Australian fiction
The Visitors by Jane Harrison
On the 26th of January 1788, a fleet of 11 British ships sailed into Sydney Harbour. From the British side, the arrival is well documented. What we don’t really know is what was the reaction of the people who inhabited…
The Sitter by Angela O’Keeffe
In The Sitter, the spirit of Hortense Cézanne – wife of the more famous Paul – is reanimated by the interest of her biographer and coexists in a hotel room in Paris at the start of the pandemic in…
God Forgets about the Poor by Peter Polites
The premise of Western Sydney author Peter Polites’ third novel feels simple: a son tells his mother’s story. The narrator’s family is from Greece. His mother, named Honoured, was born in a craggy mountain village on the island of Lefkada…
West Girls by Laura Elizabeth Woollett
When we first meet Luna, she’s Luna Lewis, a Western-Australian-Maltese teen growing up in the suburbs of Perth in a school ruled by the ‘Blondes’. She’s soon reinvented: dropping the end of her name to become the ambiguously exotic Luna…
But the Girl by Jessica Zhan Mei Yu
But the Girl is the latest in a series of Australian writers using fiction to tackle family history and legacy skilfully. It’s as much about the present state of the creative and academic world as it is about the past…
Strangers at the Port by Lauren Aimee Curtis
On a fictional Aeolian island in a volcanic archipelago, a community thrives off the bountiful vineyards that produce the sweetest wines in all the Mediterranean. Their ordinary lives are shaped by ritual and religion, and they are reminded of their…
Perfect-ish by Jessica Seaborn
Prue’s life is far from perfect. She’s about to turn 30 and feels like an absolute failure. All around her, she sees people living their best lives while she’s having to crash at her brother’s after her fiancé breaks off…
Thaw by Dennis Glover
At the dawn of the 20th century, Antarctica was a place of peril, where explorers braved hypothermia, isolation and death in search of knowledge and fame, long before science and technology allowed us a more comfortable existence on the ice…
Firelight: Stories by John Morrissey
John Morrissey’s debut collection of short stories is a beguiling, evocative delight. In it, he presents a series of visions that meld the absurd and mundane: a mysterious commonwealth celebrating their colonisation of the moon, the fraught efforts of a…
Restless Dolly Maunder by Kate Grenville
We know Kate Grenville is one of Australia’s most acclaimed authors, and that she is an astute researcher. She is a writer who can fill in the gaps. If she has the facts, then she will shape them into something…
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