Nonfiction

My Body Keeps Your Secrets by Lucia Osborne-Crowley

Reviewed by Chris Gordon

If you have already read Lucia Osborne-Crowley’s I Choose Elena then you will understand her latest brilliant work, My Body Keeps Your Secrets, comes with a warning from me. This book is about sexual assault. But if you are…

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Why You Should Give a F*ck About Farming by Gabrielle Chan

Reviewed by Margaret Snowdon

‘I would rather pay for the farmer who passes up a few points of economic productivity to keep the fallen tree in the paddock for nesting birds. I would rather pay a farming family who is involved in the local…

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The Women of Little Lon by Barbara Minchinton

Reviewed by Julia Jackson

If I asked if you knew about Madame Brussels, I’d forgive you for responding: ‘oh, the rooftop bar at the Spring Street end of Bourke Street, where the staff used to get around in tennis whites?’. Usually, you’d be right…

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The First Time I Thought I Was Dying by Sarah Walker

Reviewed by Stella Charls

In the opening chapter of her extraordinary essay collection, Sarah Walker introduces the notion that ‘the out-of-control body can be a radical site’. This statement is the powerful heart of The First Time I Thought I Was Dying, tying…

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Fox and I by Catherine Raven

Reviewed by Gabrielle Williams

Catherine Raven lives on her own in a tiny hand-built house, on acres of land off a dirt track that has never been named, far from towns and civilisation. She likes it that way – the remoteness of her bush…

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Women in the Picture: What Culture Does with Women’s Bodies by Catherine McCormack

Reviewed by Margaret Snowdon

Reading Catherine McCormack’s new book is an antidote to something I didn’t know had been happening to me. I have read writers that McCormack references such as Griselda Pollock, Hélène Cixous and Barbara Creed, and their ideas informed me deeply…

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Things Are Against Us by Lucy Ellmann

Reviewed by Kara Nicholson

Lucy Ellmann’s most recent novel, Ducks, Newburyport, was nominated for the Booker Prize in 2019. It is over 1000 pages long, has no paragraph breaks and almost no full stops. It is also a compelling, moving and highly original…

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Trivial Grievances: On the Contradictions, Myths and Misery of Your 30s by Bridie Jabour

Reviewed by Lucie Dess

In late 2019, Guardian Australia opinion editor Bridie Jabour wrote a viral article titled ‘The millennials at 31: Welcome to the age of misery’. Jabour wrote it believing the uniquesocial and economic circumstances millennials grew up in have led them…

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Soil: The Incredible Story of What Keeps the Earth, and Us, Healthy by Matthew Evans

Reviewed by Chris Gordon

Read a book on soil, they said. You like gardening, eating, breathing – read a book on soil. Until now, I can honestly say that soil has not been a passion of mine, but now I am all about considering…

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Where We Swim by Ingrid Horrocks

Reviewed by Stella Charls

At a time when we can’t travel very far from home, let Ingrid Horrocks take you to bodies of water across the world in Where We Swim, a warm and compelling blend of memoir, travel and nature writing. This…

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