culture

That versatile polymath historian Tim Bonyhady’s latest book is nostalgic in the weirdest way. Where, he asks, are the great rat plagues of yesteryear, those rodent hordes that, in times past, regularly swept the back blocks of Queensland, New South...

Mother of Pearl tells the story of a surrogacy from the perspectives of three different women. Meg, a married 39-year-old jeweller from Melbourne, is desperate for a child. Years of IVF treatments have left her bereft, her grief like “a wild animal...

In 2014 the writer Stephanie Wood returned to what she calls the badlands of online dating. She ended up exchanging emails with “Joe”, who seemed gentle, uncomplicated and only a little bit of a dag. The emails developed into a date and then a...

At the age of five, Kampol is left sitting on a kerbside by his father, who promises to return. The boy waits, waits, waits, eventually realising his father is not coming back. He floats around his village, raised by the families that surround him,...

We live in an age where memoirs arrive thick and fast, and a book deal comes easiest to those in the public eye. When there’s little money in skewering yourself for general consumption unless fame has first taken its toll, it’s unlikely a memoirist...

When San Franciscan academic Daphne returns one morning to collect her daughter, Honey, from day care, it is because she has decided to flee. A student has been killed in a traffic accident in Turkey and she feels responsible. Her husband is stuck...

In his second novel, The Pillars, Peter Polites uses Australia’s fixation on home ownership to explore the intersection of race, class and sexuality – as well as a growing conservatism within the queer community. “If you look at the generic images coming out of the queer community, there is a very specific aesthetic going on that’s obviously tied to race and class … You can be a total slut monster but still operate within a hegemonic discursive framework. There’s nothing radical about reinforcing dominant discourse. To me, that’s the opposite of sexual liberation.”

Elizabeth Bryer’s From Here On, Monsters is a genuinely exciting debut from an Australian writer. This novel is playful, allegorical and formally ambitious, qualities that lend it a distinctly international flavour, in the way of Peter Carey’s early...

Things go missing in Disappearing Earth . Children. Friends. Lovers. Dogs. Love. Life as it once was and as it seemed it always would be. We learn early on that 11-year-old Alyona, a natural storyteller, “liked, every so often, to bring her [younger...