Australian Fiction reviews
State Highway One by Sam Coley
Sam Coley won the 2017 Richell Prize for Emerging Writers for his very deserving debut novel State Highway One. The story is centred on Alex, a young Aucklander who returns home from abroad after the…
Dreams They Forgot by Emma Ashmere
Emma Ashmere’s debut collection contains stories that have been published and won awards over the last twenty years. Generally, an author’s work improves with time, but all twenty-three stories in Dr…
Ordinary Matter by Laura Elvery
Laura Elvery has merged art and science with a clever twist in her collection of short stories, Ordinary Matter. She has won multiple awards for her stories, and her previous collection, Trick of the…
The Tolstoy Estate by Steven Conte
It’s 1941, in the depths of the Russian winter, and the beginning of the end of the German advance on Russia. A German medical unit stumbles through the gates of Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy’s country es…
Broken Rules and Other Stories by Barry Lee Thompson
The short-story collection from a single author is something I have grown to appreciate, especially in the last ten years or so. Australian writers have definitely made their mark in this area, rangi…
The Mother Fault by Kate Mildenhall
Kate Mildenhall’s debut novel, Skylarking, found many fans at Readings. With her second novel, The Mother Fault, Mildenhall is sure to cement herself as a reader favourite. While the two novels are v…
The Morbids by Ewa Ramsey
About a month or so ago, our head book buyer Alison Huber flagged this book with me, saying that it was something I might like. Oh yeah, I thought at the time, this sounds interesting, I’ll give it a…
The Burning Island by Jock Serong
You may have read Jock Serong’s gripping 2018 novel, Preservation, based on real events surrounding a shipwreck’s survivors and their doomed walk along the south east coast of Australia to Sydney in …
Loner by Georgina Young
Loner won the Text Prize in 2019. It is the universal story of becoming an adult and all the uncertainty, drifting and questioning that entails. Some lucky young people know who they are and what the…
Kokomo by Victoria Hannan
The anguish of living with unfulfilled desire pulses through Victoria Hannan’s debut novel, Kokomo. Its characters, each in their own way, are trying to work out how to live when they cannot get what…
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