culture

Harriet McKnight’s debut novel is a rather bleak and dispiriting portrait of two women on the verge of nervous breakdowns, and of a world on the verge of environmental catastrophe. Pina Marinelli is a middle-aged woman whose husband has early onset...

This is the third novel in Steven Carroll’s T. S. Eliot collection, inspired by the poet’s famous Four Quartets series. Here, he interrogates the perspective of Eliot’s secret platonic mistress, the somewhat doomed Emily Hale, who we meet as a...

Miles Franklin-winner Sofie Laguna has developed such a characteristic literary style that it’s easy to forget that The Choke is only her third novel for adults. Here, her child narrator is Justine Lee, who is 10 in the early ’70s when the story...

Karl Ove Knausgaard is the writer since Roberto Bolaño and David Foster Wallace, both alas dead mid-career, for whom the highest claims are made internationally. His multi-volume My Struggle saga asks to be taken as seriously as a work of fiction...

Bram Presser once came upon his grandfather in the backyard of his Melbourne home. The old man, a Holocaust survivor, was running his fingers through the dirt and incanting a prayer. Suddenly, he thrust a fistful of earth at the sky. When he turned...

“A memoir of dying is exceptionally wrenching,” wrote the novelist Tom Rachman in 2016, “because we know the end at the beginning, and so meet with an effortful, pulsing person who will soon be neither.” In the pages of The Museum of Words , we meet...

Fourteen-year-old Julie “Turtle” Alveston lives with her father, Martin, in rural California, where he trains her in shooting and hunting, and to be distrustful of anyone outside the family. He fears for her future in a lawless, cataclysmic world he...

Cli-fi – climate change fiction – has become so popular it has achieved the status of a genre. That makes it more easily identifiable and more marketable, but it also comes with pitfalls. Conventions carry the risk of appearing formulaic and...

Women who cast spells and brew potions to dispel illness and fuel desire have historically been vilified as servants of the devil. Contemporary culture has, to a large degree, drained the menace and repositioned witches as figures of frivolity in TV...