The instant that Lucy Dougan cites Andrea Arnold’s 2009 film Fish Tank as a touchstone of her collection, I know I’m going to like it. The Guardians has all the austerity and noiselessness of Arnold’s film, thematically linked with brief flashes of wildness in suburban life. The Guardians is Dougan’s fourth poetry collection. Her first, […]

‘I come and go across borders drawn between men and women.’ Imagine if your parents told you ‘You are no longer a girl. You are now a boy,’ and you were forced to simply change your identity. Bacha posh is an old, unspoken Afghan tradition that allows families without a son to transform their daughters […]

Robert Fairhead reviews Bapo by Nicholas Jose.

Oliver Mol, the Sydney-based writer best known for his passion for digital writing, has been kicking around and getting published in everything under the sun for the last few years. I recall picking up a copy of Voiceworks once and saying to myself, ‘It’s that bloody Mol guy again!’ – but in a good way. […]

If you’ve spent much time within the contemporary business world, you’ve probably come across sentences like this one: ‘To minimise the amount of time devoted to consideration of operational issues and to performance monitoring, and thereby permit the maximum amount of time to be devoted to the Board’s other key role, consideration of strategic and […]

Jane Messer is based in Sydney, teaching creative writing at Macquarie University, so it’s no wonder her fourth novel Hopscotch settles so nicely into the city and its suburbs, from Lane Cove to the Northern Beaches. The familiarity of places, and small details such as finding Stephanie Alexander’s The Cook’s Companion in the kitchen, help […]

I’ve never read anything like this book and I’m fairly certain I never will again. Not for lack of trying but because books like Permutation City simply do not come around very often. Its reflections on artificial intelligence and the way humans interact with technology were well ahead of its original 1995 publication, and Egan […]

Arky Steele is no ordinary 12-year-old. He’s an adventurous, clever, polite boy with a passion for old relics. I initially had a hard time getting into the groove of the story mainly because the parent side of me was screaming ‘Don’t take your child on a dangerous mission when there’s a villain who wants to […]

Ian ‘Pee Wee’ Wilson grew up on the beaches of the Eastern suburbs of Sydney, joined the Bronte Surf Life Saving Club as a teen, and found himself harmonising some lines with a couple of blokes in a bathroom (because the acoustics were better). It’s these kinds of quirky and heart-warming stories that make up […]