Australia’s contribution to the Second Gulf War has not proved a fertile subject for literary fiction. Of the 75 books nominated for the Miles Franklin Award since 2003 there’s almost nothing about Iraq, Saddam Hussein or weapons of mass destruction. There …

Australian novelist Gail Jones is no great spinner of yarns or master of mood and atmosphere, but she does have a unique feeling for the fascinations of the fragmentary. Her books brim with literary allusions, historical anecdotes, references to scholarly …

In her poem “Simply Yarning”, Charmaine Papertalk Green writes: Yarning is a beautiful conversation / From that moment / That space / That time / Yarning puts us on common ground. Her co-author John Kinsella responds warmly with his own hymn to …

The Shepherd’s Hut is the outrageous story of a headlong bolt through the remotest outback by a charismatic gun-toting teenager determined to reunite with his girlfriend half a continent away. It’s Winton’s 29th book and the closest thing …

Julian Barnes is the de facto novelist laureate of the English postwar middle classes. Across his handful of novels and many short-story collections, he has held a mirror to the world of middle managers and provincial bankers, treating their myths and …

The Years, Months, Days was awarded the prestigious Lu Xun Literary Prize in 2001 and is among Chinese author Yan Lianke’s most popular novellas. It’s also a weirdly intoxicating book that moves from passages of stark realism to the most …

It begins, this mesmeric inward spiral of a book, with a digressive turn towards the past: Two months ago, when I first arrived in this township just short of the border, I resolved to guard my eyes, and I could not think of going on with this piece …

Alex Miller is a gifted writer whose most compelling books – Journey to the Stone Country, for example, or Autumn Laing – have a simplicity of vision, an earthiness and poignancy, an integrity and grace few can match. How surprising …

Pippa used to be Narelle when she lived up north with her mum. She changed her name the day she turned 18 because she was convinced that no one named Narelle could ever win the Booker. And Pippa desperately wanted to win the Booker. She still does. For …