Michael McLoughlin
Michael McLoughlin is a former Readings Carlton bookseller
Review — 25 Mar 2019
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…
Review — 23 Feb 2020
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-alonnah…
Review — 27 Jan 2020
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…
Review — 23 Sep 2019
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…
Review — 21 Jul 2019
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 degradation. I…
Review — 27 May 2019
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…
Review — 29 Jan 2019
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…
Review — 22 Oct 2018
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…
Review — 28 May 2018
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…
Review — 25 Feb 2018
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…