Jo Case
Jo Case is the editor of Readings Monthly, and a bookseller at Readings Doncaster.
Reviews
Evening Primrose by Kopano Matlwa
Masechaba, a medical intern in a South African hospital, is a teenager suffering excruciating periods when she’s inspired to become a doctor. Her secret plan is to one day convince a colleague to giv…
Watching Out by Julian Burnside
Julian Burnside, intellectual hero of the left and early advocate for the rights of asylum seekers, voted Liberal in every election from 1972 to 1996. And while he infamously defended the MUA in the …
Thirty Days by Mark Raphael Baker
Older readers (like me) might remember Mark Raphael Baker’s critically acclaimed, deeply moving family memoir, The Fiftieth Gate, about the experiences of his Holocaust survivor parents. His second b…
Big Little Lies
Fantasy dreamscape flashes to nightmare, and back again, in the HBO limited series Big Little Lies, based on Liane Moriarty’s bestselling novel and masterfully directed by Jean-Marc Valee (Wild). Eve…
Do Not Become Alarmed by Maile Meloy
Maile Meloy is one of my favourite writers. Her short stories are regularly published in The New Yorker (and were recently adapted for the film Certain Women, with Laura Dern, Michelle Williams and K…
The Mighty Franks by Michael Frank
I gobbled up this deliciously dark, profoundly poignant memoir in two half-days. The Mighty Franks is Hollywood gothic, complete with distorted families, claustrophobic passions, silver-screen glamou…
Depends What You Mean by Extremist by John Safran
Self-described ‘television prankster’ John Safran confirms that he’s a major writing talent with his second book. Here, he embeds himself with Australian political extremists and attempts to tease ou…
For a Girl by Mary-Rose MacColl
For a Girl is the story Mary-Rose MacColl has been writing around all her life. Its themes – of sexual misconduct and secrets – have driven her critically acclaimed novels, Falling in Snow and Swimmi…
Lion
Lion opens in remote rural India, where tiny Saroo, having promised to wait for his brother on a train platform, curls up in a stationary train carriage, and wakes up with the empty train moving at s…
The Family by Chris Johnston and Rosie Jones
Books about cults were big last year: Emma Cline’s The Girls, about the Manson family, was the talk of 2016. Locally, Laura Elizabeth Woollett’s The Love of a Bad Man included stories about the Manso…
Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey
Craig Silvey’s much-awaited second novel is very different from the elegiac Rhubarb – but it’s every bit as good, if not better. And, like Rhubarb’s play on the Beatles song Eleanor Rigby, with its b…
News
Exciting new releases in August
I first discovered Jock Serong last year, when Readings’ Stella Charls, Alice Pung and I were reading through an enormous book pile, judging the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction. None of us expected to be utterly seduced by a crime novel titled The Rules of Backyard Cricket (spoiler: none of us are sporty). But we were all intrigued by its gritty, elegant exploration of Australian m…
My five favourite books about writers
It’s no coincidence that my name is Jo. Okay, I’m not named after her, but I’ve always identified with Little Women’s tomboyish writer Jo March. The second-oldest of four sisters during the American Civil War, Jo is the driving force of the quartet: she writes plays for them all to act in; she invites the lonely boy in the mansion across the road, Laurie, to be their best friend; a…
Exciting new releases in May
There’s something both delicious and dangerous about working in a bookshop. Every other day, I discover a new – or old – book that I suddenly can’t live without. It’s tempting enough working on the shop floor at Readings Doncaster (Mondays), but now that I’m editing Readings Monthly too, my bedside book mountain is rising to ridiculous levels.
I don’t know if it was a desire to scale the mountai…
Jo Case interviews Jessica Friedmann
The opening chapter in Jessica Friedmann’s memoir-in-essays, Things That Helped, closes with her lying on her bathroom floor in the middle of the night, resolved to drown herself in the Maribyrnong River, but unable to get up. She’s a young woman engulfed by early motherhood, distanced not just from …
