Australian fiction

Gunflower: Stories by Laura Jean McKay

Reviewed by Joe Murray

Short story collections are a rare pleasure, a chance to glimpse an author’s fascinations and preoccupations across a series of vivid imaginings, each individual ‘blazing moment’ nonetheless contributing to a unified whole. That pleasure is front and centre in Laura…

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The Opposite of Success by Eleanor Elliott Thomas

Reviewed by Lian Hingee

I was on page two of Eleanor Elliott Thomas’s debut novel The Opposite of Success when I laughed out loud for the first time. By page five, I was reading paragraphs aloud to my partner. I found this story about…

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Green Dot by Madeleine Gray

Reviewed by Aurelia Orr

What is it about human nature that is so enticed by the thought of chasing something we were never meant to have? Do we each have a forbidden fruit we shouldn’t taste? What happens when we don’t just taste it…

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Prima Facie by Suzie Miller

Reviewed by Aurelia Orr

Written as the novelisation of the award-winning play Prima Facie, Suzie Miller delivers a riveting and urgent story of one woman, who represents millions, and the legal system that sets them up for failure.

Tessa is the best criminal…

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Lola In the Mirror by Trent Dalton

Reviewed by Chris Gordon

Trent Dalton is never going to write fiction for fiction’s sake. He is a journalist, after all. Therefore, there is always more to his stories than a simple quest or love scenario. In his wonderful third novel, he takes you…

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Edenglassie by Melissa Lucashenko

Reviewed by Bernard Caleo

‘Edenglassie’ was the original colonial name for Magandjin-Brisbane, a portmanteau of ‘Edinburgh’ and ‘Glasgow’. Half of Edenglassie the novel is set in 1854–55, the other half in 2024. Shuttling between these two time periods means Melissa Lucashenko can deliver us…

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Body Friend by Katherine Brabon

Reviewed by Alison Huber

Body Friend is told by an unnamed narrator who is suffering from a chronic autoimmune illness and living with daily debilitating pain. Her hostile body fights against itself, and to mitigate some of its pain, she is booked in for…

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Something Bad is Going to Happen by Jessie Stephens

Reviewed by Annie Condon

A writing teacher once told me that it’s difficult to write about characters experiencing depression, without depressing the reader. However, this is not the case in Jessie Stephens’ novel, Something Bad is Going to Happen. Even though we meet the…

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Others Were Emeralds by Lang Leav

Reviewed by Olivia Hurley

Acclaimed poet and author Lang Leav’s new novel, Others Were Emeralds, follows a group of teenagers living in the New South Wales town of Whitlam in the late 1990s. Whitlam is known for its large refugee population and…

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Doll's Eye by Leah Kaminsky

Reviewed by Mark Rubbo

Karin Magnussen was a Nazi scientist who was complicit in research into the pigmentation of irises to provide scientific proof of Nazi racial theories. Originally, her research was done on rabbits, but later it was conducted on humans with the…

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