Category: Australia

Australia, Author, Book review, Brendan Colley, Fiction, literary fiction, Publisher, science fiction, Setting, speculative, Transit Lounge

‘The Season for Flying Saucers’ by Brendan Colley

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Fiction – paperback; Transit Lounge; 304 pages; 2026. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

How could I not read a book with such an intriguing cover image and title?

Brendan Colley’s The Season for Flying Saucers is one of those new breed of eccentric and entertaining Australian novels that appear to be about one off-the-wall subject but are really about something else entirely.

I’m thinking Rhett Davis’ Arborescence, which is about people turning into trees but is really about grief and the unstable boundaries between humans and the natural world, and Jock Serong’s Cherrywood (review forthcoming), which is about a city pub that moves location but is really about community and belonging.

Or even Robbie Arnott’s Dusk, about the search for an elusive puma in the highlands of Tasmania, which is a thinly disguised call to leave nature alone.

In all these books, the reader has to accept a strange premise for the story to work.

Colley asks us to do the same in The Season for Flying Saucers. Here, a family in modern-day Hobart is being targeted by aliens from outer space, though their purpose is never fully explained. Yet this is not really a book about aliens. It is about family, connection and the need to believe in something beyond ourselves.

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Australia, Author, Book review, Fiction, Focus on WA writers, Graeme Dixon, Poetry, Publisher, Reading First Nations Writers, Reading Projects, Setting, TBR 2026 Challenge, University of Queensland Press

‘Holocaust Island’ by Graeme Dixon

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Poetry – paperback; University of Queensland Press; 80 pages; 2023.

Graeme Dixon (1955-2010) was a Noongar poet from Perth and the first person to win the David Unaipon Award in 1989.

His debut collection of poetry, Holocaust Island was first published in 1990 and reissued by UQP as part of its First Nations Classics series in 2023.

By all accounts, Dixon had a troubled early life. He was a member of the Stolen Generations, having been taken from his family aged three — following his parents’ separation — and then raised in institutions.

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Alan Fyfe, Australia, Author, Book review, Fiction, Focus on WA writers, literary fiction, Publisher, Reading Projects, Setting, Transit Lounge

‘The Cross Thieves’ by Alan Fyfe

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Fiction – paperback; Transit Lounge; 208 pages; 2026. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Alan Fyfe’s latest novel, The Cross Thieves, is the second in his planned trilogy centred around the Peel region, just south of Perth, in Western Australia.

His debut T, was a chilling look at a community of junkies (my review) told in spare but evocative prose.

This instalment, a standalone, follows two brothers facing food insecurity and homelessness. After a small act of revenge — the theft of a cross (hence the book’s title) — they are drawn into a tense cat-and-mouse chase with the criminal underworld, including drug dealers and violent thugs.

It’s a propulsive read, but it’s also complex. Fyfe, who wrote the novel as part of his PhD at the University of Western Australia, employs what he describes as a “little known (and very old) structure called a ring composition” (Acknowledgements, page 199).

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2026 Stella Prize, Australia, Author, Book review, Geraldine Brooks, Hachette Australia, Literary prizes, memoir, Non-fiction, Publisher, Setting, USA

‘Memorial Days: A Memoir’ by Geraldine Brooks

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Non-fiction – hardback; Hachette Australia; 224 pages; 2025.

Not having read any of Geraldine Brooks‘ fiction before, I wasn’t overly keen on reading her memoir about the untimely death of her husband, but then it was longlisted for the Stella Prize, and I decided I should just give it a go. It helped that it was available to borrow from my local library and that it was short.

As it turns out, sometimes I could kick myself for not reading certain books because of a preconceived (usually wrong) idea about the author and/or the content. Memorial Days is a brilliantly evocative and emotional read. The Stella Prize judges describe it as “a gift from a writer to a reader”, adding:

As much as this is a grief memoir, it is also the portrait of a long and beautiful marriage. It is a writer grappling with pain and loss and showing it to us saying, ‘this is what it feels like for me, how does it feel to you’?

That assessment is apt.

Along with the beautiful, clear-eyed prose and the often gorgeous sentences that stopped me in my tracks — “I wake before dawn and watch the sunrise silvering the concave curves of the clouds and then turning them roseate, strewing the sky with pink petals” (page 77) — it’s the structure of the book that makes it such a powerful read.

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2026 Stella Prize, Australia, Author, Book review, Fiction, literary fiction, Literary prizes, Miranda Darling, Publisher, Scribe, Setting

‘Thunderhead’ and ‘Fireweather’ by Miranda Darling

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Fiction – hardback; Scribe; 160 pages & 140 pages; 2024 & 2025.

I wouldn’t normally review two books in one post but Miranda Darling’s novellas, Thunderhead (2024) and Fireweather (2025), are a set, best appreciated if read one after the other, so it makes sense to write about them together, too.

Both books are a quietly radical look at marriage, domestic entrapment, societal expectations and mental health. Read back-to-back, they offer a powerful, if somewhat oppressive, account of what it is like to be coercively controlled by the person you should be able to trust most.

They follow the life of Winona Dalloway, a respectable middle-class wife and mother, a writer of romantic fiction who loses her sense of self in a whirlwind of chores, domesticity and child-rearing. (The name is a nod to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, but having never read the book, I can’t draw comparisons.)

In the first book, Winona is married to Him (always capitalised and never named), who’s successful and popular in the outside world, but controlling and manipulative within the family home.

In the second book, she’s divorced Him and has custody of their two young boys, but He consistently gaslights her, causing her to doubt her own memory and reality to the point where she begins to lose her mind.

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2026 Stella Prize, Australia, Author, Book review, Fiction, Literary prizes, Lucy Nelson, Publisher, Setting, short stories, Summit Books

‘Wait Here’ by Lucy Nelson

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Fiction – paperback; Simon & Schuster; 240 pages; 2025.

Wait Here, a volume of short stories by Lucy Nelson, has been long-listed for this year’s Stella Prize.

The judges described it as “virtuosic” and “glistening”, noting the collection’s “incredibly interesting and innovative” use of the short fiction form and the way each story varies significantly in tone, perspective and style. And yet, for me, each felt truly intimate, as if whispered directly into the reader’s ear — and heart.

Largely themed around motherhood, mothering and all the ways in which women who are childfree are judged, seen or set apart, I loved this entertaining, compelling and thought-provoking book. I ripped through it over the space of a weekend and wished I had taken a bit more time to linger over each story, there’s just so much to reflect on.

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Australia, Author, Book review, dystopian, eco-fiction, Fiction, Hachette Australia, Publisher, Rhett Davis, science fiction, Setting

‘Arborescence’ by Rhett Davis

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Fiction – paperback; Hachette Australia; 288 pages; 2025.

If you are a Robbie Arnott fan and love his surreal, slightly weird stories, please put his compatriot Rhett Davis on your list.

Arborescence is Geelong-based Davis’s second novel, and it blends realism with touches of dystopia and eco-fiction in a way that feels entirely original.

The book’s premise, in which human beings transform into trees, is a metaphor for rejecting the status quo and succumbing to an innate love of nature.

I wasn’t sure I would buy into this idea, but somehow it works. It’s weird, but utterly believable within its own logic.

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Australia, Author, Book review, crime/thriller, Fiction, Kate Mildenhall, Publisher, Scribner, Setting

‘The Hiding Place’ by Kate Mildenhall

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Fiction – paperback; Scribner Australia; 320 pages; 2025. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Following hot on the heels of my last read (Karen Herbert’s The Ghost Walk), here’s another Australian book that’s not strictly a crime novel but plays with the conventions.

Kate Mildenhall’s The Hiding Place is a strange and beguiling story, part thriller, part seachange drama. But it’s also a skilful exposé of middle-class Australian values, laying bare the hollowness at the heart of suburban respectability.

The publisher’s website describes it as White Lotus meets The Slap, which perfectly sums up its blend of social satire, moral discomfort and family dysfunction.

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Australia, Author, Book review, crime/thriller, Fiction, Focus on WA writers, Fremantle Press, Karen Herbert, Publisher, Reading Projects, Setting

‘The Ghost Walk’ by Karen Herbert

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Fiction – paperback; Fremantle Press; 268 pages; 2025. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Karen Herbert’s fourth novel, The Ghost Walk, is billed as a psychological medical thriller, but it’s really a story about an ethically murky relationship between a doctor and his patient.

The doctor is Gabriel Beaufort, an organ transplant surgeon who is found dead in the wetlands — at a place called “Ghost Walk”, a notorious hot spot for suicides — near the Perth hospital where he works. But whether he took his own life or was murdered remains uncertain.

This isn’t a typical whodunnit, though.

The story unfolds through the eyes of Ruby Rose Gillespie, who just so happens to be Gabriel’s secret lover. She’s a cystic fibrosis patient whom Gabriel “saved” several years earlier by performing a lung transplant on her. While their clandestine relationship is relatively new, they have known each other since childhood, attended the same university and hung out in similar social circles.

On the night Gabriel dies, Ruby has been readmitted to the hospital with an infection. From her window the next morning, she watches the crime scene investigation unfold and learns her lover is dead.

Her reaction is oddly calm, but curiosity soon takes over. Was Gabriel undone by professional stress, private anguish, or something darker? Was it something to do with his research interests in Africa? And how well did she really know him?

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2025 TBR challenge, Australia, Author, autofiction, Book review, Catherine Rey, Fiction, France, Giramondo Publishing, literary fiction, Publisher, Reading Projects, Setting, translated fiction, women in translation

‘Stepping Out: A Novel’ by Catherine Rey (translated by Julie Rose)

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Fiction – paperback; Giramondo Publishing; 240 pages; 2008. Translated from the French by Julie Rose.

Catherine Rey’s Stepping Out (Une femme en marche) is an unusual contribution to Australian literature: a novel written in French by a French-Australian writer, later translated into English.

It sits somewhere between fiction and autobiography, and indeed Rey herself toys with the distinction:

All novels are autobiographies and all autobiographies are novels. But novels are closer to the truth … And yet in autobiography, you offer something more precious (page 180).

The book follows Catherine, a fiery and uncompromising narrator, looking back on her life from her late teens through to her fifties, and her deep desire to become a successful writer even though she doesn’t “come from a family of intellectuals” (page 47).

Continue reading “‘Stepping Out: A Novel’ by Catherine Rey (translated by Julie Rose)” →