Australian fiction
One Day We're All Going to Die by Elise Esther Hearst
Despite having a job that she loves, 27-year-old Naomi isn’t quite sure what she is doing with her life. She has never really had to forge her own path; coming from a privileged Jewish family in Melbourne (her parents even…
Everyone and Everything by Nadine J. Cohen
It hasn’t been Yael Silver’s year. She’s just found out (the hard way) that a suicide attempt is surprisingly awkward, and that recovery is confusing, and arduous. Nevertheless, armed with erotic literature of dubious quality and a worrying number of…
The Modern by Anna Kate Blair
The Modern is a playful and introspective debut novel that interrogates queerness and urban social life through a lens of art history. Sophia is on the cusp of 30, living in New York with her well-off boyfriend and working as…
Ordinary Gods and Monsters by Chris Womersley
Chris Womersley is one of the most interesting and inventive writers in this country, in my extremely humble opinion. He began his publishing career with The Low Road, a gritty crime novel, his next, City of Crows, was…
A Light in the Dark by Allee Richards
Iris loves musical theatre. She loves dissecting the words of plays, listening to a chorus belt out a number, and investigating the depths of even the most minor characters. There’s just one person standing in her way to great success…
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…
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