culture

“What is happening?” the adults in Rumaan Alam’s third novel keep asking one another. Amanda and Clay, a middle-class white couple, have rented an isolated Airbnb to get away from New York for a few days with their two teenage children, Rose and...

The climate crisis demands urgent action. Our democracy, with its “oligarchic” major parties – “shelf companies” with “small, ageing memberships” that serve as little more than “executive-placement agencies” – and an “infantile” standard of...

When I first started reading Philip Salom’s latest novel, The Fifth Season , I thought I was in for a real treat. The set-up is engagingly noirish. Jack, a writer, moves into a holiday rental at the end of summer, with plans to write a book about “...

Kyle Sandilands as prime minister, ethnic suburbs on stolen lands being gentrified and our souls being illegally uploaded to computers: these are just some of the speculative imaginings within the 16 stories of Liminal magazine’s debut anthology,...

In the decade to 2018, 52,396 sexual assaults were reported to the New South Wales Police Force. Charges were laid in 12,894 cases, and 7629 cases proceeded to court. Just 7 per cent of initial reports – 3827 cases – ultimately saw a guilty verdict...

Dolly Alderton exited her 20s with her best-selling memoir, Everything I Know About Love , in which she writes about female friendships keeping her grounded. In Alderton’s debut novel, protagonist Nina notes that her friend only reads “overhyped...

Sofie Laguna has established herself as a writer who renders the world in vivid detail through the eyes of children. She skilfully shows how childhood can be punctured by brutality: the first-person protagonists of her two previous novels are...

Clarissa Goenawan’s The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida is written like a homage to Haruki Murakami. At the heart of the story lies a dead woman, the titular character whose death – as it’s revealed from the get-go – occurred under mysterious...

For his sixth novel, Hari Kunzru posits a line between sanity and madness so tenuous, the slightest nudge from a malevolent actor can send someone hurtling into the mental abyss. A modestly successful but self-doubting author accepts a fellowship at...