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
What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez
Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend is one of my highlights of recent reading years, and it has become so much a part of my own reading autobiography that it’s hard to believe that is has only been in my memor…
The Burning Island by Jock Serong
You may have read Jock Serong’s gripping 2018 novel, Preservation, based on real events surrounding a shipwreck’s survivors and their doomed walk along the south east coast of Australia to Sydney in …
Kokomo by Victoria Hannan
The anguish of living with unfulfilled desire pulses through Victoria Hannan’s debut novel, Kokomo. Its characters, each in their own way, are trying to work out how to live when they cannot get what…
The Disaster Tourist by Yun Ko-eun
Many forms of travel and tourism are currently off the agenda, so it’s an interesting time to contemplate the needs that are not being sated due to these pandemic-imposed restrictions. What precisely…
A Burning by Megha Majumdar
Already garnering the kind of praise from high-profile authors and international reviewers that a debut author might only dare dream of, A Burning has the feel of one of the ‘must read’ titles of 202…
The Animals in That Country by Laura Jean McKay
The Animals in That Country is a standout debut novel of 2020. It is the second work of fiction from Laura Jean McKay, following her acclaimed short-story collection, Holiday in Cambodia (2013). Orig…
Indelicacy by Amina Cain
Vitória is a cleaning woman in a museum, but longs to be a writer. She meets and swiftly marries a wealthy man, who wants her to do nothing but relax. With this new-found leisure, Vitória works dilig…
Weather by Jenny Offill
If I were more paranoid than I am willing to admit, I would be ruminating very seriously on when and how Jenny Offill (or her agents) entered my brain, extracted many of my thoughts, concerns, and ne…
A Couple of Things Before the End by Sean O'Beirne
All hail Sean O’Beirne, and his brilliant debut collection of short stories, A Couple of Things Before the End, a timely excoriation of the nostalgic myths of Australianness. With a master satirist’s…
Damascus by Christos Tsiolkas
Damascus is one of the standout novels of the year, delivered to us by the incomparable and singular writer who is Christos Tsiolkas, an author who reinvents himself with every single one of his book…
Guest House for Young Widows by Azadeh Moaveni
What might make a woman – perhaps an educated woman from a stable family situation – travel to Syria to join the Islamic State? This is the foundational question of the brilliantly provocative and ge…
Women, Men and the Whole Damn Thing by David Leser
Journalist David Leser has written a timely and passionate contribution to the public discourse that is emerging in the wake of the #MeToo movement. It’s the contribution of, in his own words, ‘a str…
Three Women by Lisa Taddeo
It’s safe to say that you’ll be reading (or have already read) a lot of breathless and emotional endorsements for this book from readers far and wide – and this extraordinary piece of nonfiction dese…
Lanny by Max Porter
Literature runs through Max Porter’s veins. He’s been editorial director at Granta and Portobello books, home to some of my favourite books of recent years, and penned the affecting and brilliant deb…
The Little Girl on the Ice Floe by Adelaide Bon, translated by Ruth Diver
As the scale and impact of child sexual abuse is finally becoming acknowledged and understood (though tenuously so, as recent comments by a defence QC in a famous court case chillingly reminded us), …
The Arsonist by Chloe Hooper
In February 2009, the state of Victoria experienced extreme weather events that provided the perfect conditions for the bushfire catastrophe that has come to be known as Black Saturday. One hundred a…
Preservation by Jock Serong
A little-known (though maybe soon-to-be-well-known) historical event forms the basis for Jock Serong’s latest novel, Preservation.
Using the 1797 shipwreck of the Sydney Cove off the coast of Preser…
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…
News
Dear Reader, September 2020
If, after six weeks at home during Stage 4 restrictions, you’ve been staring at your shelves thinking, ‘I’ve read all these’, then have I got some great news for you. September is usually the month that gets me prepping for the Christmas season, with lots of the biggest books of the year due in store. This September is bigger than ever, full of books readers are waiting for, some of them delayed …
Dear Reader, August 2020
The award given to an Unpublished Manuscript at the annual Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards has developed an excellent track record over the years for uncovering talent (alumni include Jane Harper, Christian White, and Melanie Cheng), and so it was with some expectation that I read Kokomo by Victoria Hannan, 2019’s award recipient. I was not disappointed: this impressive debut is a finely craf…
Dear Reader, July 2020
If you feel like your head will explode if you hear the phrases ‘unprecedented times’ or ‘new normal’ again, then you are in the right place. Welcome to an experience that will take you back to a more comfortable era, delivering a familiar kind of ‘old normal’ that should bring you some feeling of nostalgic relief: perusing an excellent edition of the Readings Monthly. This month’s issue is overf…
Dear Reader, March 2020
Vivian Pham is one of those incredibly talented and bright young people whose list of achievements at an early age will make you seriously wonder what you have been doing with your life. Case in point: Pham’s debut novel was signed by Penguin Random House two years ago when she was still at high school. Reading the final product, The Coconut Children, a story set in the late 1990s in the Vietnames…
The most anticipated books of 2020
Dear Reader
It must be said: it has been a grim start to the year. I have always imagined 2020 as the year that officially starts ‘the future’ (well, actually, it used to be the year 2000, but somehow that came and went two decades ago). But instead of the flying cars, intergalactic travel, and neural telepathy of my imagination, we are deep in climate emergency. The climate refugees in The Glad…
The best non-fiction books of 2019
Three Women is an incredibly accomplished piece of writing, and a uniqu…