In Dan Sheehan’s debut novel, four Irish friends, Tom, Baz, Gabriel and Karl, exit high school with varying degrees of ambition. Narrator Karl fancies himself a photographer of bleak spaces, while Tom heads off to war-torn Sarajevo as an unqualified …

Twenty-one years have passed since John Stephenson’s first novel, The Optimist. His long-overdue sophomore book comes in the unusual form of a Polish fable, The Baker’s Alchemy. Those expecting anything similar to his well-received …

Despite being fresh in our minds, the case of Belle Gibson is still compelling. A self-styled “wellness warrior” who built a business by hoodwinking millions into believing she had cured terminal brain cancer, Gibson’s fraudulent house of cards …

Thomas Coraghessan Boyle is a respected American writer who, despite penning 16 novels and 11 short-story collections, has never managed to set the literary world ablaze. His work is commendable, readable and occasionally veers into the fantastical, but …

Women who cast spells and brew potions to dispel illness and fuel desire have historically been vilified as servants of the devil. Contemporary culture has, to a large degree, drained the menace and repositioned witches as figures of frivolity in TV shows …

The Java Ridge is a boat ferrying Australian surf tourists from Bali to the killer breaks found off remote Indonesian islands to the south. Stand-in captain Isi Natoli is at the helm, while her partner, Joel, is in Perth, trying to save the business. …

The Greek islands are often romanticised in fiction, employed as a destination for disaffected middle-class wastrels wishing to rediscover what life is really about by eating feta salads on sun-kissed patios and tumbling into bed with handsome salt-of-the-earth …

Walkaway begins with a chapter entitled “Communist Party”, then lists the 22 hipster names of protagonist Hubert, Etc, which his parents chose from the 1890 census. The party in question is an outré rave, set in an abandoned bed-making factory, …

[TOC:ul In this story] There is an argument to be made that the writing of the beat generation has had a detrimental effect on the literary pretensions of male writers in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Bukowski, Kerouac and their ilk are often …