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 light long-hidden family …

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 as our thirst for the …

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 director Ted Kotcheff. …

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 be cosmology (the study …

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 barred from his own …