive orange and white livery of the Penguin Popular Classics at an affordable price – a bit like classy plain packaging!

Peter and I spoke about this…

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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.

Fiona Hardy is reading The Witch of Salt & Storm by Kendall Kulper

The cover of this book was as seductive as I’ve ever seen on our young adult fiction shelves, and so when it came to pick a title for the book club I’m part of, I waved a picture of this…

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Lauren Beukes

South African novelist Lauren Beukes is an entirely original voice in crime fiction, blending together sci-fi, horror and crime. Her 2013 novel, The Shining Girls, which featured a time-traveling serial killer, was intensely creepy and earned her praise from Stephen King and James Ellroy. In her latest novel, Broken Monsters, Detective Gabriella Versado is stumped when part-human, part-animal corpses start appearing in Detroit.

Octavia Butler

Octavia Butler is best known as a sci-fi author but her…

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Well just the other day we announced the winner of the inaugural Readings New Australian Writing Award, which goes to Sydneysider Ceridwen Dovey for Only the Animals. I was genuinely thrilled by this, her second published work: Michelle de Kretser has described it as ‘wholly extraordinary’, and that really is the only suitable epithet for this amazing book. I was disoriented at first – animal narrators, and dead ones at that, so it’s their souls talking?! – but I…

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Our staff share some of the books that scared them when they were children.

Emily Gale on the Long Legged Scissor Man:

I still have my childhood copy of Struwwelpeter, a picture book first published in 1845 which is basically a catalogue of children wilfully ignoring the good advice given to them for their own safety and, as a result, ending up maimed, bedridden, tortured, alone, or just plain dead.

As a child, these stories became part of my…

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Given the sizeable number of new releases that arrive in store each month, it’s easy to miss some hidden gems. We’ve compiled a short list of books you might have missed this October.

Indigo by Clemens J. Setz

Set in a world uncannily familiar and yet entirely strange, Indigo (Austrian writer Clemens J. Setz’s first novel to be translated into English) is part thrilling detective story, part post-modern puzzle. It is 2007 and Austria is in the grip of a…

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