books

The new year opened to live footage of cops opening the gates to the United States Capitol, enabling rioters to storm the building. The racial privilege that laid ground for the insurrection was, if not unsurprising, deeply unsettling. Ivanka Trump...

In 2020 reading nonfiction felt, to me, like an anchor to normalcy: reading about the big ideas and intimate dramas that were the stuff of our lives and the centre of our concerns before the pandemic reshaped our imaginations and our everyday, for...

It has been said so many times that it’s almost considered a banality. 2020 was A Year, one that saw societal inequalities further magnified. No thanks, of course, to the elite who carried on business as usual, and who own many of the tools we use...

“I can tell our stories. I can bear witness. But I have to be honest. Some days bearing witness doesn’t seem like enough.” That’s novelist and editor Sophie Cunningham in the essay collection Living with the Anthropocene . Her unease highlights a...

“Mountweazels” – the fictitious entries in dictionaries set as traps to catch bootleggers – were the subject of English writer Eley Williams’ PhD, and they form the narrative backbone of her debut novel, The Liar’s Dictionary . It follows the...

Drawing on personal experience and pop culture, Show Me Where It Hurts explores the isolation and frustration of living with chronic pain and mental illness, not to mention battling a medical system steeped in misogyny. “Pain – both physical and...

A physical restlessness pulses through the pages of A Jealous Tide , as its unnamed protagonist walks along rivers – first the Yarra, then the Thames – ruminating on gravity and tidal pulls, what it means to be cast adrift, and how returning from...

When faced with tricky life-or-death decisions, the preteens of Australian graphic novel series Home Time don’t tread lightly or seek parental approval: as one of them says, “Now’s the time to ruin everything by doing something totally awesome.”...

In the winter of 1893, the Irish prospector Paddy Hannan and two compatriots noted the presence of gold in the place that would become known as Kalgoorlie. The diggings were soon swarmed, and a bustling mining town grew up in the years that followed...