Australian fiction
The Island Will Sink by Briohny Doyle
Somewhere in the latter part of the 21st century, the planet has reached breaking point, the world watching grimly on as Pitcairn Island gradually, inexorably sinks into the Pacific. It’s a kind of doomsday clock for humanity’s hopes of averting…
Their Brilliant Careers by Ryan O'Neill
In Their Brilliant Careers, Ryan O’Neill combines conventions of biography and short story in an exhaustively brazen blend of Australian literary history and plausible yet gloriously bonkers invention. Each of these connected stories is a mini-biography of an imaginary…
Music and Freedom by Zoë Morrison
‘Perhaps’, says Alice as the narrator in the opening pages, ‘I could blame Romantic music for what happened. It is, she says, the triumph of fantasy over reality.’ Music and Freedom, however, is not about a fantastical life; it…
The Toymaker by Liam Pieper
From the opening pages of Liam Pieper’s The Toymaker, the reader is left with no doubt as to what kind of man Adam Kulakov is. The head of a successful toymaking company inherited from his Holocaust-surviving grandfather Arkady, Adam…
Treading Air by Ariella Van Luyn
I really fell for Lizzy O’Dea in Ariella Van Luyn’s historical fiction, Treading Air. We meet Lizzie in Brisbane’s lock hospital in 1945. She’s just been given a lighter sentence and learned from the magistrate that her husband, Joe…
Ruins by Rajith Savanadasa
Set in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Rajith Savanadasa’s debut novel Ruins is a sweeping family saga that looks at class, wealth, gender, intergenerational conflict, cultural conflict, politics and more. It follows the fortunes and misfortunes of a family, with each chapter…
Fine by Michelle Wright
The thirty-three stories in the collection Fine by Michelle Wright, are a wonderful celebration of the modern Australian short story, and a must-read for students of the form. Ranging from ‘flash fiction’ of a page or two, to comprehensive stories…
The Dry by Jane Harper
Jane Harper’s The Dry won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript in 2015, and before it was even published, rights were sold to over twenty territories and Reese Witherspoon’s production company is planning to adapt the book…
The Healing Party by Micheline Lee
The dysfunctional family is the foundation of so many great works of fiction – there is so much natural drama to draw upon in complicated relationships between parents and children, siblings, and tight knit communities. With her debut novel, The…
Wood Green by Sean Rabin
How does it feel to be told by an aspiring novelist that they’ve written a book, but regretted its protagonist is a writer? Some might think that writers are a dull bunch, but Sean Rabin’s Wood Green proves otherwise. Michael…
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