Novels are uniquely placed to depict the interiority of a person, saving from obsolescence a particular entertainment that is unadulterated crack for some. Luke Horton’s debut, The Fogging, is a study in interiors. Academics Tom and Clara have …

It begins with lightkeeper Esther Nunn, inspired after she is sent Tracks by a friend. Or it begins with author Anna Krien, for whom Robyn Davidson has been a moral compass since, as a child, Krien saw Davidson on the cover of National Geographic. …

When British philosopher and mathematician Frank Ramsey wrote in the 1920s that the wellbeing of future generations should not be given less weight than current generations, he was ahead of his time. This consideration might affect how we vote, where …

With no time to recover from the recent fire season and the next one looming behind this pandemic, Torched, set in a Yarra Valley town devastated by bushfires, indisputably captures the spirit of the times. Kimberley Starr evokes Brunton, once …

At one point in Hamnet, award-winning Irish–British author Maggie O’Farrell’s eighth novel, the cloaked physician is at the door because Hamnet’s twin, Judith, is unwell, and Hamnet asks his mother whether the physician’s mask is sufficient …

At one point early on in this excellent debut novel, The Dictionary of Lost Words, set in Oxford 120 years ago, it appears as though Esme may have to choose between getting married and becoming an editor, a choice that doesn’t seem as outdated …

Ruby grows up in the time of the passive tense – when appearance is everything, when she would do well to heed her elders, and when it is acceptable to assume that men only want one thing from a girl. But her daughter, Eva, coming of age with Whitlam …

A growing number of writers grappling with the accelerated rate at which our habitat is changing are also demonstrating our connectedness to the natural world. This summer, those of us not directly in the line of fire have adapted to the haze and floods, …

Zora Cross was a poet and journalist writing a hundred years ago. The obviousness of the assertion that if she had been a man we would be considerably more familiar with her oeuvre doesn’t make the reality of it any less enraging. Her 1917 poetry collection, …