[TOC:ul In this story] The precis of Sam Carmody’s debut novel, The Windy Season, reads like a congeries of Australian Gothic tropes: we have a small town where not everything is as it seems, a missing brother whose disappearance brings to …

[TOC:ul In this story] Representations of the drug-trade violence that currently roils in Central America tend towards the lurid – it sometimes seems that Western audiences’ appetite for graphic details of cartel violence is almost as unquenchable …

[TOC:ul In this story] Time has been kind to Kenneth Cook’s career. The prolific Australian novelist, who died in 1987, is now remembered primarily for his 1961 novel Wake in Fright – itself best known for the 1971 film adaptation by Canadian …

[TOC:ul In this story] John Gribbin has written or co-written a stupendously large number of books about quantum physics, climate change, and evolutionary biology and genetics, as well as biographies of leading scientists. Yet his true loves seem to …

[TOC:ul In this story] British music writer Mick Wall’s memoir, Getcha Rocks Off, opens with an anecdote about a three-day bender in Los Angeles with members of Metallica, Iron Maiden and Guns N’ Roses. The bacchanal culminates in Wall being …