Australian Fiction reviews
The White Girl by Tony Birch
In post-World War II Deane, a rural Australian town, Odette Brown cares for her granddaughter Sissy. They live on Deane’s fringes, in a run-down mining area called Quarrytown, where the local police …
Hitch by Kathryn Hind
In her debut novel, Kathryn Hind has created a complex and vulnerable character, Amelia, who is hitchhiking around Australia following her mother’s death. Amelia is in her early twenties and has no f…
Crossings by Alex Landragin
In the opening pages of Alex Landragin’s debut novel, Crossings, the reader is immediately made aware that this is no ordinary tale. The first two sentences read: ‘I didn’t write this book. I stole i…
The Electric Hotel by Dominic Smith
Dominic Smith continues his fascinating exploration of the progression of life through art. This time around it is the beginnings of filmmaking. It is 1962 and we find our protagonist, Claude Ballard…
This Taste for Silence by Amanda O'Callaghan
Short fiction is a versatile and, in my opinion, very useful form of writing. A good short story can immerse you in a totally new world over the course of a train trip, or help you consider things fr…
Little Stones by Elizabeth Kuiper
Set in the last decades of Mugabe-era Zimbabwe, Elizabeth Kuiper’s debut novel Little Stones is about grappling with identity. Hannah Reynolds is a precocious eleven-year-old energetically passing he…
Bodies of Men by Nigel Featherstone
We all know that we shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but how often do we find ourselves doing exactly that? When I first saw Bodies of Men, I thought it looked like a blokey war story, which is n…
Daughter of Bad Times by Rohan Wilson
Daughter of Bad Times is set in the not-so-distant future, where rising sea levels have begun to swallow entire islands. Levee walls are built around cities that can afford it – those that can’t are …
Room for a Stranger by Melanie Cheng
Melanie Cheng arrived on the Australian literary scene in style. Her debut story collection, Australia Day, won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript; then, upon public…
A Lovely and Terrible Thing by Chris Womersley
It is a testament to the quality of Chris Womersley’s short fiction that sixteen of the stories in this collection have already been published in journals such as Meanjin and Kill Your Darlings. Thes…
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