Alison Huber
Alison Huber is Readings’ Head Book Buyer and works at the Carlton store. She has been selling books in Melbourne for twenty years. She is also a recovering academic.
Reviews
Man Out of Time by Stephanie Bishop
Stephanie Bishop took themes of nostalgia, memory and migration and made them her own in her stunning 2015 Readings Prize-winning novel, The Other Side of the World. Bishop’s third novel, Man Out of …
Days of Awe by A.M. Homes
A.M. Homes is one of my favourite authors, and I am hungry for any new writing from her. Homes is a brilliant analyst of life in the anxious times of late capitalism, where personal relationships and…
Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata
Since the age of 18, narrator Keiko has worked part time in a 24-hour Tokyo convenience store. Often baffled by societal norms, Keiko appreciates the order that the shop brings to her life; the stric…
Eggshell Skull by Bri Lee
During her year as a judge’s associate in the District Court in Queensland, Bri Lee finds herself enduring case after case after case involving rape, sexual assault and child abuse. A fact that Lee k…
Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday
Given the fact of the seemingly relentless media revelations of exploitation in all sorts of industries, I can’t think of a better time to read a smart book about uneven power dynamics. Lisa Halliday…
In the Garden of the Fugitives by Ceridwen Dovey
Ceridwen Dovey won the inaugural Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction in 2014 with her book of short stories, Only the Animals, an audacious and original work of imagination. Dovey’s new novel c…
My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent
Sometimes, it’s a single character that makes a novel unforgettable; sometimes an intense plot puts you in a book’s grip; other times still, it’s the writer’s craft that draws you in and keeps you th…
Miss Jane by Brad Watson
Miss Jane Chisolm is born on a farm in Mississippi in the early part of the last century. Before too long it becomes apparent that she has a genital birth defect that she will need to live with, one …
The Girls by Emma Cline
There’s no other way for me to say it: I love this book. It’s a debut from a young writer called Emma Cline who I feel is a literary star of the future – actually, scrap that – of the present. This b…
The Mirror Thief by Martin Seay
When I was at the American Booksellers Association Winter Institute in January this year, it seemed like pretty much everyone was talking about The Mirror Thief. First, I heard the impassioned pitch …
Work Like Any Other by Virginia Reeves
Virginia Reeves has written an extremely affecting debut novel set during the age of electrification in 1920s Alabama. It’s the kind of story that will stay with you long after you start reading the …
The Portable Veblen by Elizabeth McKenzie
You may not immediately recognise the name of the economist, sociologist and critic of modernity, Thorstein Veblen, but you will recognise some of the concepts that he introduced into the twentieth c…
Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins
Speculative imaginings of our world in the wake of climate change are providing many authors with rich material for exploration. It’s fertile ground for some big questions that we should probably all…
Purity by Jonathan Franzen
Fellow lovers of Big American Novels, clear your diaries: the new Jonathan Franzen is here. It has been five long years since Franzen’s last work of fiction, Freedom, and it has been worth the wait. …
A Whole Life by Robert Seethaler
This small book makes a huge impact. It has been a bestseller in its original German language publication (selling some 150,000 copies) and readers can now join in this thoroughly deserved enthusiasm…
Fourth of July Creek by Smith Henderson
Sometimes it feels like books find their own way to you. I was drawn to Fourth of July Creek in a pile of proofs at the Carlton office for no particular reason, and it turned out to be an exact fit f…
Alice Spring by Eleanor Hogan
This handsome book is the latest addition to New South’s justly successful series about Australian cities, focusing this time on the capital of ‘Centralia’, Alice Springs. Countless readers have reli…
Tigers in Red Weather by Lisa Klaussmann
Read our Q&A with Liza Klaussmann here.
Let me first deal with two items of publicity that will inevitably precede this book – one, it is the debut novel by Herman Melville’s great-great-great-gran…
News
Dear Reader, August 2018
Some time last year, it seemed like everyone I know was talking about a true crime podcast called ‘Trace’. The crime – a terrible unsolved murder with scandalous connections to a major institution – happened in 1980, not far from where I live. The victim, Maria James, was killed in her home, a residence behind the bookshop she owned. While I wanted to know more, I find no space in my leisure time…
Dear Reader, July 2018
Winter is here at last. As I write, it’s pelting rain, an Antarctic gale is blowing, and I couldn’t be happier. I love the drama of Melbourne’s weather, which confounds and annoys my friends from interstate no end. But really, there could be no better incentive to stay indoors and read until your eyes will read no more.
This July you must begin with our Fiction Book of the Month, Boy Swallows Un…
Dear Reader, June 2018
I can’t remember a month with so many strong Australian nonfiction releases. Our Book of the Month, Kate Wild’s Waiting for Elijah, is a superb piece of investigative journalism that explores the fatal shooting of a mentally ill young man by police in 2009. Wild’s account is classic detective work, but also a strong critique of the legal system and the ongoing social taboos that surround mental h…
Dear Reader, May 2018
I sat down one Saturday to take a casual look at my advance copy of Maria Tumarkin’s Axiomatic, but found myself pinned to the couch for several hours by the force of Tumarkin’s writing; such is the power of this book. It is another major achievement for the author, who writes about history, trauma, the legacies of the past, and the experience of living in the present; it is a beautiful, challeng…
Dear Reader, April 2018
Anita Heiss has edited our Non-fiction Book of the Month, Growing up Aboriginal in Australia, an essential and generous collection that our reviewer calls nothing short of ‘brilliant’; this book gives voice to the variety of Indigenous experience and should be compulsory reading across the land. Please obtain this book immediately (and help raise money for the ILF as well).
The title alone of ou…
The most anticipated books of 2018
Dear Reader,
As 2017 drew to a close, a previously unknown writer, Kristen Roupenian, sparked an intense social media frenzy when her short story, ‘Cat Person’, was published in the New Yorker (NB: though the internet does love cats, the story is not about cats). By the end of December, the New York Times reported that Roupenian had secured a seven-figure, two-book deal (and in 2019 we’ll no dou…
