Michael McLoughlin
Michael McLoughlin works as a bookseller at Readings Carlton.
Reviews
Truganini by Cassandra Pybus
Cassandra Pybus’s Truganini tells the story of a journey full of deception and dead ends as George Augustus Robinson, ‘Protector of Aboriginals’, leads a group of Indigenous survivors from Lunawanna-…
Greenwood by Michael Christie
Every generation experiences a catastrophe: history can be read as a series of apocalypses. Do you think the people affected by the Dust Bowl felt like the Plebs during the Fall of Rome? Will we all …
The Offing by Benjamin Myers
I found it difficult to choose the right superlative to describe Benjamin Myers’ The Offing. I’d been mulling it over for a while and the word I chose is ‘wonderful’. And I mean it in the truest sens…
The Wooleen Way by David Pollock
’Pastoralism might be a dirty word in Australia. I think there is a certain correlation in Australian’s minds between pastoralism, colonisation, the displacement of Aboriginal people, and soil degrad…
Who’s Minding the Farm? In this climate emergency by Patrice Newell
Let’s face facts: industrial agriculture is about to come to a grinding halt. We know well what overgrazing and inappropriate crops have done to Australian soils: erosion, salinity, drought and flood…
City of Trees by Sophie Cunningham
Sophie Cunningham has written a collection of travel writing that grapples with the destructive nature of tourism. Or is it nature writing that never forgets its place within the machine that threate…
Fusion by Kate Richards
Conjoined twins Sea and Serene live in an isolated shack in the Australian Alps with Wren, the young man who cares for them. Up among the snow gums they grow their own vegetables and ferment their ow…
Red Birds by Mohammed Hanif
Major Ellie crashes his sixty-five-million dollar jet in the desert near the refugee camp he was supposed to bomb. It’s not really a high priority target, but Ellie was thrown a bone by his commander…
Out of the Forest by Gregory P. Smith
Gregory P. Smith was born into a life of violence. At home he was a witness to, and a victim of, his alcoholic father’s physical abuse, and his speed-addled mother’s vicious criticism. Before long, h…
The Word for Woman is Wilderness by Abi Andrews
Erin, 19, goes on a solo journey across the world to live alone in the Alaskan wilderness à la Christopher McCandless, or Henry David Thoreau. Or Jack London. And Bear Grylls is doing it too … In fac…
Soon by Lois Murphy
A fleet of forebodingly official-looking vehicles arrives one winter solstice in the West Australian town of Nebulah. The vehicles disappear as mysteriously as they appeared, and with them go the bir…
