Australian fiction

The Yield by Tara June Winch

Reviewed by Miles Allinson

The Yield, Tara June Winch’s inspired second novel, begins and ends with an injunction: ‘Every person around should learn the word for country in the old language’ Albert Gondiwindi says. In Wiradjuri, a language once thought extinct, that word…

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The Electric Hotel by Dominic Smith

Reviewed by Dianna Jarnet

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, living out the remainder of his life in…

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Hitch by Kathryn Hind

Reviewed by Annie Condon

In her debut novel, Kathryn Hind has created a complex and vulnerable character, Amelia, who ishitchhiking around Australia following her mother’s death. Amelia is in her early twenties and has no family except her dog, Lucy, who is on the…

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Crossings by Alex Landragin

Reviewed by Deborah Crabtree

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 it.’

A Parisian bookbinder comes…

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This Taste for Silence by Amanda O'Callaghan

Reviewed by Ellen Cregan

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 from a…

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The White Girl by Tony Birch

Reviewed by Georgia Brough

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 officer, soon to retire, often fails to enforce…

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Little Stones by Elizabeth Kuiper

Reviewed by Elke Power

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 her days at private school with her best friend Diana, her financier parents’…

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Room for a Stranger by Melanie Cheng

Reviewed by Annie Condon

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 publication, it was shortlisted for the Readings Prize for New Australian…

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A Lovely and Terrible Thing by Chris Womersley

Reviewed by Annie Condon

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. These stories, published between 2006 and…

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Daughter of Bad Times by Rohan Wilson

Reviewed by Cindy Morris

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 relocated as refugees. Rin Braden…

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