In Can You Hear the Sea? Brenda Niall, author of biographies of Martin Boyd, Judy Cassab and Daniel Mannix, trains her eye on her grandmother, Agnes “Aggie” Maguire. The daughter of Irish refugees who have flourished in the grim seaport …

Michael Fitzgerald’s debut, The Pacific Room, is putatively a novel about the last days of Robert Louis Stevenson. After several years travelling around the Pacific, the Scottish author of Treasure Island and Strange Case of Dr …

[TOC:ul In this story] Bloodlines follows two Australian women as they make new lives for themselves in unfamiliar places. In modern-day Fremantle, 31-year-old Beth decides to travel to Papua New Guinea. Something has gone wrong for Beth in …

[TOC:ul In this story] George Saunders is an award-winning master of the American short story. Over the past three decades he has produced several collections and a body of work that is characterised by formal ingenuity and ventriloquistic flair. That …

[TOC:ul In this story] “Rotten Row” is the nickname given to the bustling street in Harare that is home to the criminal division of the Magistrates Court. In this collection of interconnected stories, Petina Gappah takes these courts as her subject …

[TOC:ul In this story] Terranaut Ramsay Roothoorp’s big “closure ceremony” speech has been followed by an uncomfortable silence. He has given them some numbers – the hermetically sealed Ecosphere where the eight Terranauts will spend the next …

[TOC:ul In this story] Steven Amsterdam’s third novel follows the model of the first two. Like Things We Didn’t See Coming and What the Family Needed, The Easy Way Out is a realist narrative set in a recognisable world …

[TOC:ul In this story] Andrew is an Australian photographer living in Berlin with his girlfriend, Dom. One night he receives an email from his best mate back in Sydney, Stewart, telling him his ex-girlfriend, the ever-troubled Kirsten, has disappeared, …

[TOC:ul In this story] One of the clichés of the literary thriller or page-turner is the use of multiple narratives that relate to each other only in oblique ways. The milieu of one of these narratives is usually exotic, the life of a female painter …