Latest Posts
Q&A with Emily Gale on The Wild Unknown: Friendships, AI, and growing up
It’s 2045 and the world is full of tech. Eddie has a bot in his ear giving him advice all day, and classroom bots keeping track of him at school. The streets are full of bird-drones, and gametech is amazing. But tech can’t help the police find a missing boy called Theo. When they abandon…
Keep reading
Review: Neighbourhood Watch balances realism and hope
The annual Curlew Street scarecrow competition is back, and the residents of Melbourne’s inner north have never seen an entry like it. Shirt bloody, head and arms slumped over a scarecrow crucifix: Victoria’s most conservative Supreme Court Judge, Harry ‘The Pope’ Somerton, is dead. Priyanka Pal, a former psychologist turned homicide detective, is disturbed when…
Keep reading
Q&A with Amanda Lohrey on Capture: Alien abduction, scepticism and psychiatric research
James Mather is a psychiatrist in his sixties. He is invited to take on a new group of patients. All he knows about them is that each one claims to have been abducted by aliens. His wife, Deborah, is sceptical, but he gets going anyway. His patients tell mesmerising stories. There’s Anthony, for instance, who…
Keep reading
Q&A With Dr Bee Lim on Welcome Home
What if the parts of yourself you silenced just to survive… were the ones calling you home? Welcome Home is seen through the eyes of Isabel Meilin, who wanders through a mysterious house built from memory, where she meets Rabbit, Ox, Wolf, and Crane–inner protectors shaped by fear, duty, rage, and distance. Each carries a…
Keep reading
Review: The Paradise Heights Miniature Railway Bust-Up, A Neuroaffirming Cosy Mystery
Something is amiss at the Paradise Heights Miniature Railway. And this suits Fleck Parker just fine – she’s on the hunt for a new puzzle to solve. Expensive equipment and supplies have disappeared and nobody knows why. Who could possibly wish harm on a community group delivering Sunday afternoon fun on a fleet of jolly…
Keep reading
Review: Reflecting on schizophrenia representation in The Sooner I Go
Seven months after her boyfriend and parents die tragically on the same night, eighteen-year-old Brynn—once an aspiring singer, now desperate for any paying gig that will keep her from ending up on the streets—sets out to rebuild her shattered world. At her new ad agency job, she’s distracted by enigmatic twenty-year-old Micah. Their enemies-to-lovers attraction…
Keep reading
Q&A with Lauren Keegan on The Woman in the Seal Skin
Set in Scotland in 1695, this is the story of Malie, a young woman struggling with grief, oppression, her relationship with nature and her own inherent wildness within during Europe’s ‘little ice age’. Malie grew up hearing tales of selkies: shape-shifting women who shed their seal skins to seduce fishermen on the Orkney shores. That’s…
Keep reading
Love is an Algorithm review: can compatibility be quantified?
Eve wants to make music that’s fuelled by love, passion, and rage (feelings!). She trusts her gut and her friends and in no way wants to rely on technology, let alone AI, to tell her how she feels. Danny is anxious – about his dad, his dating life, his coffee order (why is it twelve…
Keep reading
Review: ‘The Slip’ showcases original, discomfiting stories
These dark, feral and unforgettable stories are about the things we can’t hold onto: a marriage drifting out with the tide, a family collapsing like a wave, a young woman’s affair that dissolves as quickly as it ignites. From Melbourne to regional Victoria and beyond, lovers flounder in the push and pull of desire, and…
Keep reading
The Belly of a Wolf review: Grief, in all its messiness
Red is going back to high school six months after the death of her best friend Wolf. Their friendship began on the first day of Prep, when they were cast as Little Red and Wolf in the school play; ever after their lives were entwined as two halves of the same story. Red is defined…
Keep reading
Something went wrong. Please refresh the page and/or try again.
addiction adhd adult fiction announcement Anxiety australian fiction author interview autism Blog-exclusive book review bonus episode book club book review depression eating disorder gender roles grief hospital inpatient treatment kay kerr medication memoir mental health middle grade mystery nicola moriarty non-fiction parenting podcast episode psychiatry psychological thriller psychology psychosis ptsd racism relationships review romance schizophrenia speculative fiction stigma suicide therapy thriller trauma young adult
Subscribe to our blog
Get new content delivered directly to your email.