Reviewer: EA

Saul, a mid-30s drifter, finds out his childhood friend Jed has committed suicide. Skipping the funeral, he sets out from Sydney on an epic trip across their homeland to find answers. Travelling to the fictional community of Ininyingi in Pitjantjatjara …

For a period in his childhood, Daniel Kahneman lived like a hunted animal. When the Nazis occupied France he and his family fled into hiding. In search of Jews, the SS prowled the streets, stripping men and boys naked to see if they were circumcised. Bundled …

Bestseller Jodi Picoult’s new novel Small Great Things is based on a true-life story. In Flint, Michigan, a white supremacist father refused to let an African-American nurse touch his baby. African-American hospital staff sued for discrimination …

“I can’t remember the first time I was called ugly, but I can remember the last. It was today,” writes Clementine Ford in Fight Like a Girl. In her new feminist manifesto, the popular – if controversial – Fairfax columnist remembers …

“Not a single [Negro] was ever found,” Immanuel Kant declared in 1764, “who presented anything great in art or science or any other praiseworthy quality.” According to The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu, Kant was just one Enlightenment …

One ordinary summer’s afternoon American writer Lindy West received a message from her dead dad. Paul West had recently passed away from prostate cancer. But there he was, sitting at the piano, in a Twitter profile with the username “PawWestDonezo”. …

In 2014 Senator Jacqui Lambie circulated a photograph online of a woman draped head to toe in a blue burqa, her hand lifted at a cool 90 degrees, pointing a gun towards someone unseen. Sourced from the anti-immigration party Britain First’s Facebook …

As a child, Han Kang came across a photograph of a young woman’s corpse, “dead with a bayonet wound from her cheek to her throat, one eye cracked open and the other closed”. “Soundlessly, and without fuss, some tender thing deep inside me broke,” …

Anarchy has broken out in large swaths of America following a massive financial crash. Gangs prowl the streets, ready to rape, steal, and kill. Meanwhile, prim middle-class couple Charmaine and Stan camp in their car, the doors locked, sleeping fitfully, …

One passage succinctly sums up Please Don’t Leave Me Here, the debut novel by Melbourne-based writer Tania Chandler. Brigitte, the dubious heroine who was tangled up in a gruesome murder some 14 years ago, is dreaming of a man with a snake …

When Joanna Jepson emerged from corrective surgery as a young woman she discovered what it was like to be considered “pretty” for the first time. Born with a congenital deformity that left her “beak-like” upper jaw, with protruding teeth, hanging …

Myfanwy Jones’s Leap is all about urgent motion. At the novel’s heart is the question of how we navigate grief and then move on. Twenty-two-year-old Joe shares a home in Melbourne with his best friends, Sanjay and Jack. Into this male environment …

North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il, who died in 2011, famously worshipped the movies. Of the thousands of Western films smuggled into the Hermit Kingdom for his enjoyment alone, James Bond resonated with him the most.  Not only, like Bond, did the …

When the Surrealist artist Max Ernst painted a swimmer, he showed him not frolicking in blue waters but imprisoned behind vertical stripes made of electric cables. In Leonora, he scoffs, “Automatically, we all blindly follow the current.”  Not …

The Koh-i-Noor was a diamond the size and weight of a hen’s egg that once belonged to the Sikh Maharajah Ranjit Singh. If any image endures in Sophia, the tale of Singh’s British-raised suffragette granddaughter, it is this fabled stone. The …

In dystopian novel The Chimes – set in a familiar yet eerily off-kilter England – the written word has been forbidden and the ability to remember forgotten. In the place of both writing and memories is music. Citizens congregate every …

In 1937, an American psychologist named William Moulton Marston staged a press conference. Women, he announced, would one day rule the world. He soon thought up a more pervasive method to spread his message: Wonder Woman. Today this spandex-sporting …

In the twilight years of her life, Gugu, the deeply flawed protagonist in Mo Yan’s novel Frog, is accosted by a plague of clammy green amphibians. They knock her to the ground, swarming over her body and stripping her nearly naked. In their …